Note: I'm adding a few posts of columns I wrote for the newspaper that are still somewhat current.
Mocking
and lampooning Conservatives and Tea Party activists for their
conspiracy theories has become standard operating procedure for those on
the left for decades. It has risen to new heights under the Obama Administration, aided and abetted by the ever-willing mainstream media.
But the past ten days has shown why it is never wise to put one’s faith in government bureaucrats – or Big Government – ever.
Last week was a week the Obama Administration would like to forget ever happened. The
Benghazi revelations were bad enough, but then on Friday it was
discovered that the Internal Revenue Service had been targeting
Conservative groups dating back to 2010. Then,
to make matters worse, it was revealed on Monday that the Department of
Justice secretly monitored 20 separate phone lines assigned to the
Associated Press for two months in 2012.
Each one of these cases is damning enough by
itself, but the broader picture it paints of Obama and the people who
work under him is, frankly, sickening. In review:
Stephen F. Hayes of the Weekly Standard
and ABC News revealed last week that the original CIA talking points on
the Benghazi attacks had been altered 11 times before Ambassador Susan
Rice was sent out to discuss the attacks on the Sunday news shows. The
email strings show frustration by the CIA that all reference to al
Qaeda linked groups had been scrubbed and, instead, the attacks were
being blamed on a video – all of which the State Department and the CIA
knew not to be true - yet Ambassador Rice and Secretary of State Hilary
Clinton kept repeating.
Presidential spokesman Jay Carney turned combative
on Friday when a skeptical press corps challenged his original version
of events which the emails clearly show as not accurate.
Of course, damage would have likely been done to
the President’s re-election bid if his claim to have kept American’s
safe from al Qaeda had been shown to be false - or that his Secretary of
State oversaw Americans being killed because she, or someone in her
chain of command, ignored repeated requests for extra security. None of those would have played well last November.
Late last week, the IRS admitted to targeting
Conservative groups’ applications for tax exempt status for higher
scrutiny than other groups. The
groups were targeted based on key words in their applications, like
‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriot,’ and, believe it or not, ‘Constitution.’
The agency blames it on low level bureaucrats in
the Cincinnati field office that handles tax exempt applications, but
isn’t that what always happens in these scandals - find a low level
employee who doesn’t have the authority to make those decisions and
somehow pin the blame on them?
Politicians of all stripes condemned the IRS
actions, and even Obama condemned it on Monday, but something tells me
this is also just the tip of the iceberg. To me this all sounds a bit Nixonian – using the IRS to attack one’s enemies. It’s a page right out of Richard Nixon’s playbook.
Finally, the Associated Press reported today that
the government had secretly monitored 20 of their telephone lines back
in 2012.
In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP
President and CEO Gary Pruitt sought information that could not be
justified by any specific investigation.
"There can be no
possible justification for such an overly broad collection of the telephone
communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records
potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all
of the news gathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month
period, provide a road map to AP's new sgathering operations and disclose
information about AP's activities and operations that the government
has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.
While it is not known
why the government sought this information, but a criminal investigation
is underway into a leak that led to an AP story in May of 2012 about a
terror plot that had been foiled.
Certainly, the government has an interest in protecting classified information and prosecuting those who release it. No one disputes that.
But it appears that the
Justice Department is likely guilty of overreach at a minimum and
possibly abuse of subpoena and wire tapping power.
The President’s second term agenda always faced a rocky road. Immigration
reform and a so-called Grand Bargain on deficit reduction and
sequestration were always going to be difficult, if not impossible to
achieve.
However, these three
stories, and the constant bad news about Obamacare implementation, could
prove to be fatal blows to the President’s chances to pass any
meaningful legislation in its second term.
