"Makes sense" isn´t the same as "goes towards achieving a noble goal".
I agree with you - I didn't state my point very clearly.
The Holocaust made sense and seemed logical - to the people who were implementing it, but as you say, it did did nothing towards achieving any sort of noble goal, and was not even remotely the right thing to do, being based on false premises and deeply flawed logic.
On a similar note, the crazy guy with the kid in the bunker - his actions seemed logical and made sense (to himself) as well.
So, if the Holocaust was not senseless, then pretty much no human act in history has been senseless (because people nearly always do things things for a reason, for reasons that make make sense to them, even if it appears absurd to everyone else).
It does not matter if they thought it made sense at the time - perceiving a thing to be sensible does not make it so.
That, and Eliana Johnson seems to have a reflexive need to disagree with Obama. That is a reason for her to write the article, so by that standard, the article is not just a senseless attack on Obama's intelligence or character. I suppose one can argue the semantics, but Johnson has picked pretty tiny sliver of a thing to criticize.
ETA: Your gaming is not senseless - you have perfectly valid reasons for doing it.
Double ETA: I mean to say that the author has so narrowed the meaning of the word "senseless" as to eliminate most any situation where the word would commonly apply. If Obama and Reagan used it in a wrong way, then it would be difficult for anyone to use it in a correct way - and Obama and Reagan were not not wrong.
