Is Obama’s puppet master to blame for all the scandals?
Scandals, scandals, and more scandals. My list so far includes:
1. Benghazi: politics before, politics and apathy during, and politics and a wall of lies and cover-ups afterwards.
2. Fast & Furious: a completely bungled effort to track cartels in Mexico or a deliberate attempt to gin up gun crime as a way to feed anti-gun fervor.
3. IRS: Deliberate targeting of conservative groups and individuals in order to disable them in the lead-up to a tight election.
4. AP: Justice Department eavesdrops on media, with recent news indicating that this wasn’t about national security but was a tit-for-tat step taken because the AP mis-timed releasing a story about a thwarted terrorism plot.
I feel as if I’ve forgotten something. I’m sure there’s something else, but I’ve reached the outer limits of my brain’s capacity for the scary, sordid, disgusting, and illegal.
Anyway, the above is a starter list, which shows a distinct trend-line: the Obama government is about politics before country, revenge before law and morality, and cover-ups above and beyond everything. That’s why the New York Times’ desperate attempt to blame Republicans for all these things makes for amusing reading. Although the Times was absolutely outraged by the AP scandal (and I agree with their outrage), everything else is just business as usual. Nothing to see here. Just move along:
The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines. The tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, never a scandal to begin with, has devolved into a turf-protection spat between government agencies, and the e-mail messages Republicans long demanded made clear that there was no White House cover-up.
The only example of true government overreach was the seizure of The Associated Press’s telephone records, the latest episode in the Obama administration’s Javert-like obsession with leakers in its midst.
(A total aside here. The myth is that reporters are, at heart, curious people who want to know what’s going on. Although they’ve been temporarily blinded by ideology, once they catch the scent, they’ll be like the crazed reporters in His Girl Friday. That’s just wrong. Today’s reporters signed on, not because they like sniffing out information, but because they’re ideologues who want to pursue an agenda. The Times perfectly exemplifies this. It does not report on all the news fit to print. It doesn’t report at all. It simply works like a Leftist propaganda arm, reporting all the spin necessary to advance an agenda. It’s utterly incurious and cares only when it, personally, gets poked. And now back to your regularly scheduled blogging.)
Wow. Just wow. For one thing, it’s clear that the New York Times wrote this editorial before the head of the IRS went before Congress and confessed that the IRS denied what was going on before the election (a lie) and that it timed the release of information to bury it in the news cycle. And then there’s all that other fascinating stuff that’s been oozing out from the single most powerful coercive entity in the federal government.
In every single statement she made, Lois Lerner, the IRS official who every so casually broke the story, lied. Just some examples are the fact that the IRS didn’t target, maybe, 75 groups. It targeted at least 470 groups. And it wasn’t just wacky Tea Party groups that got caught it the cross hairs, it was any group that appeared even vaguely to oppose Obama’s policies. The targeting wasn’t just confined to a rogue Ohio office, it went to the top. And, indeed, the very top person got over $100,000 in bonuses and was promoted to head the — ahem — nonpartisan branch of the IRS in charge of enforcing ObamaCare.
We also know that the IRS illegally leaked information about Obama’s political opponents — which definitely has a kind of mirror-like Watergate quality to it. Nixon’s henchmen stole data directly from his political opponents; Obama’s henchmen release data about Obama’s political opponents to Obama’s supporters. And of course, speaking of stealing things, it appears that the IRS stole tens of thousands of medical records — this would be, of course, the same IRS that’s in charge of enforcing ObamaCare.
Worried yet? I know I am.
Despite all this, Obama remains perched precariously atop ignorance mountain. His line is consistent:
Either Obama’s lying, which is entirely possible, because he’s a compulsive liar, or he was as ignorant as he seems. Those Leftist media figures who are not in total denial have latched on this as the excuse to protect their idol, now that they know there’s a lot of clay mixed in with his feet. He’s a little too disengaged, he’s not a micro-manager, he’s too pure to know what evil lurks in the heart of men, etc.
John Fund, however, has a very different idea, and I think he may be on the right track. His version of events posits that Obama has never actually been president. We’ve been operating, instead, under the shadow presidency of consigliere Valerie Jarrett:
So if Obama is not fully engaged, who does wield influence in the White House? A lot of Democrats know firsthand that Jarrett, a Chicago mentor to both Barack and Michelle Obama and now officially a senior White House adviser, has enormous influence. She is the only White House staffer in anyone’s memory, other than the chief of staff or national security adviser, to have an around-the-clock Secret Service detail of up to six agents. According to terrorism expert Richard Miniter’s recent book, Leading from Behind: “At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving” the mission for May 2, 2011. She was instrumental in overriding then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel when he opposed the Obamacare push, and she was key in steamrolling the bill to passage in 2010. Obama may rue the day, as its chaotic implementation could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections.
A senior Republican congressional leader tells me that he had come to trust that he could detect the real lines of authority in any White House, since he’s worked for five presidents. “But this one baffles me,” he says. “I do know that when I ask Obama for something, there is often no answer. But when I ask Valerie Jarrett, there’s always an answer or something happens.”
You really should read the whole thing. That theory explains so much….