Click on WORD or PDF for full content
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.