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Roger L. Simon thinks Benghazi is a very serious story.

… The Benghazi scandal is more disturbing than just lying about a terror attack to get reelected. And that’s pretty disturbing, considering the lies were made directly to the families of the victims. (cf. Hillary Clinton telling Charles Woods, one of the dead SEALS’ father, they were going to get the guy who made that video and revenge his son’s death.)

The Benghazi scandal, in all probability, would not have happened if the administration and/or the State Department took the War on Terror seriously or even, dare I say it, put the words terrorism and Islamic together in a sentence. But that would break a thousand narratives in the mind of Barack Obama, from his childhood with Frank Marshall Davis until now and back.

So now he is riding the whirlwind. The question is, will he carry us (and Western Civ) with him?

In a long winded piece for the Journal’s Best of the Web, James Taranto agrees, but goes further into the other scandals. 

Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left’s response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

“After a week of scandal obsession during which the nation’s capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about–jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education–it’s worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy,” declares the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne.

He goes through a partisan litany of complaints–”a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements”–but makes no mention of the abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. He does hint at Benghazi, in his concluding paragraph, but only to pooh-pooh it:

Since World War II, bouts of economic growth have allowed democracies to buy their way out of trouble. One can hope this will happen again–and soon. In the meantime, politicians might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal. They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points.

But if the purpose of that rewriting was, as it appears to have been, to deceive voters and bolster the president’s re-election prospects, then it was a subversion of democracy.

And the IRS scandal was a subversion of democracy on a massive scale. The most fearsome and coercive arm of the administrative state embarked on a systematic effort to suppress citizen dissent against the party in power. Thomas Friedman is famous for musing that he wishes America could be China for a day. It turns out we’ve been China for a while. …

Some of the grown-ups in the media are getting the message. Eugene Robinson at WaPo and Howard Fineman at HuffPo have weighed in. Here’s the money grafs from Robinson.

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” should rule out secretly obtaining two months’ worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior. …

And from Howard Fineman.

So far, voters don’t seem to be abandoning President Barack Obama over controversies gripping the Beltway world. But White House aides are tempting fate with their reluctant, piecemeal and contradictory disclosures of what they knew and when they knew it, especially about a report on the Internal Revenue Service’s 18-month effort to target tea party and other conservative groups for special scrutiny.

The aides either have forgotten or are unable to implement the basic lesson of scandal control in Washington: Get the full story out — all of it — as fast as you can before your critics accuse you of a cover-up or worse.

It’s been only a week since the president told the world that he had learned about the “outrageous” actions of the IRS’ Cincinnati office from “news reports” on May 10. We now know that those reports stemmed from a disclosure the administration had planned and that, in fact, “senior officials” in the White House knew the essence of a damning inspector general’s report on the matter as early as April 24.

From the start, the White House’s response on this potentially explosive matter has been grudging at best and, in retrospect, ignorant or arrogant or both. …

Jennifer Rubin says the public is getting the message about Benghazi.

The spin that the American people aren’t interested in Benghazi or that it’s only Republicans who think something is fishy isn’t faring too well in a plethora of … polls.

The GOP figures on all these are off the charts (vs. the administration). But independents are much more like GOP voters than Dems. In some cases, they view the president more harshly.

The newest Post/ABC poll finds: “Last year’s deadly attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, is shaping up as a real political problem for President Obama, with concern extending well beyond the conservative base. More than half of Americans say his administration is trying to cover up the facts of the attack.” Asked if the White House is engaged in a cover-up, 56 percent of Republicans and 60 percent of independents say yes. …

And Ms. Rubin shows how the media are turning against the miscreants.

The Obama administration has a particularly ineffective and ham-handed approach to the media. It has launched an unprecedented attack on journalists, going so far as to label James Rosen’s ordinary newsgathering as criminal. It sought from its first days in office to delegitimize Fox News and limit its press access. It has evaded, delivered half-truths (and smaller fractions) and tried to frustrate mainstream reporters. But as the White House is falling down around its ears, the administration calls in lefty journalists for a private meeting. This is the distillation of  “you’re either with us or against us.”

The strategy is not going so well. Mainstream reporters are lashing out at Jay Carney in the briefing room, while the reporting is generally hard-hitting on the full range of White House scandals. And a chunk of left-of-center pundits is scathing. Dan Pfeiffer’s outing on Sunday was generally panned and earned the White House another four Pinocchios.

Ryan Lizza has added to the reporting on the Rosen case, explaining:

Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).

In all, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers. ..

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John Fund explains the three signs of a “cover-up.”

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” 

The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved.

Astonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation that it had targeted tea-party groups and other organizations with “patriot” or “9/12” in their names. “Mistakes were made initially,” the official IRS statement on May 10 read, implying that the mistakes ended after a short “initial” period. We now know that the scandal and cover-up unfolded over a three-year period, and the IRS publicly acknowledged them only after the 2012 election was safely past.

Here are some other clues that a Washington cover-up is going on.

1. No one seems to be able to name the players.
Last week, former acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller claimed he had identified “rogue” employees at the IRS’s Cincinnati office who were at the center of the scandal. But an IRS staffer at the Cincinnati office at the center of the scandal told the Washington Post this week: “Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

Perhaps that’s why on Friday, Miller had this exchange during his House testimony with Representative Kevin Brady (R., Texas) .

Brady: “Who is responsible for targeting these individuals?”

Miller: “I don’t have names for you.” …

Michael Barone claims the IRS and AP scandals will have a chilling effect on free speech. 

Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.

There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security.

The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on a Monday, after the AP was told that administration spokesmen would officially announce it the next day.

That tends to undercut Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that the story was based on one of “the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen” and “put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole.”  …

Jennifer Rubin says Dan Pfeiffer’s weekend efforts were the worse attempts at damage control ever.

… So far, the administration isn’t fooling anyone. Most high-profile mainstream journalists now concede that both the underlying scandals and the defense are problematic. (Ron Fournier: “The problem with this scandal, and it actually relates to the other ones that we’ll talk about later, is when you’re in a position of government and saying, ‘We’re not corrupt, we’re just incompetent,’ that’s a bad place to be. . . What unites all these things is it undermines the credibility of the administration and the president in a competence of government.”)

Democrats  on oversight committees who were willing to carry some water for the White House on Benghazi appear entirely unwilling to do so both on the IRS scandal (in which Congress was arguably misled) and the Associated Press (which strikes at liberals’ media allies).

Pfeiffer’s outing, if nothing else, suggests that the White House is entirely tone deaf, is unaware that its excuses sound as bad as the offenses and is unable to conceal its  desperation in trying to paint this as all the GOP’s fault.

A president actually in command of his administration would bring in a new chief of staff and new communications personnel, and figure out how to at least appear interested in getting to the bottom of these issues. It is the only way to allow himself a sliver of a chance to keep moving forward on his agenda. But then again, his agenda may be irrelevant at this point.

David Harsanyi wonders why Justice was bugging FOX News reporters since the administration has been saying FOX isn’t really a news organization. 

We now know that the Justice Department kept exceptionally close tabs on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, following his trips in and out of the State Department, hacking his personal emails and phone calls. Normal newsgathering activities are being treated as criminal activities by the White House.  But consider what the same White House had to say about Fox News back in 2009.

You might remember the concerted effort by White House officials to brand the right-leaning Fox News as a bogus news outlet, unworthy of attention. I’m not talking administration partners like Media Matters or Think Progress, but high ranking officials.

There was Anita Dunn, then communications director, who attempted to defang Fox coverage of the White House by claiming:

“They are — they’re widely viewed as, you know, part of the Republican Party. Take their talking points and put them on the air. Take their opposition research and put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.” …

Ron Fournier who was quoted above by Jennifer Rubin writes in the National Journal about how obama can restore the public’s trust and rescue his presidency. Why the hell would we want to see that done? The article is a good example of how worried the media have become.

Swamped in controversies, President Obama and his slow-footed team are essentially telling the American public, “We’re not crooked. We’re just incompetent.”

The IRS targeting conservatives, the Justice Department snooping at The Associated Press, the State Department injecting politics into Benghazi, the military covering up sexual assaults, and the Department of Veterans Affairs leaving heroes in health care limbo – each of these so-called scandals share two traits.

First, there is some element of “spin,” the cynical art of telling just enough of the truth to avoid political embarrassment. Obfuscation and demagogy, the dirty tools of political quackery that Obama pledged to purge from Washington, enjoy top-shelf status at his White House.

Second, there is almost comical bungling. While denying involvement in high crimes and misdemeanors, the Obama administration appears to be pleading guilty to lesser crimes of bureaucratic incompetence.  But that is an unsustainable position for a president who wants Americans to believe again in the power and grace of good government, particularly as it relates to the implementation of Obamacare. …

 

A new bio of Thatcher is reviewed by Daniel Hannan. Remember him? He’s the guy who said Gordon Brown was the “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.” 

All Britons remember where they were when Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990. It was our equivalent of the Kennedy assassination—events that, curiously enough, both fell on Nov. 22. No British politician in living memory had provoked such strong feelings. At Thatcher’s funeral in April, 23 years after she left office and a decade after her last intervention in public life, the battles she had so enjoyed were re-enacted: Many threw flowers before her coffin, while a few, their faces twisted in unfeigned loathing, yelled abuse.

 

The funeral was a reminder of what conviction politics looks like. These days, our leaders consult their pollsters, weigh their words, fret about how they are coming across. Margaret Thatcher, as Charles Moore shows in the magisterial first volume of his authorized biography, had a healthy interest in public opinion, but she never lost sight of where she wanted to go. While others drifted with the current, she was like a shark swimming only forward: focused, patriotic, slightly humorless and needing remarkably little sleep.

These were, happily, just the attributes that the times demanded. It is hard to convey the sheer wretchedness of the nation she was elected to govern in May 1979. Since World War II, Britons had seen their empire vanish, their standing deteriorate, their credit expire. Successive governments had inflated away their debts, with a disastrous effect on competitiveness and productivity.

By the mid-1970s, the U.K. had reached its lowest point. These were the years of double-digit inflation, of power cuts, of shortages. There were constant strikes, and trade-union leaders were better known household names than elected ministers. A Conservative government—a government of which Thatcher was the despairing education minister—was reduced to passing laws regulating prices and incomes. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor

Leno: So many scandals now for President Obama–IRS, AP. You know it’s really bad when Obama says, ‘Hey, let’s talk about Benghazi.’

Letterman: Reporters were all over Obama at his news conference. But Obama did pretty well. He’d been listening to their phone conversations.

Conan: A new movie coming about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s early years together. The movie has a happy ending, and then Hillary walks in.

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Mark Steyn knows how our government works.

Speaking at OhioStateUniversity this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists, with a straight face, that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “President of the United States” and a “Government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the “Pimp With A Limp” show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line and leaks your confidential tax records. But they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.

If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

“Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

“Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. … The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you) the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.” …

John Kass says you can find out how DC works by looking at Chicago.

The Internal Revenue Service scandal now devouring the Obama administration — the outrageous use of the federal taxing authority to target tea party and other conservatives — certainly makes for meaty partisan politics.

But this scandal is about more than partisanship. It’s bigger than whether the Republicans win or the Democrats lose.

It’s even bigger than President Barack Obama. Yes, bigger than Obama.

It is opening American eyes to the fundamental relationship between free people and those who govern them. This one is about the Republic and whether we can keep it.

And it started me thinking of years ago, of my father and my uncle in Chicago and how government muscle really works.

Because if you want to understand The Chicago Way of things in Washington these days, with the guys from Chicago in charge of the White House and the federal leviathan, there’s one place you start:

You start in Chicago. …

And Charles Krauthammer knows the administration interest in the Benghazi cover story.

… the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaeda was vanquished and the tide of war receding.

But then things got worse — the coverup needed its own coverup. On Nov. 28, press secretary Jay Carney told the media that State and the White House edited nothing but a single trivial word. When the e-mail trail later revealed this to be false, Carney doubled down. Last Friday, he repeated that the CIA itself made the edits after the normal input from various agencies.

That was a bridge too far for even the heretofore supine mainstream media. The CIA may have typed the final edits. But the orders came from on high. You cannot tell a room full of journalists that when your editor tells you to strike four paragraphs from your text — and you do — there were no edits because you are the one who turned in the final copy.

The Clintonian wordplay doesn’t stop with Benghazi. Four days after the IRS announced that it discriminated against conservative organizations, Carney said repeatedly in his daily briefing that, if true, the president would be outraged.

If? By then, the IRS had not only admitted the grievous misconduct but apologized for it — and the president was speaking in the conditional.

This could be the first case in presidential history of subjunctive outrage. (It turned into ostensibly real outrage upon later release of the Inspector Generalreport.) Add that to the conditional truths — ever changing, ever fading — of Benghazi, and you have a major credibility crisis.

Note to the White House: Try the truth. It’s easier to memorize.

NewsBusters says Bob Scheiffer at Face the Nation was not happy Sunday when he laid into Dan Pfeiffer, the latest administration flack. 

… But with all of these things, when these things happen, you seem to send out officials many times who don’t even seem to know what has happened. And I use as an example of that Susan Rice who had no connection whatsoever to the events that took place in Benghazi, and yet she was sent out, appeared on this broadcast, and other Sunday broadcasts, five days after it happens, and I’m not here to get in an argument with you about who changed which word in the talking points and all that. The bottom line is what she told the American people that day bore no resemblance to what had happened on the ground in an incident where four Americans were killed. …

… But what I’m saying to you is that was just PR. That was just a PR plan to send out somebody who didn’t know anything about what had happened. Why did you do that? Why didn’t the Secretary of State come and tell us what they knew and if he knew nothing say, “We don’t know yet?” Why didn’t the White House Chief of Staff come out? I mean I would, and I mean this as no disrespect to you, why are you here today? Why isn’t the White House Chief of Staff here to tell us what happened? …

And Jennifer Rubin is happy someone in the media is interested in Benghazi.

… Bob Woodward says, “I would not dismiss Benghazi,” as the president has tried to do. Blanket announcements by the media or the White House that it is a made up scandal with no attempt to wrestle with the nitty-gritty facts, the executive inattention and the strategic negligence aren’t compelling. For one thing, it is cause for concern when the administration can admit in private such gross errors yet no one will admit that publicly. If nothing else, it is a scandal that we still don’t know what the president was doing, how we left our people as sitting ducks and why so many people who should have known better could have come up with a cock and bull story, for which, by the way, they never came forward to tell us that what they had said had been wrong.

Come to think of it, there is one big difference between Benghazi and Watergate. In the latter, the press was interested and determined to get to the truth, not content to say, “Nixon has enemies.” In the former, the lack of curiosity if not skepticism is a sign how far we’ve come from a truly aggressive, independent media to act as a check on government.

Even left winger Andy Borowitz is making fun.

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.

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Richard Epstein chronicles the problems with the Affordable Care Act.  

The ACA’s new marketplaces are said to allow ordinary individuals to shop for their own policies. This modest goal sounds easy, but it is not. As the current rules demand, all enrollment must be possible online, in person, by phone, fax, and mail. In addition to a website, the exchanges must provide “culturally and linguistically appropriate assistance,” along with a navigator program to promote public awareness. They must offer seamless linkage with other public initiatives, and accurate information on premium tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies, all under a program whose key provisions are not yet fully worked out. Already, HHS has distributed over $3.6 billion to states for implementation, with more to come.

Yet for all of these Herculean efforts, at present, only 18 states have opted to create their own exchanges, and seven are planning for a partnership exchange in cooperation with the federal government. A whopping 26 states have defaulted on their option, leaving the feds to pick up the pieces. Similarly, only 29 states have opted into the ACA’s Medicaid extension program, even though it promises substantial federal support early on. Twenty states have already opted out of the program and two are weighing their options.

At this point, the total administrative burden on the federal government has massively increased. Yet neither the federal government nor the states have the human or financial resources to discharge these tasks in a timely fashion, making it highly unlikely that these exchanges will be up and running by January 1, 2014. To achieve that goal, the various private participants on the exchanges must design and post their policies by October 1, 2013.

Unfortunately, these private insurers cannot do their part unless they have enough information to accurately price the “essential minimum conditions” required under the ACA. At present, it is estimated that only around 2 percent of the current plans meet the ACA’s outsized legislative ambitions. Nor can the federal government set up, all at once, the federal exchanges that are needed to make this system work. Similarly, the tepid reception to the Medicaid extension program only stretches scarce government resources. With each passing day, it becomes clearer that the entire process is backing up.

Then there is the matter of the initial 21-page enrollment form that the Department of Health and Human Services first released to the public. The President’s speech crowed that HHS has compressed that form to 3 pages, making it shorter, analogous to private enrollment forms. Yet like everything else about the ACA, his point is a public relationships ruse that has already backfired. As Grace-Marie Turner has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, much of the reduction in form length comes from shrinking the font, or from relegating key parts of the basic application to separate forms. Needless to say, HHS has just announced a $150 million grant for its navigation program to help people work their way through the now abbreviated form.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, who was in these pages often before he left Commentary and signed on to the Romney campaign, has written a book about how the loss came about.

Even before my new book, A Bad Day on the Romney Campaign: An Insider’s Account, went on sale and could be read, it was suggested to me by former colleagues in a series of e-mails, calls, and statements in the press that I would regret airing “dirty laundry” in public.

One top aide warned that I would become “permanently radioactive” and would never work in this town again. Others called me disreputable and disloyal — and those are among the kinder words directed my way. And then the smearing began, with Romney’s deputy campaign manager going so far as to state to Time that I was lying about being a “senior adviser” to the campaign, an attempt to discredit me readily disproven by the campaign’s own official documents.

Is this fierce reaction warranted? Am I wrong to speak up? Both questions raise interesting issues.

The ferocity, I believe, comes from fear. Throughout the campaign, the Romney organization was relatively successful in keeping its secrets to itself. Although the problems of the campaign were visible to the world, a code of silence prevailed, and continues to prevail, in its ranks. It exists for reasons of self-protection, to evade responsibility for a loss that was avoidable. Those warning me off publishing have not even read my book, but their anxiety about what I might say is a measure of how much they have to hide.

My book exposes incompetence, yes. Too often, incompetence is blithely excused in politics. “That’s how campaigns always are,” the experts assure us. For one, if the Republican party hopes to win, that lackadaisical attitude needs to change. Exposing incompetence is a start. …

Michael Barone says Benghazi and the IRS thuggery are just politics by other means. 

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses.

Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds.

He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al Qaeda was on the run. The global war on terror — well, don’t call it that anymore.

A deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video — even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.

The White House and the State Department altered the CIA’s talking points — not just in one minor particular, as Carney claimed, but through 12 separate versions. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, armed with the talking points, spoke sternly about a spontaneous protest and an anti-Muslim video on five Sunday interview shows.

The campaign trail press grilled Mitt Romney for his (impolitic) statement immediately after the attacks. Obama went on talk shows and peddled his line about an anti-Muslim video.

Debate moderator Candy Crowley came to Obama’s defense when he claimed that he had immediately stated that Benghazi was a terrorist attack — a claim Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler awarded four Pinocchios. …

Christian Science Monitor Blog says Bob Woodward thinks we should not ignore Benghazi.

Bob Woodward compared Benghazi to Watergate during a Friday morning appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

The famous Washington Post reporter and former antagonist of President Richard Nixon said the US government’s editing of talking points used by public officials in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, is “a very serious issue.”

“I would not dismiss Benghazi,” Mr. Woodward said.

Woodward’s own main talking point was that he believed there are similarities between the process used to produce the Benghazi talking points and Nixon’s release of edited transcripts of the White House tapes.

Citing the lengthy e-mail chain detailing the production of the talking points, released by the Obama administration earlier this week, the Watergate press hero said that in the wake of the Libyan tragedy “everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to Al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ ”

Forty years ago, Nixon went line by line through his tape transcripts and made his own edits.

“He personally went through them and said, ‘Let’s not tell this, let’s not show this,’ ” said Woodward on “Morning Joe.”

Nixon, of course, was trying to deflate the increasing public and congressional pressure for him to release the tapes themselves. He wasn’t successful. The tapes revealed the extent of his involvement with the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover up.

As to Benghazi, Woodward concluded that the edits “show the hydraulic pressure that was in the system not to tell the truth.”

WaPo reporters do a good job exposing Eric Holder’s lies that purported to explain and excuse the AP wiretaps.

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters’ home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months.

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The president’s top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on “Good Morning America” the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public.

Holder said this week that the unauthorized disclosure “put the American people at risk.” …

Now for the important stuff. In a working class neighborhood south west of downtown Milwaukee is the Holler House Bar. Not your average bar, but one with its own entry in Wikipedia. Two notable things about the tavern are the bowling alleys (first in the nation, they say) and the patron’s bras shed and signed so they can be posted for posterity. Then government idiots got involved and told the owner, Marcy Skowronski to remove the “fire hazard” or face fines up to “$10,000 per day.” Typical government creeps. We can thank Jim Stingl of the Journal-Sentinel for the story with the happy ending. Sounds like the bar has lots of support. 

Stripped of the bras that decorated the tavern’s ceiling for nearly half a century, the Holler House looked mighty naked.

But on Thursday, justice was restored to the universe. A ridiculous city order to ban the bras as a fire hazard was rescinded.

“Oh my goodness, we won,” cried Marcy Skowronski, the always colorful 87-year-old owner of the south side bar. “We’re going to have a party to throw the bras back up.”

I’ll let Skowronski explain what happened when a city inspector stopped in recently.

“We’ve had bras hanging here for 45 years. It’s been a charm of the place. So here comes this gal, and she’s walking in here like Lady Astor’s pet horse, you know, and she says she wants those bras down because they’re a fire hazard. Now how can a bra be a fire hazard unless someone is wearing it? Honest to God.” …

… “We’ve got a bunch of crazy people who come in here,” Skowronski said.

But no crazier than the city’s short-lived ban on the frilly things they leave behind. 

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When it comes to exposing administration incompetence, we are in a target rich environment. John Fund reviews the unfolding, cringe inducing, tales of government idiots. Pickerhead never begrudged the president’s golf rounds figuring if he was on the links that was less damage he could do to the country. Turns out though, he outsourced the presidency to Valerie Jarrett. It is easy to believe she was heavily involved in many of the things that have gone bad for this bunch of miscreants.

The recent spate of Washington scandals has some liberals finally confessing in public what many of them have said privately for a long time. The Obama administration is arrogant, insular, prone to intimidation of adversaries, and slovenly when it comes to seeing that rules are followed. Indeed, the Obama White House is a strange place, and it’s good that its operational model is now likely to be finally dissected by the media.

Joe Klein of Time magazine laments Obama’s “unwillingness to concentrate.”

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post tars him as a President Passerby who “seems to want no control over the actions of his administration.” Milbank warns that “he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes.” Comedian Jon Stewart says Obama’s government lacks real “managerial competence” and that the president is either Nixonian if he knew about the scandals in advance or a Mr. Magoo–style incompetent if he didn’t.

But it was Chris Matthews of MSNBC who cut even deeper in his Hardball show on Wednesday. A former speechwriter for President Carter, he wondered if Obama “really doesn’t want to be responsible day-to-day for running” the government. He savaged the White House for using “weird, spooky language” about “the building leadership” that must approve the Benghazi talking points. “I don’t understand the model of this administration: weak chiefs of staff afraid of other people in the White House. Some undisclosed role for Valerie Jarrett. Unclear, a lot of floating power in the White House, but no clear line of authority. …

Kimberley Strassel details how the IRS scandal started with the one.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a “wealthy individual” with a “less-than-reputable record.” Other donors were described as having been “on the wrong side of the law.”

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot’s divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn’t account for what the president’s vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn’t a mistake; it was the president’s strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. 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 didn’t need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

Weekly Standard learned from NBC’s Lisa Meyer the IRS chose to hide the scandal until after the election.

NBC’s Lisa Myers reported this morning (Friday) that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election:

The IRS commissioner “has known for at least a year that this was going on,” said Myers, “and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What’s going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when — after these officials are briefed by the IG that this is going on, they don’t disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we — if you can — what 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.”

Jennifer Rubin watched the latest press conference.

President Obama’s press conference in the rain was not a success, if by success, his supporters would mean an event which convinces anyone who doesn’t work for him that he’s getting ahead of the scandal deluge. The sight of a Marine holding an umbrella over his head only added to the weirdness of the event.

So what did we learn?

1. He has full confidence in Attorney General Eric Holder, the man who purportedly recused himself (whenever) without putting it in writing (whatever). When asked about the untrammeled snooping on Associated Press reporters and editors, Obama said he doesn’t talk about a “pending case” (except in numerous shootings, the IRS, etc., I suppose). He reiterated his intolerance of leaks. In other words, the great liberal icon is pleased (“no apologies”) with an investigation that went far beyond anything previously undertaken against a media outlet.

2. He’s going to get the Internal Revenue Service in tip-top shape. Still, it’s an independent agency and all. (The willingness to show he is in charge is undercut by his insistence he had no idea what was going on there.)

3. His lip-service to the importance of a free press that holds him “accountable” suggests the most important attribute he now has is shamelessness. …

Peter Wehner calls him the “ad hominem president.”

1. President Obama is once again engaging in what psychiatrists refer to as projection, in which people lay their worst attributes on others.

In this instance, the most hyper-partisan president in modern times is ascribing that trait to Congressional Republicans. What we’ve learned about Mr. Obama over the years is that he that while he is unusually inept at governing, he’s quite good at campaigning. He certainly enjoys it, having taken the concept of the Permanent Campaign beyond anything we’ve ever seen. It turns out it’s the only thing he does well—no human being in history has raised campaign cash quite like he has—and it’s all he seems interested in doing.

On some deep, subconscious level, though, Mr. Obama seems ashamed of the path he’s chosen. And so the president projects those traits he loathes in himself on to others. To give you a sense of how deep the malady runs, the president does more than merely project; he actually preaches against the very character flaws he himself cannot overcome.

2. The president can hardly go a day without impugning the motivations of his opponents. They never have honest differences with the president. Instead they are suffering from an illness (“fever”), cowardice (afraid of what Rush Limbaugh might say about them), and lack of patriotism (caring about elections rather than future generations). Mr. Obama is the ultimate ad hominem president. …

Dana Milbank called him “president passerby” and now he’s turned his sights on the placeHolder.

As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.

Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records?

“I do not know,” the attorney general told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday afternoon, “why that was or was not done. I simply don’t have a factual basis to answer that question.”

Why didn’t the DOJ seek the AP’s cooperation, as the law also requires, before issuing subpoenas?

“I don’t know what happened there,” Holder replied. “I was recused from the case.”

Why, asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), was the whole matter handled in a manner that appears “contrary to the law and standard procedure”?

“I don’t have a factual basis to answer the questions that you have asked, because I was recused,” the attorney general said.

On and on Holder went: …

Jennifer Rubin on the Holder faux recusal.

Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee he recused himself from the leak investigation involving sweeping surveillance of the Associated Press because he was a “fact witness,” meaning he had access to the classified data at issue and was questioned about it. But he can’t recall when he recused himself. And it wasn’t in writing. In one of the worst security leaks of which he is aware (he says), he never told the White House (he says) that he took himself out of the loop.

Remarkable really, even if true. John Yoo, who authored the enhanced interrogation memos in the Bush Justice Department and was widely criticized by the left for taking a broad view of executive power, was somewhat incredulous when I asked him about the Justice Department’s behavior. As for the paperless recusal, he told me, “There must be something in writing to at least the DAG [deputy attorney general].”

Former attorney general Michael Mukasey agreed, emailing me that ”it is inconceivable to me that you would not do it formally. Of course, you’d have to inform all the people who might otherwise have to contact you. Indeed, if you didn’t you might conceivably come into possession of information you should not have.” He added that “in the one case I can recall in which I recused myself I did it in writing. Hard to imagine how else you’d do it — shout ‘I recuse myself’ in your office? In the hall?”

But it is the unrestrained nature of investigation that is breathtaking, beyond anything Mukasey has seen, he told me. Yoo observed, “I cannot think of another example this broad that didn’t turn out to be unauthorized. The only comparable thing was cases where a court tried to get a journalist to reveal a source. But I cannot think of the actual monitoring of reporters and editors.” He added, “If something like that had ever come up during the Bush administration in my time at DOJ, I would have said it was unconstitutional.” …

As John Fund mentioned above, even Chris Matthews is starting to gag. Politico has the story.

President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News. …

You can’t make it up! ABC News tells us Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS creep in charge of the tea party targeting, now runs the IRS health care office. Of course. 

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. …

And from the Examiner we learn Ingram got $100,000 in bonus over the last three years. 

Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harrassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency’s Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS’ regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today. …

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This is rich. Dana Milbank, certified WaPo liberal, calls him “president passerby.”

President Passerby needs urgently to become a participant in his presidency.

Late Monday came the breathtaking news of a full-frontal assault on the First Amendment by his administration: word that the Justice Department had gone on a fishing expedition through months of phone records of Associated Press reporters.

And yet President Obama reacted much as he did to the equally astonishing revelation on Friday that the IRS had targeted conservative groups based on their ideology: He responded as though he were just some bloke on a bar stool, getting his information from the evening news.

In the phone-snooping case, Obama didn’t even stir from his stool. Instead, he had his press secretary, former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney, go before an incensed press corps Tuesday afternoon and explain why the president will not be involving himself in his Justice Department’s trampling of press freedoms.

“Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the Associated Press,” Carney announced.

The president “found out about the news reports yesterday on the road,” he added.

And now that Obama has learned about this extraordinary abuse of power, he’s not doing a thing about it. “We are not involved at the White House in any decisions made in connection with ongoing criminal investigations,” Carney argued. …

Politico says the media has turned on the president and his minions.

… Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.”

Republican outrage is predictable, maybe even manageable. Democratic outrage is not.

The dam of solid Democratic solidarity has collapsed, starting with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s weekend scolding of the White House over Benghazi, then gushing with the news the Justice Department had sucked up an absurdly broad swath of Associated Press phone records. …

WaPo fact checker gives him four Pinocchios – their max for a lie.

… the president’s claim that he said “act of terrorism” is taking revisionist history too far, given that he repeatedly refused to commit to that phrase when asked directly by reporters in the weeks after the attack. He appears to have gone out of his way to avoid saying it was a terrorist attack, so he has little standing to make that claim now.

Indeed, the initial unedited talking points did not call it an act of terrorism. Instead of pretending the right words were uttered, it would be far better to acknowledge that he was echoing what the intelligence community believed at the time–and that the administration’s phrasing could have been clearer and more forthright from the start.

Four Pinocchios

J. Christian Adams describes his experience with an IRS audit. 

Franklin Graham, the Tea Party, and Larry Conners all faced the wrath of the Obama IRS.

You can add me to that list.

After Obama was elected, I faced my first IRS audit shakedown after decades of filing income tax returns. Overdue coincidence?  Perhaps.

Given the headlines of the past 48 hours, perhaps not.

My audit experience was a headache, as anyone who has experienced one can attest.  When it happened, a former IRS lawyer with whom I associated in private practice told me – “it’s no accident you were audited.”

I brushed it off.  But I wonder how many left-wing election lawyers and leftist bloggers were audited.  Any Media Matters drones face an audit in the last four years? Step right up and announce yourself if you did. …

It wasn’t just the IRS. The EPA did the same thing. Examiner has the story. 

Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

CEI reviewed Freedom of Information Act requests sent between January 2012 and this spring from several environmental groups friendly to the EPA’s mission, and several conservative groups, to see how equally the agency applies its fee waiver policy for media and watchdog groups. Government agencies are supposed to waive fees for groups disseminating information for public benefit.

“This is as clear an example of disparate treatment as the IRS’ hurdles selectively imposed upon groups with names ominously reflecting an interest in, say, a less intrusive or biased federal government,” said CEI fellow Chris Horner.

For 92 percent of requests from green groups, the EPA cooperated by waiving fees for the information. Those requests came from the Natural Resources Defense Council, EarthJustice, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, The Waterkeeper Alliance, Greenpeace, Southern Environmental Law Center and the Center for Biological Diversity.

Of the requests that were denied, the EPA said the group either didn’t respond to requests for justification of a waiver, or didn’t express intent to disseminate the information to the general public, according to documents obtained by The Washington Examiner.  CEI, on the other hand, had its requests denied 93 percent of the time. …

Maybe David Axelrod has joined the Tea Party, because this is the whole point. The government is too big. From The Corner.

The government is simply too big for President Obama to keep track of all the wrongdoing taking place on his watch, his former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “Part of being president is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast,” he explained. …

Nile Gardiner has more on Lady Thatcher’s funeral and the snub delivered by our government. 

In his joint press conference yesterday (Monday) with David Cameron at the White House, President Obama began with warm words for the former British prime minister, who passed away on April 8. “Here in the United States,” declared Obama, “we joined our British friends in mourning the passing of Baroness Margaret Thatcher, a great champion of freedom and liberty and of the alliance that we carry on today.” The British Prime Minister responded by saying: “Thank you for what you said about Margaret Thatcher. It was a pleasure to welcome so many Americans to her remarkable funeral in the UK.”

Significantly, however, those Americans who attended Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral did not include a single serving member of the Obama administration in Washington. As is so often the case with President Obama, his flowery, grandiose words frequently fail to match his actions. There is a name for this kind of approach – rank hypocrisy. As I noted in a previous piece: …

BBC report on how our economy has been saved from the government of rank amateurs by fracking.

… The surge in US production will reshape the whole industry, according to the IEA, which made the prediction in its closely-watched bi-annual report examining trends in oil supply and demand over the next five years.

The IEA said it expected the US to overtake Russia as the world’s biggest gas producer by 2015 and to become “all but self-sufficient” in its energy needs by about 2035.

The rise in US production means the world’s reliance on oil from traditional oil producing countries in the Middle East, which make up Opec (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), would end soon, according to the report.

US production is set to grow to a level that is some 3.9 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) higher in 2018 than it was in 2012, accounting for some two thirds of the predicted growth in traditional non-Opec production, according to the IEA. …

Andrew Malcolm tops off the week with late night humor.

Leno: President Obama says the IRS targeting conservatives is ‘outrageous.’ And he promises to get his Benghazi investigators on the case immediately.

Leno: Obama down in Texas on his ‘Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity Tour.’ Don’t confuse that with his first term ‘Jobs & Missed Opportunities Tour.’ Obama also told people to ‘Remember the Alamo’ and forget Benghazi.

Conan: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie revealed that he underwent a surgery earlier this year that restricts the amount of food he can eat. As a result, 12 animals have been removed from the endangered species list.

Today’s cartoons should not be missed.

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It is history day. Tomorrow we’ll continue with coverage of the creeps in DC.

Maybe after this travesty of an administration passes from the scene, a memorial to Winston Churchill will find its way to DC. Richard Jencks makes the case in a WSJ OpEd.

… There is a grotesque stereotype that he was a buoyant and bellicose man who had simply found his time. What really differentiated him from the pragmatic foreign secretary, from the hero-aviator, from the ambivalent philosopher, and from the Indian apostle of nonresistance, was that Churchill’s moral judgment of evil was more acute and implacable than theirs. He himself, in his history of the war, called the final result “Triumph and Tragedy.” But what we of the generation who participated in it called it at the time, and since, was Victory.

Early in Barack Obama’s presidency, he removed from the White House a bust of Winston Churchill. It has been speculated that this might have been done because the president was offended by an opinion rendered by Churchill in 1899 during his early career as a British officer in the Middle East. He then wrote: “Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exits in the world.”

It seems probable that the next president will restore the Churchill bust to the Oval Office. An even better outcome would be for some publicly minded person or group, with the concurrence of the responsible authorities, to place a statue of Churchill on or near Capitol Hill in Washington, together with the text of his July 1943 speech to the House of Commons.

England has long recognized great Americans with public statues, beginning with the statue of Abraham Lincoln just outside Parliament Square. Closely following World War II, England honored President Roosevelt with public statues, one in Grosvenor Square and one of FDR with Churchill, seen sitting and talking together, on a bench in Mayfair.

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of a White House ceremony when President Kennedy granted honorary U.S. citizenship to Winston Churchill, the son of an American mother. It is a propitious time to bestow another honor on him.

The other history lesson for today is offered by the May 11th anniversary of the Mossad capture of Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious of the German persecutors of Jews. We get the story from the Jewish Virtual Library.

… Adolf Eichmann had escaped both the Nuremberg trials and the Avengers. All trace of him had been lost in May 1945. He had actually remained in Europe until 1950, maintaining no contact with his family. In 1950, with the help of an organization assisting former Nazis to leave Europe, he escaped to Argentina. He sent for his wife and children two years later.

The passport issed to Adolf Eichmann by the International Committee of the Red Cross on June 1, 1950 was discovered by a graduate student in at the University of San Martin mid-2007 conducting research on Eichmann’s wife, Veronica Catalina Leibel. The name on the passport reads “Ricardo Klement,” and claims that he was a “technician born in Bolzano, Italy, and apolide (without nationality).”

When Eichmann arrived in Argentina in 1950, he lived for almost three years in a quiet town near Buenos Aires called San Fernando, where he worked in a metal factory. He then moved to the province of Tucuman, located over 600 miles from Buenos Aires, where he worked at an engineering company called the Capri firm, to which Juan Peron, the Argentine president at the time and known Nazi-sympathizer, gave many state contracts in order to modernize the province’s water administration.

Eichmann’s wife and two children arrived in Argentina in mid-1952, and accompanied him to Tucuman. He registered his two children at a German school, known to promote anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi propoganda at the time, under the name Eichmann, suggesting again how the Argentine government aided and abetted former Nazis and their sympathizers.

In April 1953, the Capri firm declared bankruptcy and Eichmann moved his family to Buenos Aires, where he worked for a number a companies. He was hired by Mercedes Benz in March 1959, where he continued to use the alias Ricardo Klement.

No one had heard him for years. But in the autumn of 1957 Walter Eytan at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, got a call from Fritz Bauer, the public prosecutor of the province of Hesse, Germany. Hesse told Eytan that Eichmann was alive and living in Argentina.

Eytan immediately alerted Isser Harel, the head of the Mossad. Harel spent one autumn night reading Eichmann’s dossier. At that point Harel didn’t know much about him. As Harel writes in his book on the capture of Eichmann, The House on Garibaldi Street; “I didn’t know what sort of man Eichmann was. I didn’t know with what morbid zeal he pursued his murderous work or how he went into the fray to destroy one miserable Jew with the same ardor he devoted to the annihilation of an entire community. I didn’t know that he was capable of ordering the slaughter of babies – and depicting himself as a disciplined soldier; of directing outrages on women – and priding himself on his loyalty to an oath; or of sending helpless old men to their deaths – and classifying himself as an ‘idealist’…But I knew when I rose from my desk at dawn that in everything pertaining to the Jews he was the paramount authority and his were the hands that pulled the strings controlling manhunt and massacre. I knew that at all the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals this man was pointed to as the head butcher. I knew that he was a past master in police methods, and that on the strength of his professional skill and in the light of his total lack of conscience, he would be an exceedingly dangerous quarry. I knew that when the war was over he had succeeded in blotting out all trace of himself with supreme expertise.”

Harel knew that this man must be brought to justice and punished for his crimes; the victims of his slaughter demanded it; justice and morality demanded it; but no one was looking for him – no agency, no government, no police force. Until the Mossad took over.

It was not going to be an easy task. …

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Joe Klein of Time roughs up the administration again.

The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups is outrageous. Those who did this should be fired immediately. That’s obvious.

It continues a slovenly week for Barack Obama. The President has been very proud of the absence of scandal in his administration, and rightly so. The inability of his opponents to find any significant corruption in the historic $800 billion stimulus package was a real achievement, given the speed of the payout. None of his top aides have been caught up in taking bribes while in office–although their race through the revolving door into lucrative private sector positions is well beyond nauseating.

As in most presidencies, there have been an awful lot of political hacks populating the mid-reaches of this Administration. In the Obama instance, these have shown an anachronistic, pre-Clinton liberal bias when it comes to the rules and regulations governing many of our safety net programs, like social security disability. And now they have violated one of the more sacred rules of our democracy: you do not use the tax code to punish your opponents.

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

Does anyone actually believe this?

Yet again, we have an example of Democrats simply not managing the government properly and with discipline. This is just poisonous at a time of skepticism about the efficacy of government. And the President should know this: the absence of scandal is not the presence of competence. His unwillingness to concentrate–and I mean concentrate obsessively–on making sure that government is managed efficiently will be part of his legacy.

Previous Presidents, including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Barack Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.

Michael Barone asks if Hillary and barack believed their Benghazi baloney. 

What were President Barack Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thinking? Why did they keep pitching the line that the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans started as a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim video?

One possible explanation is confusion. There was such an attack on our embassy in Cairo earlier that day that fit that description.

When Hillary Clinton on Sept. 14 talked of a “mob” and “violent attacks” over the caskets of the Americans slain in Benghazi, she could have been referring to the attacks in Cairo. In that case she would not exactly be lying, as many have charged.

But she would have been misleading people, quite possibly intentionally. We know she assured one victim’s father, Charles Wood, that “we’re going to prosecute that person that made the video.”

Not entirely successfully, by the way. “I knew she was lying,” Woods said after the House committee hearing on Benghazi last week.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Clinton was knowingly attempting to mislead. She certainly knows the difference between Cairo and Benghazi.

And it’s undisputed that Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 man in our Libya embassy, reported that it was an “attack” on Sept. 11. That was the word he heard in his last conversation with Chris Stevens. …

Boston Globe tells us where some of the bogus “studies” came from.

A prominent Dutch social psychologist who once claimed to have shown that the very act of thinking about eating meat makes people behave more selfishly has been found to have faked data throughout much of his career.

In one of the worst cases of scientific fraud on record in the Netherlands, a review committee made up of some of the country’s top scientists has found that University of Tilburg Prof. Diederik Stapel systematically falsified data to achieve the results he wanted.

The university has fired the 45-year-old Stapel and plans to file fraud charges against him, university spokesman Walther Verhoeven said Thursday.

Stapel acknowledged in a statement the accusations were largely true.

“I have manipulated study data and fabricated investigations,” he wrote in an open letter published by De Volkskrant newspaper this week. “I realize that via this behavior I have left my direct colleagues stunned and angry and put my field, social psychology, in a poor light.” …

Ann Coulter defends John Lott, the author of “More Guns; Less Crime.”

You can tell the conservatives liberals fear most because they start being automatically referred to as “discredited.” Ask Sen. Ted Cruz. But no one is called “discredited” by liberals more often than the inestimable economist John Lott, author of the groundbreaking book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws .

Lott’s economic analysis of the effect of concealed-carry laws on violent crime is the most thoroughly vetted study in the history of economics, perhaps in the history of the world.

Some nut Dutch professor produces dozens of gag studies purportedly finding that thinking about red meat makes people selfish and that litter leads to racism — and no one bothers to see if he even administered questionnaires before drawing these grand conclusions about humanity.

But Lott’s decades-long studies of concealed-carry laws have been probed, poked and re-examined dozens of times. (Most of all by Lott himself, who has continuously re-run the numbers controlling for thousands of factors.)

Tellingly, Lott immediately makes all his underlying data and computer analyses available to critics — unlike, say, the critics. He has sent his data and work to 120 researchers around the world. By now, there have been 29 peer-reviewed studies of Lott’s work on the effect of concealed-carry laws.

Eighteen confirm Lott’s results, showing a statistically significant reduction in crime after concealed-carry laws are enacted. Ten show no harm, but no significant reduction in crime. Only one peer-reviewed study even purported to show any negative effect: a temporary increase in aggravated assaults. Then it turned out this was based on a flawed analysis by a liberal activist professor: John Donohue, whose name keeps popping up in all fake studies purporting to debunk Lott. …

According to a BBC report, the risk of skin cancer is more than overcome by the healthy effects of sunshine. 

The health benefits of exposing skin to sunlight may far outweigh the risk of developing skin cancer, according to scientists.

EdinburghUniversity research suggests sunlight helps reduce blood pressure, cutting heart attack and stroke risks and even prolonging life.

UV rays were found to release a compound that lowers blood pressure.

Researchers said more studies would be carried out to determine if it is time to reconsider advice on skin exposure.

Heart disease and stroke linked to high blood pressure are estimated to lead to about 80 times more deaths than those from skin cancer in the UK. …

WSJ reviews a book on the bird watcher’s holy grail.

She’s there in a 1957-era ornithologist’s film, tossing her springy curled crest, whacking away at scaly pine bark and hitching vigorously up a tree. She is an imperial woodpecker, the largest woodpecker who ever lived: almost 2 feet tall; jet black and snow white, with a staring doll’s eye, a Kewpie crest and an oversize bone-colored bill, stuck like an awl in a surprised-looking face. And she is, sadly, one of the last of her kind: No one has spotted an imperial woodpecker in the half-century since the film was made.

Even though Tim Gallagher reported seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker, the imperial woodpecker’s northern cousin, fly across Arkansas’s Bayou De View in 2004 (and wrote a 2006 book, “The Grail Bird,” about his quest), you’re aware from the get-go that his hunt for the imperial woodpecker in Mexico won’t be a saga of discovery. There won’t be a photo of an oversize, pied woodpecker on the book’s cover, just an artist’s rendering. Instead, “Imperial Dreams” is more along the lines of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard.” It’s yearning, put into words and wistfully unrequited. …

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Mark Steyn attributes Benghazi to lack of character.

Shortly before last November’s election I took part in a Fox News documentary on Benghazi, whose other participants included the former governor of New Hampshire John Sununu. Making chit-chat while the camera crew were setting up, Governor Sununu said to me that in his view Benghazi mattered because it was “a question of character.” That’s correct. On a question of foreign policy or counterterrorism strategy, men of good faith can make the wrong decisions. But a failure of character corrodes the integrity of the state.

That’s why career diplomat Gregory Hicks’s testimony was so damning — not so much for the new facts as for what those facts revealed about the leaders of this republic. In this space in January, I noted that Hillary Clinton had denied ever seeing Ambassador Stevens’s warnings about deteriorating security in Libya on the grounds that “1.43 million cables come to my office” — and she can’t be expected to see all of them, or any. Once Ambassador Stevens was in his flag-draped coffin listening to her eulogy for him at Andrews Air Force Base, he was her bestest friend in the world — it was all “Chris this” and “Chris that,” as if they’d known each other since third grade. But up till that point he was just one of 1.43 million close personal friends of Hillary trying in vain to get her ear.

Now we know that at 8 p.m. Eastern time on the last night of Stevens’s life, his deputy in Libya spoke to Secretary Clinton and informed her of the attack in Benghazi and the fact that the ambassador was now missing. An hour later, Gregory Hicks received a call from the then–Libyan prime minister, Abdurrahim el-Keib, informing him that Stevens was dead. Hicks immediately called Washington. It was 9 p.m. Eastern time, or 3 a.m. in Libya. Remember the Clinton presidential team’s most famous campaign ad? About how Hillary would be ready to take that 3 a.m. call? Four years later, the phone rings, and Secretary Clinton’s not there. She doesn’t call Hicks back that evening. Or the following day.

Are murdered ambassadors like those 1.43 million cables she doesn’t read? Just too many of them to keep track of? No. Only six had been killed in the history of the republic — seven, if you include Arnold Raphel, who perished in General Zia’s somewhat mysterious plane crash in Pakistan in 1988. Before that you have to go back to Adolph Dubs, who died during a kidnapping attempt in Kabul in 1979. So we have here a once-in-a-third-of-a-century event. And at 3 a.m. Libyan time on September 12 it’s still unfolding, with its outcome unclear. Hicks is now America’s head man in the country, and the cabinet secretary to whom he reports says, “Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.” Just to underline the difference here: Libya’s head of government calls Hicks, but nobody who matters in his own government can be bothered to.

What was Secretary Clinton doing that was more important? What was the president doing? Aside, that is, from resting up for his big Vegas campaign event. A real government would be scrambling furiously to see what it could do to rescue its people. It’s easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. …

IBD Editors on the Clinton intimidation of Gregory Hicks.

The secretary of state in the most transparent administration in history has her chief of staff warn a Benghazi whistle-blower to not spill the beans on Benghazi to a U.S. congressman.

In the course of the career of Hillary Clinton’s husband, William Jefferson Clinton, there were handlers delegated to deal with what were famously called “bimbo eruptions,” past dalliances that might impede his political career.

Now on her own politically, Mrs. Clinton apparently has her own handlers, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, to deal with what we’ll call “Benghazi eruptions.” Those who know the truth and are willing to speak it must be dealt with by intimidation.

One of the things we learned during Wednesday’s hearings from Greg Hicks, the deputy chief of mission in Libya and a career foreign service officer for 22 years, is that after he talked to investigators about Benghazi, he received a searing phone reprimand from a very angry Cheryl Mills, who happened to be the chief of staff to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the State Department, when Cheryl Mills calls, you pick up the phone. She’s been one of the Clintons’ right-hand men, so to speak, for decades. She worked in Bill’s White House legal office, then as counsel to Hillary’s presidential campaign, and then became chief of staff at State when Hillary was appointed secretary. She knows how to help handle “eruptions, ” bimbo or otherwise. …

Michael Barone says colleges have learned how the market works.

.. Now the higher education bubble has burst. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that that the average “tuition discount rate” offered incoming freshmen last fall by private colleges and universities has reached an all-time high of 45 percent.

At the same time, their “sticker price” tuitions have increased by the smallest amount in the last dozen years. Tuitions for in-state students at public four-year colleges and universities also increased by the smallest amount during that period.

Applicants are negotiating bigger discounts than they used to. Market competition has kicked in.

What has happened is that in a recessionary and sluggish economy potential customers have been figuring out that a college diploma may not be a good investment — particularly if it entails six-figure college loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

The Millennial Generation that voted so heavily for Barack Obama — 66 to 32 percent in 2008, 60 to 37 percent in 2012 — has had a hard time finding jobs, even with diplomas in hand. Especially if their degrees are in gender studies or similar fields beloved of academics.

In even worse condition are those students who never get a degree, a disproportionate number of whom are blacks and Hispanics admitted under affirmative action programs who prove unable to keep up with the pace of instruction at schools where most students enter much better prepared.

We see in higher education something like what we saw in housing. Government programs aimed at increasing college education and homeownership, particularly among minorities, turn out to hurt many of the intended beneficiaries.

The intentions of the people who created these programs were good. The results? Well, not so much. …

Der Spiegel tells us about the plight of the African lion.

It’s a Sunday in South Africa, and on the green lawn of the Weltevrede Lion Farm, arms reach for a white animal that could double for a cuddly stuffed animal. Visitors are being allowed to pet Lisa, an eight-week-old lion cub with unusual coloring.

Lisa was two weeks old when she was taken from her mother. “To make them manageable you have to do this,” explains Christiaan, who is leading visitors on a tour of the grounds.

When cubs are born here, on this lion farm in Vrystaat, a province of South Africa, “each employee is assigned to bottle-feed one of them,” says Christiaan. “You can buy a cub for 40,000 rand (€3,400, or $4,455).” A delighted visitor asks whether she can take a lion baby into her room at night. It can be arranged, promises the guide.

Lisa’s father, a grown specimen with a stately mane who lives in the enclosure, can be had for about €20,000. Roughly 2,000 lions are kept in captivity in Vrystaat alone, where they are bred for a practice called “canned hunting.” It’s a diversion that executives at major German companies have been known to enjoy.

The king of the animals has fallen on hard times in his own kingdom. “In all of South Africa, there are almost as many lions behind bars as in the wild,” says Fiona Miles of the Vrystaat chapter of the international animal rights group Four Paws, which has been unsuccessful in its efforts to protest the hunting of animals that are somewhat tame and are sometimes even drugged to keep them calm. “As a first step to ban canned hunting,” Miles is calling for a moratorium on the breeding of lions.

Across the entire continent, the large African predator, a symbol of strength and majesty, is threatened with decline. Outside fenced enclosures, there is hardly any room left for Panthera leo. Scientists and conservationists warn that the king of the steppes has lost much of his habitat in the last 50 years. …

WSJ OpEd defends carbon dioxide. 

Of all of the world’s chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The cessation of observed global warming for the past decade or so has shown how exaggerated NASA’s and most other computer predictions of human-caused warming have been—and how little correlation warming has with concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. As many scientists have pointed out, variations in global temperature correlate much better with solar activity and with complicated cycles of the oceans and atmosphere. There isn’t the slightest evidence that more carbon dioxide has caused more extreme weather.

The current levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere, approaching 400 parts per million, are low by the standards of geological and plant evolutionary history. Levels were 3,000 ppm, or more, until the Paleogene period (beginning about 65 million years ago). For most plants, and for the animals and humans that use them, more carbon dioxide, far from being a “pollutant” in need of reduction, would be a benefit. This is already widely recognized by operators of commercial greenhouses, who artificially increase the carbon dioxide levels to 1,000 ppm or more to improve the growth and quality of their plants. …

… We know that carbon dioxide has been a much larger fraction of the earth’s atmosphere than it is today, and the geological record shows that life flourished on land and in the oceans during those times. The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.

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Jeffery Tucker at Laissez Faire Today on how government wrecked the gas can. 

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. …

ObamaBS gets derision from Charles Krauthammer.

You know you’re in trouble when you can’t even get your walk-back story straight. Stung by the worldwide derision that met President Obama’s fudging and fumbling of his chemical-weapons red line in Syria, the White House leaked to the New York Times that Obama’s initial statement had been unprepared, unscripted and therefore unserious.

The next day Jay Carney said precisely the opposite: “Red line” was intended and deliberate.

Which is it? Who knows? Perhaps Obama used the term last August to look tough, sound like a real world leader, never expecting that Syria would do something so crazy. He would have it both ways: sound decisive but never have to deliver.

Or perhaps he thought that Syria might actually use chemical weapons one day, at which point he would think of something.

So far he’s thought of nothing. Instead he’s backed himself into a corner: Be forced into a war he is firmly resolved to avoid, or lose credibility, which for a superpower on whose word relies the safety of a dozen allies is not just embarrassing but dangerous.

In his recent rambling news conference, Obama said that he needed certainty about the crossing of the red line to keep the “international community” behind him. This is absurd. The “international community” is a fiction, especially in Syria. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are calling the shots.

Nor, he averred, could he act until he could be sure of everything down to the “chain of custody” of the sarin gas.

What is this? “CSI: Damascus”? …

Neo-Neocon posts on speechwriters in the administration who get rewarded with real jobs where they are out of their depth.

Several people have mentioned Ben Rhodes in connection with the Benghazi debacle (just Google “Ben Rhodes Benghazi” and you’ll find plenty of the speculation). It’s not at all clear how much responsibility Rhodes had for the decisions during the Benghazi attack and the spin afterward. But what is clear is that Rhodes is one of Obama’s many advisors who lack anything remotely connected with expertise, except in the art of politics and speechwriting. Despite this, for Obama Rhodes doesn’t just write about foreign policy, he helps to make it.

Rhodes’ resume is singularly unimpressive, except after he was tapped by Obama to write for him and then to somehow be a foreign policy “expert.” Rhodes is hardly unique in the Obama administration for having this sort of background. The president seems to prefer to have people around him with even less experience and expertise than he has, which is saying something. …

Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes David Gelernter on Benghazi revelations.

… It is the Democratic Party that’s on trial today; and to a lesser extent, America’s mainstream media.  For Democrats (and especially Democratic senators) it is put-up-or-shut-up time: are they Democrats or Americans first?  Obviously their first instinct was to defend the Democratic administration.  Republicans would have done the same.  But starting with the Hayes story on the Rice propaganda points (and the neo-Soviet process that turned them from truth to lies), and then the Issa hearing Wednesday (and a recent ABC news piece focusing again on the phonied-up talking points), no honest observer can fail to suspect this administration of doing unspeakable things.  It is Congress’s duty to find out the truth.

How would Republicans act if a GOP administration were under this sort of cloud?  We know exactly how.  It was the radically partisan Edward Kennedy who proposed that a senate select committee investigate Watergate—but in February 1973, the Senate voted unanimously to create that committee.  Republican Senator Howard Baker was vice chairman, and asked the key question: ”What did the president know and when did he know it?”  Which Democratic senator will ask that question today, now that the issue isn’t breaking-and-entering but lying about four murders, including the murder of an American ambassador? …

Jennifer Rubin says this is pointing toward Hillary.

… To begin with, the very compelling witness Gregory Hicks explained to lawmakers that the YouTube video lampooning Muhammad was a non-event; rather, he understood the assault on the Benghazi consulate to be a terrorist attack and briefed Clinton that night. There was no confusion about the attack in that sense. The “spontaneous demonstration” story line did not come from people on the ground or from the intelligence community (who knew from the get-go that al-Qaeda linked operatives were involved). It came from senior administration officials.

Hicks, the State Department’s deputy chief of mission in Libya, asked Beth Jones, the acting assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs, why U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was pinning the incident on the YouTube video. He said he was told not to ask questions.

Then there is the matter of the rescue forces. Among others, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta testified in February that no forces were called and none were told to stand down. The testimony yesterday tells us that isn’t true. (That may have been a correct military judgment, but we’ll never know.) The forces from Aviano Air Base in Italy and a second team of special forces in Tripoli were told to stand down, according to Hicks. He said the military personnel there were “furious. [A military officer told Hicks,] ‘This is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’ ” Mark Thompson, the State Department’s deputy coordinator for counterterrorism, also testified, “I was told this was not the right time to deploy the team.”

In the wake of the attack, Hicks testified, he was told not to speak with a congressional delegation visiting Libya. After he participated in a classified briefing without a State Department lawyer present, Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff and sometimes called Hillary’s alter ego at State, contacted Gregory Hicks and told him she was “very upset.” …

This has become so serious for the administration, they are losing The New Yorker. 

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

On Friday, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl revealed the details of the editing process for the C.I.A.’s talking points about the attack, including the edits themselves and some of the reasons a State Department spokeswoman gave for requesting those edits. It’s striking to see the twelve different iterations that the talking points went through before they were released to Congress and to United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who used them in Sunday show appearances that became a central focus of Republicans’ criticism of the Administration’s public response to the attacks. Over the course of about twenty-four hours, the remarks evolved from something specific and fairly detailed into a bland, vague mush.

From the very beginning of the editing process, the talking points contained the erroneous assertion that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved.” That’s an important fact, because the right has always criticized the Administration based on the suggestion that the C.I.A. and the State Department, contrary to what they said, knew that the attack was not spontaneous and not an outgrowth of a demonstration. But everything else about the changes that were made is problematic. …

According to Mary Kissel of WSJ’s Political Diary, the Thomas Perez LaborSec nomination might be in trouble.

Are the political winds starting to shift against labor secretary nominee Thomas Perez? Senate Republicans delayed a vote on his nomination Wednesday on a procedural technicality. The hearing is now expected to be held next week. But the more surprising news is that Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat, called Wednesday for Mr. Perez to comply with a subpoena of his personal email account.

Until now, Democrats have denounced the House investigation into a legal quid pro quo that Mr. Perez negotiated with the City of St. Paul, Minn., last year, in his role as the Justice Department’s civil-rights chief. …