It’s like steering a large ship. Any input to the controls take some time before they actually have any effect. So if you’re suddenly dropped at the helm, you’re pretty much at the mercy of whatever the last guy was doing for the immediate future. But that doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to get the ship back on course either, as whatever you do at some point will have an effect.
On another note, hard to blame Obama for 2008 in any case given he didn’t become president until 2009.
The fun one that is at least a bit forgivable is “I found the solution! I just followed <long dead link to some other site>”. It’s especially fun when you keep finding multiple postings that look hopeful at first but then end up just linking back to the same dead link.
The lesson here is that it can be helpful to future internet searchers (or even your future self) to copy the relevant information or briefly summarize it instead of just dropping a URL. Especially when linking to something like an company’s official support forum or posting as many companies will pull that stuff down eventually.