IRS and Press
Scandals
With the Obama Administration’s changing stories, trying to
deal with past lies and cover-ups in the major scandals which now plague the
Executive Branch, one must wonder what the final story will be. For Benghazi, the IRS, the AP
fiasco, and the James Rosen incident, there seems to always be more depth and
higher-up involvement day by day. I guess you can’t get any higher than the
president where this is concerned, and it defies common sense to believe that
Mr. Obama knew so little and Mr. Holder knew so little.
In 2008, Barack Obama the campaigner sounded like the man
with the magical solutions to the major problems. He was going to straighten
out the economy, make our enemies our friends, and generally inspire everyone,
while running a very transparent administration. It wasn’t long before he
claimed that the economy was in far worse shape than he’d thought, and
everything he tried failed to make it better. In fact, things got worse.
Between Obama and Congress, the national debt has exploded. And forget about transparency.The Middle East is in turmoil, helped along by Obama’s
policies, the “Islam” part of radical Islam is never mentioned, and now the
“global war on terror” is a forbidden phrase.
The Newspeak Dictionary keeps being revised, each time
removing more words and phrases.
Now, instead of the man with the answers, President Obama is
portraying himself as simply out of the loop, with no clue what’s going on in
his own White House in regard to these scandals. Plausible deniability? He’s
“outraged” by the IRS scandal “if” such things happened, things which he found
out about when he read about them in the paper.
Obama, Carney, Holder, Shulman, etc. – these people are
beginning to sound like Secret Agent 86, Maxwell Smart with his “Would you
believe...?” routine. Trying to pass themselves off as know-nothings, but
having to change their tune as facts come out to “Oh, yeah, I signed off on
that,” (for example the Rosen search warrant). If Obama and Holder knew as
little as they let on, what do they do all day? Sit in the office with the door
closed and the phone turned off? No, I know the president goes out campaigning,
golfing, and raising funds. We’re told
he wasn’t consulting with his White House counsel in real time as the IRS
scandal came to light, but he may have to consult with some lawyer in his own
defense as more things develop.
Holder’s situation seems more precarious, and the Attorney
General in whom Obama has expressed full confidence may find himself resigning
before Obama’s second term is over. Such an episode as Eric Holder saying he’d
never participated in anything like going after Fox News Channel’s James Rosen,
then later remembering he’d signed the search warrant naming Rosen as a possible
co-conspirator in a leak from one of his sources, and then proceeded to obtain
Rosen’s business and personal emails, and those of his parents. Your tax
dollars at work.
Jonah Goldberg at National
Review Online, writes, concerning the scandals,
The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency.“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” So far, this is the administration’s best defense.
Or, as Ben Stein at The
American Spectator writes,
Well, we are supposed to believe that a massive assault by the IRS on a popular uprising called the Tea Party was known to the higher ups at the IRS, at the Justice Department, and at the White House.But Mr. Obama, much too pure and innocent to be told about mistakes in his administration, was too busy bathing the feet of the poor and tending to lepers to be told that his administration was engaged in an Orwellian attack on free speech.
Concerning the attacks on reporters, the mainstream media
finally have something negative to say about the Obama Administration, since
the Feds have come after them. The Associated Press and Fox News may not be the
only subjects of secret search warrants and phone record seizures. Oddly, the
president thinks more laws are needed to “shield journalists,” i.e., stop him
and Holder from doing further such threatening things.
Of course, we should remember Obama’s attempts to discredit
the Tea Party, Romney donors, and Fox News. Could there be a connection when
the IRS goes after his political opponents and Obama’s own Justice Department
goes after news outlets?
Lie upon Lie: Benghazi Scandal
Press Secretary Jay Carney says that the Benghazi attack happened “a long time ago,”
(wow, eight months). No, the War of 1812 happened a long time ago, as things
like this are measured. Benghazi
is too recent to be anything but current events in this kind of context. But
Hillary said, “What difference does it make?” Thus the Administration, having no
effective response to the attack, wished to file it with forgotten events and
lost causes, despite promises to bring the perpetrators to justice. When do you
suppose that will happen? Probably at the Last Judgment, if left to the powers
that be.
As for Benghazi, the State Department and the White House
took the CIA’s talking points and took them through a dozen editions (as
reported by the Weekly Standard, then
by ABC News, after which the mainstreamers noticed it), finally changing the
truth into a lie. And sticking with that lie long after everyone knew it was a
lie.
Mark Steyn commented,
As Mr. [Gregory] Hicks testified, his superiors in Washington knew early that night that a well-executed terrorist attack with the possible participation of al-Qaeda elements was under way. Instead of responding, the most powerful figures in the government decided that an unseen YouTube video better served their political needs. And, in the most revealing glimpse of the administration’s depravity, the president and secretary of state peddled the lie even in their mawkish eulogies to their buddy “Chris” and three other dead Americans. They lied to the victims’ coffins and then strolled over to lie to the bereaved, Hillary telling the Woods family that “we’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And she did. The government dispatched more firepower to arrest Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in Los Angeles than it did to protect its mission in Benghazi. It was such a great act of misdirection Hillary should have worn spangled tights and sawn Stevens’s casket in half.
To follow that, they silenced survivors of the attack, and
punished Gregory Hicks, the Tripoli
second-in-command (who became first upon the death of Ambassador Stevens).
After his dramatic testimony in Congress, he was placed in a lower level desk
job. Meanwhile, Victoria Nuland, who strongly influenced the editing of the
talking points, has been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State. The
Administration's attitude was expressed by Hillary Clinton to Congress: “At this
point, what difference does it make?”
Roger L. Simon
at PJ Media reported that new
whistleblowers were to come forward with shocking (if true) information about
the reason Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi
on 9/11. According to them, he was there to buy back Stinger missiles provided to “insurgents” by the State
Department. I recommend reading the entire article. It’s quite interesting.
There’s a lot more to this story, apparently, than the government has been telling.
The Benghazi
episode ought to put a stop to Hillary Clinton’s political career, but like Ted
Kennedy, she may come back from a serious scandal to run for office again.
Conclusion
These scandals are not going away any time soon, and should
be investigated until all the relevant facts are known and reported. Other
scandals currently going on are the Fast and Furious ATF gun-running operation,
and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s solicitation of money for Obamacare from
firms she regulates. Stay tuned.
Photo: President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Usahitman.com via Yahoo images, source not given. Fair use, no copyright infringement intended.
