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Craig Pirrong has a look at Iraq.

… Obama’s response? A peevish statement that basically told the Iraqis they are on their own, delivered in front of Marine One before embarking on a-what else?-golfing and fund-raising weekend. …

… Whatever you think of the situation Obama inherited in 2009, you cannot dispute that he has made it immeasurably worse. America’s two most dangerous enemies in the Middle East-radical Sunni jihadists and the radical Shia Iranian government-have been empowered. Indeed, in his desperation Obama is pursuing direct talks with Iran to coordinate a response to the ISIL threat.

Right now the best we can reasonably hope for is a stalemate, with a de facto division of Iraq, with two segments under control of American enemies.

And this isn’t the sole disaster in the making. There’s Ukraine, too, where American and European pusillanimity are encouraging Putin to pursue his asymmetric warfare strategy.

When I contemplate the further damage that Obama can do in the next two-and-a-half years, I am tempted to go on a permanent hiatus. It is just so discouraging to watch a great nation stumble so badly, all due to the extreme misjudgments of its chief executive. It is perhaps even more discouraging to recognize that despite the evidence of failure that lies wherever one looks, the author of this disaster is utterly convinced that his judgment has been unerring. There are few combinations more dangerous than extreme incompetence, insufferable arrogance, and an unwillingness to acknowledge empirical reality. But Barrack Obama combines those things, by the gross.

Allysia Finley posts on presidential priorities.

Over the weekend, Sunni insurgents reportedly mass murdered Iraqi Shiite soldiers and captured another key outpost in the country’s North. Kremlin-abetted fighters shot down a Ukrainian military plane as Russian tanks entered Eastern Ukraine. The Taliban killed 68 Afghans in an unsuccessful effort to obstruct the fledgling democracy’s presidential election. And Somalia Islamists gunned down 50 soccer fans at a Kenyan hotel.

Where was President Obama while the world was set aflame? He was in sunny California, campaigning and working on his golf handicap. On Saturday morning, he attended a private fundraiser in tony Laguna Beach for the Democratic National Committee, after which he gave a campaign speech which doubled as a commencement address at the University of California, Irvine. …

Paul Mirengoff uses a New Yorker article written by a NY Times reporter to show how the president owns Iraq.

The Islamist blitzkrieg in Iraq is the direct result of President Obama’s failure to maintain an American military presence there. As David French has shown, when Obama took office the Islamist extremists were a subdued and nearly defeated force. With a continued American presence, they would have remained subdued.

Some Obama apologists argue that we could not maintain our military presence because the Iraqi government wanted us out, and thus would not negotiate a status of forces agreement with us. In reality, though, Iraqi prime minister Maliki and his government wanted a continued U.S. military presence, and it was Obama who never seriously negotiated for this to happen. His goal was a complete military withdrawal so he could boost that he ended the war in Iraq.

You don’t have to my word for this. Dexter Filkins, who covered the Iraq war for the New York Times, has written an article in the New Yorker that lays out the sorry history.

I urge you to read the whole thing, but here are relevant highlights: …

Bret Stephens on the pace of the disasters. 

Was it only 10 months ago that President Obama capitulated on Syria? And eight months ago that we learned he had no idea the U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel ? And seven months ago that his administration struck its disastrous interim nuclear deal with Tehran? And four months ago that Chuck Hagel announced that the United States Army would be cut to numbers not seen since the 1930s? And three months ago that Russia seized Crimea? And two months ago that John Kerry‘s Israeli-Palestinian peace effort sputtered into the void? And last month that Mr. Obama announced a timetable for total withdrawal from Afghanistan—a strategy whose predictable effects can now be seen in Iraq?

Even the Bergdahl deal of yesterweek is starting to feel like ancient history. Like geese, Americans are being forced to swallow foreign-policy fiascoes at a rate faster than we can possibly chew, much less digest.

Roger Simon weighs in.

… This is a moment when we need a Churchill and what we have is the man who sent Churchill’s bust home — a nowhere man whose only demonstrable skill is fund-raising. (In that way, however,  he was even outdone by Abu Bakr himself who evidently snatched several hundred million for his cause from Mosul banks in one day.)

Today, on Twitter, a veteran named J. R. Salzman tweeted: “I did not get an arm blown off in Baghdad so you could sit on your ass and watch Iraq fall, @BarackObama. I did my job. DO YOUR JOB.” It got retweeted over 2600 times and climbing.  It’s easy to see why. …

Matthew Continetti says we’re seeing the start of the post-presidency. 

One evening in March, during a visit to Italy, President Obama asked the U.S. ambassador to round up a bunch of—and I quote—“interesting Italians” for a dinner at the ambassadorial residence. The history of the property, the Villa Taverna, goes as far back as the tenth century. Its art collection includes Roman sarcophagi and centuries-old imperial busts. The menu that evening included a variety of pastas, and wines from Tuscany and the regions around Venice. Dinner lasted four hours.

In this sumptuous and Baroque setting, amid these beautiful artifacts of long-gone civilizations, enjoying the finest foods and most delicate wines, President Obama was at home. The interesting Italians surrounding him included a particle physicist, two heirs to the Fiat auto fortune, and the postmodern architect Renzo Piano. The dinner conversation, according to Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein, touched on architecture, on art, on science, and on urban planning. Protocol demands that the president be the first guest to leave such an event. But Obama would not shut up. It was “a quite long dinner,” Piano told Politico.

Piano said that he and Obama compared and contrasted the work of architectural design with the work of drafting a political speech—and in these particular cases, it should be noted, the quality of the results is the same. This was but one digression in a long and meandering colloquy, however. “It took a certain time to end,” Piano said. “It wasn’t like, ‘I have to go.’ We kept going, talking, talking, talking. … You don’t stand up. You stay at the table.”

The next morning, during a briefing, the president—whose office holds a burden of responsibility matched only by its power—regretted that his job involved duties other than pretentious conversation with extremely wealthy famous people. “One aide paraphrased Obama’s response: ‘Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we’re back to the minuscule things of politics.”  …

… “The bull sessions satisfy the president’s intellectual curiosity as he indulges in nuanced conversations about life, ideas, and art,” Politico reports. But how nuanced, really, can these conversations be? Has anyone at these parties ever suggested to Barack Obama that his take on life and ideas and art is incomplete, biased, shallow, or—gulp—wrong? Or that, you know, maybe he should devote some attention to his actual job?

Referring to the administration, one Democrat said to Politico: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked at the next three years and think, ‘Oh my God, how are we going to survive the next 36 months of this bullshit?” Good question—one the president seems intent on answering by not caring, by retreating into his comfy and unthreatening cocoon of affluent bourgeois liberals from around the world. The rest of us have to live with the consequences. …

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John Fund introduces today’s focus; Lois Lerner’s missing emails. 

Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill O’Reilly during an interview on Fox News that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his boss’s nonchalance by insisting that there was “no evidence” that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal.

Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January 2009 to April 2011, all e-mails between Lois Lerner — the IRS official at the center of the scandal — and anyone outside the IRS were wiped out by a “computer crash.” As House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement, this loss means that “we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.” After all, there isn’t a “smidgen” of e-mail evidence to suggest otherwise.

A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze: “I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.” Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: “It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.” …

Noted liberal Ron Fournier calls for a special prosecutor.

A sloppy mistake, the government calls it, but you couldn’t blame a person for suspecting a cover-up — the loss of an untold number of emails to and from the central figure in the IRS tea party controversy. And, because the public’s trust is a fragile gift that the White House has frittered away in a series of second-term missteps, President Obama needs to act.

If the IRS can’t find the emails, maybe a special prosecutor can.

The announcement came late Friday, a too-cute-by-half cliché of a PR strategy to mitigate backlash. …

Sharyl Attkisson has some questions for the IRS.

According to the House Ways and Means Committee, the IRS reports having “lost” former IRS manager Lois Lerner’s emails to and from other IRS employees sent between January of 2009 and April of 2011 due to a ‘computer crash.’

In light of the disclosure, these are some of the logical requests that should be made of the IRS:

Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how and by whom it was learned that materials were lost; the official documentation reporting the crash and federal data loss; documentation reflecting all attempts to recover the materials; and the remediation records documenting the fix. This material should include the names of all officials and technicians involved, as well as all internal communications about the matter.

Please provide all documents and emails that refer to the crash from the time that it happened through the IRS’ disclosure to Congress Friday that it had occurred. …

A Power Line reader who is a DOJ lawyer says this is BS.

A reader writes from inside the Department of Justice to comment on the two-year gap in Lois Lerner’s intra-government email messages:

I’m a DOJ lawyer, so you obviously cannot use my name or any identifying information. But the idea that a “hard drive crash” somehow destroyed all of Ms. Lerner’s intra-government email correspondence during the period in question [2009-2011] is laughable. Government email servers are backed up every night. So if she actually had a hard drive fail, her emails would be recoverable from the backup. If the backup was somehow also compromised, then we are talking about a conspiracy.

Keep up the good work.

He reiterates in a postscript:

I’m serious about your keeping any identifying information out of the media. Things are very, very bad.

There has to be more to the story and the hearings should start next week.

John Steele Gordon also doubts the emails are lost.

… there are very good reasons to doubt the idea that these emails are irretrievably lost due to a simple crash of a personal computer’s hard drive.  For one thing, downloading an email from an email server does not cause the email to be deleted from the server itself. And a lawyer in the Department of Justice, who understandably wishes to be anonymous, reports that government email servers are automatically backed up every night. So both Lerner’s computer and the email server would have had to crash for these emails to have been lost. That would be some coincidence.

John Hinderaker at Power Line has a great deal of experience in accessing emails in the course of legal discovery. He’s blunt: “The Obama administration is lying, and lying in a remarkably transparent way.” He points out that even if the email server were erased after a period of time, the IRS has elaborate protocols for the permanent storage of all electronic communications. Hinderaker also notes that even if a hard drive crashes, the information stored on it can usually be recovered. He politely offers to help: …

Bart Hinkle traces how the IRS scandal implicates Dems.

The U.S. has a long and sordid history of presidents trying to sic the IRS on their political foes; that was even one of the charges of impeachment against Richard Nixon.

In this case, however, the GOP’s Obama Derangement Syndrome might be pointing it in the wrong direction. Granted, the administration did laughably appoint an Obama campaign donor to investigate whether Obama critics had been treated fairly. But much of the impetus for the IRS’ abuse of conservative groups seems to have come from Congress.

That becomes apparent from a complaint filed this month with the Senate’s ethics committee by the Center for Competitive Politics. The complaint asks the committee to investigate Sens. Carl Levin, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and several others for improperly trying to sway IRS deliberations and obtain confidential taxpayer information.

Admittedly, asking the Democrat-controlled committee to investigate Democrats for targeting Republican-leaning groups is a Quixotic pursuit. But Quixotic is not the same as meritless. And the complaint contains mountains of merit. …