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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.