Category: Barack Obama

Benghazi and Other ‘Concocted’ Scandals

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U.S. consulate, Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012

“Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders.”
— Andrew McCarthy

Well, that’s just “common sense,” but what does common sense count for nowadays? In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN Thursday, Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi scandal as a Republican “concoction.”

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom caught JournoLister Ezra Klein offering a similar argument that these aren’t really scandals, which sounds a bit like Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” talk:

“We lied about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records for the Associated Press, and the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to punish the president’s Enemies List, but these aren’t really scandals. Besides, those bitches deserved it. Shut up, Republicans.”

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard pointed out the pervasiveness of the media’s “Not Really Scandals” meme.

As is usual when this kind of elite “consensus” groupthink agenda gets rolling, the consensus is itself cited as tautological proof that skeptics are irrational, biased and therefore untrustworthy. You’re a Flat Earther or a Tinfoil Hatter if you think there was a deliberate effort by the White House to suppress the ugly truth, or if you believe that such a cover-up would actually amount to a scandal.

“Polls show that nobody cares! Shut up, Republicans!”

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.

“In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

 

 


Our Lawless President: Obama’s IRS Thuggery Certainly Was No Coincidence

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Dan Collins calls attention to Obama’s dog-whistle tactics, as described by Kimberly Strassel in the Wall Street Journal:

The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as “less than reputable” to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. . . .
The president derided “tea baggers.” Vice President Joe Biden compared them to “terrorists.” In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. “Nobody knows who’s paying for these ads,” he warned. “We don’t know where this money is coming from,” he intoned.
In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: “All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”

Ed Morrissey politely refers to “circumstantial evidence” that the IRS was in the tank for Obama’s re-election. Of course, they managed to keep a lid on the scandal until after the election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said [NBC’s Lisa] Myers . . . “[W]hat would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Just another random coincidence, you see? But at least one member of Congress is having none of these lame-ass “I don’t remember” excuses:

 

President Cosmic Lightworker Expresses Disappointment in Mere Mortals at IRS

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

“Difficult as it may now be to recall, there were once ‘spiritually advanced people’ who looked at this Chicago machine politician and saw ‘a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being . . . who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.’”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 25, 2012


Do not question His Divine Wrath at the career IRS guy who has only been “acting commissioner” since November and drew the short straw:

President Obama said the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service resigned Wednesday and promised that he “will not tolerate” the types of abuses reported by the agency’s inspector general. Speaking from the East Room of the White House, the president promised to “hold the responsible parties accountable” and said the administration “will work with Congress” on their investigations.
The agency’s acting commissioner, Steven Miller blamed two “rogue” employees in the Cincinnati IRS office for targeting conservative groups, but Obama said that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew had requested and received Miller’s resignation Wednesday. The political abuses were “inexcusable,” the president said. …

Inexcusable, “rogue employees,” to get caught targeting the Enemies List: Tea Party, Christians, assorted People Not Down for the Agenda.

Inexcusable, and it would have been even worse, if we had known about this at some point prior to November 6, but . . . hey, Lightworker.

One of the things about covering this stuff as a journalist is that it’s so predictable, it’s not exactly what you’d call “news,” eh?

Cynical? No, just not a complete sucker. Who ever really believed a word they said in the first place? They’re Democrats: People of the Lie.

“What’s that wonderful smell? Ah, unicorn farts!“

 

 


ObamaGate Scandal Mania!

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“Obama: Anatomy of a World Leader,” by Alex Gray (detail)

Ed Morrissey’s headline at The Week summarizes the situation:

A flood of scandals engulfs Obama

It’s not only engulfing Obama, it’s engulfing me and everybody else who’s trying to keep up with all this stuff. Easy to become confused:

Recent headlines from Viral Read:

IRS Admits Wrongly Targeting Tea Party Groups

Marriage Group Accuses IRS
of Leaking Information to ‘Political Enemies,’
Demands Explanation from Agency

South Carolina Tea Party Mom
Describes IRS ‘Harassment’

Jon Stewart Flips Out Over
IRS and AP Scandals

Reporter Who Interviewed President
Obama: IRS ‘Hammering Me’

Jay Carney ‘Unfettered’
White House Press Conference

IRS Inspector General’s Report Released:
‘Inappropriate Criteria’ Used Against
Conservative Groups; Nearly 300 Were Targeted

President Obama Reacts to IRS
Inspector General’s Report:
‘Intolerable and Inexcusable’

What’s truly intolerable and inexcusable is that all of this is happening at once, with new developments all day, every day, until Scandal Fatigue sets in and it’s impossible to keep up with even a fraction of it. So, yeah, it’s engulfing Obama and engulfing us, too.

UPDATE: Dear Lord, there’s still more:

Last week, the Benghazi talking points took center stage in the ongoing investigation of the 9/11 anniversary attacks in Libya. Jay Carney came under intense questioning at Friday’s White House press briefing as he struggled to justify a dozen iterations of talking points before Susan Rice used the final version for her now-infamous five Sunday talk show appearances on September 16, 2012. However, a background briefing by the State Department four days before Rice’s appearances provides the earliest extended look at the information used to prepare those talking points.

You really need to read the whole thing. Me, I’ve barely got time to skim half this stuff. My bedtime reading tonight will be 54 pages entitled, “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review,” by Michael E. McKenny. Sweet dreams.

 

‘People Need to Be Sent to Jail’

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“Our goal is for ‘We the People’ to be an educated and informed electorate, involved in our government, and working with and holding our elected representatives accountable to their oath of office to uphold the Constitution.”
— Laurens County (S.C.) Tea Party mission statement

In 2009, Diane Belsom was one of millions of Americans who answered the rallying cry of the Tea Party movement:

“After Obama was elected, I was devastated. And they were calling for Tea Party rallies, and I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ll figure it out and I’ll do one,’ so I did.”

A homeschooling mom in Laurens, South Carolina, Belsom started a local Tea Party group that held its first rally in April 2009. She became involved in networking with other activists who told her she should incorporate the group and apply for non-profit status. Nearly three years after she filed her application — and after she complied with burdensome, intrusive and, in some cases, redundant requests for additional information — Belsom still has not received word on whether the group’s 501(c)4 status will be approved.

The experience of the Laurens County Tea Party was replicated for dozens of other groups across the country. We now know why.

Lauren Belsom and her fellow patriots were victimized by an Internal Revenue Service that deliberately and systematically targeted President Obama’s political opponents for harassment:

“I think people need to be held accountable,” said Belsom, who has contacted her congressman, Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan, to complain about her group’s problems with the IRS.
“We’re supposed to be living in a republic, not some kind of totalitarian system,” she said. “People need to be sent to jail if they’ve broken laws or, at a minimum, fired.”

Read the whole thing at Viral Read.

 

The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

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“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
— Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012

The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:

“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
— Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012

There was a sort of argument last week between Ken White at Popehat and some conservatives who insist on calling Nakoula a “political prisoner.” Alternately, Rich Lowry calls Nakoula a “patsy,” but this really isn’t the argument we need to be having.

The Nakoula case isn’t about anyone’s free speech rights. The First Amendment doesn’t protect the right of convicted criminals to operate under aliases in potentially lucrative business while owing restitution to the victims of their earlier crimes. While I wholly endorse the right to speak truth about Islam — and to hell with any mob of violent savages who object — Ken White is correct that Nakoula is neither a “political prisoner” nor a heroic martyr for free speech.

But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?

What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.

Genuinely dangerous people seem to have no problem eluding federal investigators. Ariel Castro kidnapped women and kept them in his Cleveland basement for more than a decade, while the FBI never even considered the wife-beating school-bus driver a suspect. Nor was Castro the only menace to evade the FBI.

The good news? The feds are finally cracking down on those dangerous high-capacity pressure cookers. About damned time, too . . .

 

The ‘How Dare You’ Defense on Benghazi

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“This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing do to with. It’s hard for the American people to make sense of that, because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.”
— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012, while standing over the caskets of the four Americans killed at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya

Jeff Goldstein cites the important testimony that “a State Department official emailed the Libyan government on September 12 that the consulate attack was in fact a terrorist operation — specifically identifying Ansar al-Sharia in the email.” But why bother with facts? What difference, at this point, does it make?

Quite obviously, it makes a very important difference to Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) in their tireless efforts to convince Americans that Obama’s foreign policy is working, and especially to persuade us that the fine public servants at the top levels of the State Department did nothing wrong in the Benghazi affair.

When you point out the obvious facts — that the “Arab Spring” was a bad idea, that everybody in the administration lied through their teeth about Benghazi, and that the major media are enthusiastic volunteers in a partisan P.R. effort to assist in the cover-up — liberals go into fake indignation mode: How dare you?

If you’ve watched Democrats do this for years, you know how the tactic works: They’re trying to do the Jedi mind trick — “This is not the scandal you were looking for. Move along.” — and if you refuse to cooperate, they act as if your non-cooperation is proof of your bad motives. They have decided that none of the evidence or testimony means what you think it means, and that your interpretation of facts is therefore illegitimate, so you must be shunned as a bad person.

Our Moral Superiors™ get away with this trick often enough that they’re genuinely shocked when they don’t get away with it.

There are multiple layers to the Benghazi scandal, from the policy failures that left the consulate vulnerable to the mysterious “stand-down” order to the Special Ops rescue team — and with my son training as an 18X recruit, I can easily imagine how “furious” the troops were about that — and on to the “Internet video rage” talking points. As has been said, the administration failed before, during and after the Benghazi attack, and are now attempting to avoid accountability.

Damn, I need me some Chick-Fil-A.