Great Line

On Special Report tonight, Jonah Goldberg noted that 7 security personnel were dispatched to the World War II Memorial to protect it from World War II veterans, which turns out to be two more security personnel than were posted in Benghazi.  Ouch!

Scandal Smorgasbord

Hardly even into his second term and Obama has been beset by a bumper crop of scandals, any one of which would topple a Republican president.

 

Benghazi: Oh, look, it turns out that there wasn't a demonstration that got out of hand and that stupid video played no role in the attack.  Susan Rice's talking points had undergone a dozen revisions before she was sent to parrot the nonsense on 5 Sunday talk shows.  The White House knew that it was a terrorist attack while it was still in progress.  Moreover, they knew it was an Al Qaeda affiliate.  Gosh, lucky none of that came out during the campaign.

 

IRS: The IRS harassed conservative groups from 2010 through the 2012 election and the former acting commissioner brushed it off as 'bad customer service.'  Funny how only Tea Party groups suffered this bad service.  Back in 2009, people laughed when Obama playfully joked about auditing them for not giving him an honorary degree.  Well, it seems he wasn't joking.  Many will say that Obama never gave the order so he isn't to blame.  Hmm, I remember the Bush White House saying something like that with regard to Abu Graib but the press asserted that Bush had baked such into the culture of his administration.  Let's see, who said you should reward your friends and punish your enemies?  Obama.  Who attacked the Supreme Court for the Citizens United decision (the one that made these tax-exempt groups possible)?  Obama.  Sounds like the president gave some guidelines in his speeches.

 

AP Phone Records: The DOJ scooped up the phone records of a wide swath of AP reporters for two months to catch a leaker.  Hey, why not just get the phone records of every reporter so you don't miss something?

 

Fox News: AG Holder approved naming James Rosen as a co-conspirator in a leak investigation.  So, a reporter who gets a scoop is now to be a criminal.  Must not allow information to be released that the government doesn't want the people to know.  What Freedom of the Press?

 

Obamacare Donations: The Congress has not allocated sufficient funds to get all of the state exchanges up and running so HHS Secretary Sebelius has been making the rounds asking for 'donations.'  Sure, she is going to be regulating these companies once Obamacare is fully in force but don't think that a failure to offer a 'donation' will affect how stringently the rules are enforced.

 

Government Bullying: A couple in Texas sought to get tax-exempt status for a Tea Party related group and soon thereafter were interviewed by the FBI (multiple times), audited by the IRS, audited by ATF (twice), and had a visit from OSHA.  Somehow, that doesn't seem like a coincidence.

One Republican said that impeachment wasn't off the table; that Republican is a fool.  Short of being captured on camera killing someone (who is not a Republican), there is no way a Democrat Senate is going to convict a Democrat President in an impeachment trial.  It is an utter waste of time to go down that path, or even suggest that path is a possibility.  It didn't work out too well last time.

 

David Axelrod made a cogent point (accidentally, I suspect): he said that the government is too big for one man to control.  I am in complete agreement.  We need to shrink the government to a more manageable size.  When it gets down to a size where Obama isn't still claiming to be out of the loop, we will know we have reached the appropriate amount of government.  Oh happy day!

No Americans Died in Watergate

Imagine it is September 11th of 2004 and the US Ambassador in Middle Eastern country and 3 others are killed in a terror attack.  Let us also suppose that said ambassador had sent multiple requests for added security and reported that there had been attacks on the embassy.  Further, let us say that the British ambassador had been withdrawn on account of a terrorist attack.  Moreover, let us say that the embassy reported the day before the attack that terrorists were massing and that the embassy's locally-hired security forces (not US Marines) appeared to be casing the embassy.  Would the press treat this as a distraction from the campaign?  Would they paint it as an effort by the Kerry campaign to draw attention away from the Swift Boaters?

Suppose it was discovered in the aftermath that a former Navy Seal had requested permission to aid the besieged embassy and was refused.  Not once.  Not twice.  No, three times.  He finally ignored the order and went to assist anyway.  Would the press not demand the identity of the person who told the Navy Seal to stand down?

Assume that the attack on Americans proceeded for 7 hours and the US had forces one hour away but those forces were not dispatched.  Let us suppose that there were drones in the sky that supplied live pictures of the attack to the Situation Room at the White House and there was also constant contact between embassy staff and the State Department.  Now, suppose that the administration said it didn't act because it didn't know what was happening.  On top of that, let us say that the administration had reduced the security present at the embassy the previous month despite the protest of the head of security and the ambassador.

 

Suppose the President and his administration had claimed that the attack grew from a protest  of a YouTube video that got out of hand.  Presume that the administration continued that claim for two weeks.  Then we learn that there was no protest.  All had been quiet on the streets at 8 pm, not a protester in sight.  Also, such had been reported to the Situation Room at the time.  Would the press be disinterested in such revelations?

Obviously, there would be calls for everyone involved in the fiasco to be fired for incompetence and the press would hammer the president for failing to aid Americans.  The event would be the story of the ongoing presidential campaign and every question to the president or the administration would have asked about it.  It would have destroyed President Bush's re-election bid if such had happened, and rightly so.

 

As it happens, everything above has happened but Barack Obama is president and the media are letting the story slide.  To pursue the story is to torpedo the re-election of their candidate.  Whether Obama is re-elected or not, the truth about Benghazi will come out.  If he is in office, it will be a massive blow to his presidency.  This isn't sex with an intern that can be overlooked by saying "move on" or "it's only sex."  Nor is this a burglary cover-up by the administration.  Here is a case where there were multiple warnings of danger to the embassy from multiple sources and the administration responded by reducing security.  To add insult to injury, the administration then misled the public about the attack when it knew - or certainly should have known - what happened within 24 hours.

 

One wonders why the administration prevaricated.  The most likely answer is that only a week earlier at the Democratic Convention, it was repeatedly voiced that al Qaeda was crippled (i.e. Osama bin Laden was dead).  A successful al Qaeda attack the following week looks extremely bad.  Better that it was a protest that got out of hand.  Thus began the cover-up that has only made things worse.  The administration just wants to keep the story from breaking until after the election, like Nixon with Watergate.  We know how well that turned out for him.  But he was Republican, so perhaps Obama will fare better.