Posted on 05/20/2013 3:42:19 PM PDT by presidio9
Don’t let anyone fool you: Everyone in politics is tempted to believe that their noble ends could justify unethical and illegal means.
Those who had hoped that President Obama would usher in a new era of higher standards in Washington must be shell-shocked by last week’s revelations:
-The Internal Revenue Service admitted to delaying conservative organizations’ tax-exempt status while quickly approving groups that had liberal or progressive orientations. The IRS asked these groups all sorts of invasive questions, including what kind of books they read, and leaked some information to the media.
-The Department of Justice secretly obtained two months worth of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, more than 20 separate phone lines — a stunning amount of snooping into the interactions between reporters and their sources.
-The Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly been waiving fees for Freedom of Information Act requests from environmental groups while keeping them in place for conservative groups.
-Gregory Hicks, a career State Department employee whose account of events in Benghazi contradicted the administration’s initial claims that it was tied to a YouTube video, said he was harangued and demoted for not toeing the line.
While there are still chapters to be written in the story of how this administration went astray, one element appears clear: Obama’s crew in Washington, and those who worked under him in the federal bureaucracy, have bent, broken and ignored the rules — all quite certain that they were acting for the greater good. (At this point, it is not clear whether Obama turned a blind eye to all this or obliviously presided over the federal bureaucracy’s transformation into a partisan cudgel.)
Saul Alinsky, the activist whose writings influenced Obama in his community organizing days, scoffed at those who spent a lot of time worrying about whether the ends justify the means. In his most famous book, “Rules for Radicals,” Alinsky wrote, “One has to remember means and ends. It’s true that I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers. To me, that would be utter immorality.”
But you don’t need to be a devotee of Alinsky to conclude that making an omelet requires cracking some eggs.
Undoubtedly, the men and women who made up the highest ranks of the Bush administration believed in a noble end of a free Iraq: dictator Saddam Hussein deposed, weapons of mass destruction eliminated and a functioning, secular democracy in the middle of the Arab world.
It is indeed a lovely vision, one that drove that administration to overlook questions about the Iraqi WMD programs and whether there were enough troops to keep order after the invasion.
Once the war began, one misdeed after another had to be excused or dismissed as a distraction from that noble end: military contractor profiteering, Abu Ghraib prison, an environment of runaway sectarian violence and so on.
Obama debuted on the political scene with an atmosphere of messianic excitement. A July 2008 column by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Chronicle asked, with no detectable sarcasm, whether Obama was a “Lightworker” — described as “that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
These moments, when self-righteousness shines from every pore, are probably when politicians should be most careful — and since they rarely are, these are the moments when the public should be most vigilant. For almost every scandal is rooted in the belief that what you and your allies are doing is so good, so noble and so necessary that it can justify some moral shortcuts.
The Contras really needed those arms. A President is entitled to a little canoodling with an intern, and it’s acceptable to lie under oath about it. To quote Nixon, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Good screenwriters know every villain believes he is the hero of his own story. The human capacity for self-justification can be pretty epic even outside a highly charged political atmosphere in which each side sees itself as the living embodiment of everything that makes America great — and the other side as a motley amalgamation of petty, corrupt, selfish special interests.
And now, we see what happens when an administration and the ranks of the federal bureaucracy become filled with folks who are convinced they can cut some corners because they’re doing the Lord’s work. Or, perhaps, the Lightworker’s work.
I’m trying to figure out how anyone would think that a protege of William “guilty as sin, free as a bird” Ayers, and a practitioner of Chicago Thug Politics would have a “white hat” at all.
I saw the headline and assumed that there may be a Bill Clinton, or at least a Democrap tie in....
That's not shell-shock, that's drug withdrawal combined with delirium tremens.
Bear in mind that the readership of the New York Daily News is overwhelmingly "BUSH LIED - PEOPLE DIED" liberal. The fact that they can be made to even consider the possiblity that the bloom is off the rose is a step in the right direction.
Obviously only the most gullible could believe that a card carrying member of the Chicago political mob would observe any kind of ethics at all.
Sadly there were many of them in 2008.
By 2012 nobody believed that, but the entitlements gravy was thick enough to buy another election.
Now the excuse is “everybody does it”.
“Stained” is a monstrously inadequate word to describe it. The WH is headquarters to an out-of-the-closet racketeering and corrupt outfit.
If you look on google image, Obama has NEVER
worn a white cowboy hat.
Bunch of rustlers and horse thiefs.
Put’n the Obama brand on every cow
in the county...
Your Ranch? You didn’t build that.
Just so we're clear, not all white hats are of the ten gallon variety, and not all men in white hats are heros.
This confusing, theme-challenged piece is the best the poor now hero-challenged NY Daily News can come up with.
OK.
And Eleanor Clift was laughing yesterday on the McLaughlin Group while Rich Lowry challenged her weird points on Benghazi.
Laughter is not appropriate on the matter, not even for her. I took it as a desperate attempt at distraction.
The truth and exposure are awkward and painful for them.
I see it here.
White hat, blue dress, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that they are stained ;-)
Actually, Jim Geraghty’s day job is as Rich Lowry’s colleague at the National Review...
Did Jim Geraghty write this?
I’ll have to reread it. Maybe I missed the tone. Or he toned it as much as possible for the Daily News.
More than likely.
It is rather scathing in the first third.
Geraghty’s an excellent pundit. He offers a “human condition” explantion that doesn’t excuse the president’s behavior.
No one in Washington with an ounce of common sense expected anything more from Obama than what they got.
All they had to do was take a look at Washington’s former Mayor Marion Barry to see how Obama would turn out.
I have to admit though Bathhouse Barry even makes Marion look good.
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