Posted on 05/15/2013 4:21:41 PM PDT by presidio9
Boy, oh boy. What many called the worst week yet for the Obama White House has spilled over into another, with news that the Department of Justice secretly obtained telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors to root out the cause of a (rare unwanted) leak of national security information.
Is it a fishing expedition, a witch hunt or something in between? Time will tell — if, that is, anyone ever comes forward with an explanation. Whether on Fast and Furious or Benghazi, the typical M.O. of the administration has been to slow-play answers and hope that we all forget.
That will be hard to do now that the list of administration travails is growing. There was White House spokesman Jay Carney’s struggle to answer pool questions last Friday about a flood of Benghazi emails revealing the State Department’s desire to scrub terrorism links from talking points. There was, the same day, news that the IRS has been unfairly targeting conservative non-profits for their tax-exempt applications.
Through it all, the powers-that-be have either insisted, “We had no idea,” or calmly stated, “Nothing to see here.”
There is, in fact, lots to see. The Benghazi, IRS and AP stories threaten to prove what conservatives have claimed all along: that this isn’t just Big Government, but government with a vengeance, one that will dispatch its tax collectors if it doesn’t like your politics, or unleash the FBI if it doesn’t like your reporting, or punish you for whistleblowing.
Of course, the administration insists it has legitimate explanations for each and every infraction — but those are getting increasingly tough to take. And this government, which suddenly seems less reverent of the First Amendment than any recent predecessor, is led by a former constitutional law professor.
The White House, liberal media and Democratic elected officials have swatted away all these assertions as nothing more than right-wing conspiracy, political propaganda, black helicopter paranoia and, most routinely, unadulterated hatred for President Obama.
All of that may in fact animate many of the inquiries — and the passion with which they’re spun by political opponents. But it doesn’t make any of the accusations themselves untrue.
While the IRS’s actions may, in the end, be written off as low-level staffers run amok, the implications of the other simmering scandals are far more damaging. Look closely, and the AP story appears to bolster claims by the right that the administration was reluctant to implicate Al Qaeda in the attack on the Libyan mission for political reasons.
Follow the logic:
The story that allegedly drove the DOJ to pull all those phone records revealed that the CIA had intercepted a 2011 airliner bomb plot in Yemen. Good on the CIA — except that bombshell contradicted an earlier statement from the White House that it had no credible information that Al Qaeda was plotting an attack to coincide with the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death.
It isn’t surprising that the administration would want to bury the terror threat after assuring voters in an election year that Al Qaeda had been “decimated.”
For those of us looking to draw attention to all these issues, it’s been infuriating to see many in the press — the very victims of this government overreach — ignore and dismiss them even as their sources were being prosecuted under the Espionage Act more times than all previous administrations combined.
Hopefully, though, now that these stories have become impossible to ignore, the press will finally wake up.
Even before news of the AP story broke, last Friday it seemed as though many in the White House press pool had finally had enough. Almost to a person, reporters pressed Carney on statements that seemed categorically untrue. The press pool seemed united in its sheer contempt for the way the administration had withheld, manipulated and distorted information.
With the latest revelations that potentially dozens of reporters at one news organization alone were secretly investigated, one can only hope the outrage over these abuses of power continues to guide a media that has been reluctant to ask too many tough questions.
[image of Ms. Cupp]
She looks like a prettier version of the actress who plays Capt. Raydor on `Major Crimes.’
Or is it just the high ckeekbones and glasses that give that impression?
U.S. President Barack Obama gives the commencement address to the graduating class of The Ohio State University at Ohio Stadium on May 5, 2013 in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo: Getty Images)
"Still, you’ll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more
than some separate, sinister entity that’s the root of all our problems,
even as they do their best to gum up the works;
or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner.
"You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative,
unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can’t be trusted."
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