Posted on 12/28/2011 5:55:23 AM PST by Kaslin
With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama's snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.
Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May -- while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill -- that "one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals." Conveniently, he defines scandal as a "widespread elite perception of wrongdoing."
So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal -- never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder's watch -- there is no scandal!
Self-serving much?
Mother Jones' Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: "Obama's presidency has so far been almost completely free of scandal."
This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she infamously bullied auto execs to "put nothing in writing, ever." The previous fall, the White House's own oil spill panel had singled out Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration's Draconian drilling moratorium and "contributing to the perception that the government's findings were more exact than they actually were."
The Interior Department inspector general and federal judges likewise blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel's own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.
In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration's culture of contempt and "determined disregard" for the law.
This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some 2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal mandates -- including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.
But it wasn't just Republicans objecting to the president's arbitrary Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel -- freed from normal public notice, public comment and public review rules -- would have unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.
Obama's health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that Kansas health officials "shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces" and failed to disclose it for six years.
That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: "There is zero evidence ... of corruption. Where is it?"
Alter's declaration of the "Obama Miracle" came just weeks after the politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus "investment" went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House bundler and visitor George Kaiser.
As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle -- a federal broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors Philip Falcone and George Soros. In September, two high-ranking witnesses -- William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo -- exposed how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared's interference threat to military communications.
The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about the Federal Communications Commission's approval of a special waiver for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that the company's "signals caused harmful interference to the majority of ... general purpose GPS receivers."
The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies -- controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman. Then there was the small matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official resigned amid allegations that "dozens, if not hundreds," of signatures were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor -- scandal-plagued pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of MF Global.
All this -- and so much more -- yet erstwhile "conservative" journalist Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, "Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?"
There's none so blind as those who will not see.
Lets make a list of things that would be MAJOR SCANDALS if Republican did them
Solndra and Fast and Furious are just the tip of the iceburg
Obamacare-—Scandal
National Debt——Scandal
Fast and Furious -——Scandal
Cost of vacations Scandal
Campaigning on our dime-—scandal
Suing States for passing immigration laws the same as federal laws-—Scandal
Releasing a terrorist who killed 5 American soldiers-—scandal
Maybe the Media is waiting for a sex scandal - Reggie Love?
Good list, but someone can probably come up with more
I have no doubt of that it was a quick list off the top of my head. (Which isn’t all that great)
Holder's DOJ has a boat load besides Fast and Furious: 1)Black Panthers voter intimidation case dismisal, 2) recent attempts to thwart state efforts at voter ID, and immigration enforcement 3) hiring of nothing but partisan liberal DOJ wacko lawyers.
don't want to forget Obie's union kickbacks, especially those at Govt. Motors. The NLRB Boeing scam, and new union organizing rules.
Almost everything he's done ....
The Obama and Crony looting of the car makers, bondholders and dealerships.
The Obama-directed thuggeries applied against the Reinsurers and other financial firms.
The wild panic mongering and harsh, job destroying fishery shutdowns due to the Gulf oil spill.
The scandals of the “aid” given to Haiti.
...
If a politician subverts the Constitution and robs us blind and there is no media to report it, does it make a sound?
you are racist. nothing to see here move along.
The Republicans really do need a list & they need to have it on 3x5 cards in their pocket for whenever they talk to the media. We’re especially going to need that list to counter another debt limit increase. Why should we allow him more funds when he’s abused taxpayer dollars so badly?
FReepers with congressional contacts, not to mention in’s with the presidential candidates, need to talk to them now about adopting such a strategy.
Newt’s the only one I see with the guts to bring these scandals up. Mitt will pull a McCain and we will lose. Go Newt.
Suing Sheriff Joe Arpaio for doing his job. Scandal.
I know there are some Freepers who have kept better score. From day one onward, every day of the usurper in office brings more scandal.
Yet there is are troubling weaknesses of human social nature that the con man and his court know so well how to exploit.
That is almost literally true. Never mind the scandals he came into office with like campaign contributions from anonymous overseas credit cards.
To name one, of such social weaknesses, as we heard when Rose of Pittsburgh subbed for Hannity this afternoon ... Rose spoke of the indignities to person, intolerable to a free people, that are suffered by air travelers at the hands and eyes of the TSA.
When she spoke up against such treatment in a long line on a recent travel, some fellow traveler rebuked her. Said that fallen one: “I would gladly suffer far worse to be safe!”
That is the mark of the truly fallen into serfdom! That they not only accept personal indignity, but they pride themselves in such acceptance.
Why? The route of the fall will vary by person, time, and place but there are — as I suggested prior — human social weaknesses that give rise to such abject submission to and then celebration of what should be insufferable to a free person. Such weaknesses are known to the conniving and the bullying.
Pride is one. Howso? Should not pride force one to object to such treatment. Yes, but ...
When one can not stop such indignities from happening, and one has felt them, gone through them, it is hard to maintain the type pride that would support resistance. It is draining, wearying, a constant dissonance and discomfort if the spirit of resistance to such abuse is maintained.
It is far more comfortable and less wearying to find some reason not only to excuse such behavior by those who bully, but to celebrate it. To welcome being bullied!
Perhaps some might call it “co-dependency”? But I don’t like that term except in close relationships. Better we call it what it is: Choosing the comforts of serfdom. Preserving one’s pride by redefining what one is proud of, no matter how perverted that thing of pride is.
Pride is a very social thing. It is not wrong to what to be proud of one’s place in society, and in each daily arena of social interaction. A pretty young Starbucks barrista will laugh pleasantly at some joke an old leering geezer tells her — that is the proper sense social interaction from one side of the counter of a retail transaction to the other. It would be impolite, anti-social and uneconomic for her not to do so. The place and habits allow for it, it changes a leer into a beneficent social interaction, and helps regularize behavior on both sides and *can* spiritually benefit both, without any real risk of spiritual harm.
Yet, take that young woman and place her in a TSA uniform, the same geezer comes before her. A leer then becomes an actionable provocation, and the young innocent is trained to be a reactionary callous police-state functionary, a harpy and harridan in the worst cases. The geezer is left demeaned. Both are spiritually damaged. And the economic transaction? A negative. The geezer refuse to fly and becomes a recluse with regards to long distance travel, the young woman’s learning to be a bad-spirit hobbles her career development and healthy marriage prospects both.
Of those who survive the process, like the traveler Rose met who celebrated being harshly inspected and being made to in long lines? Or the TSA agents, in union, in bureaucracy, their aggregation of perverted re-defined pride in being callous comes to impact EVERY social interaction they make in life. They expect less and less of others. They come to anticipate more rudeness and less respect for others as the norm.
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