All via HotAir.

• IRS told pro-life groups that they should stop peacably demonstrating. Where is the ACLU on this? You know: freedom of assembly, something the ACLU proudly defended in Skokie? Are pro-lifers really lower (in the ACLU’s eyes) than actual KKK-hooded neo-Nazis?
• The “Benghazi e-mails were doctored!” canard, refuted.
• Senior White House Advisor Dan Pfeiffer, discussing the IRS and Benghazi scandals this morning, apparently did Obama no good with his over-use of the word “irrelevant”.

UPDATE: There seems to be controversy over Pfeiffer’s remark on the IRS scandal, “The law is irrelevant.” Here is his full quote, for context:

“I can’t speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable, and it was stopped and it needs to be fixed so we ensure it never happens again.”

Superficially, Pfeiffer said: The IRS activity was outrageous, regardless of whether it was illegal. Which sounds like taking the high road.

But Washington-speak is notoriously indirect. Pfeiffer may have been saying: The administration/DOJ is giving NO focus to the question of legality, as we intend to have no prosecutions.

To make my view clear: On current information, there should be prosecutions. If the Obama administration won’t send malefactors to court, then the Obama administration isn’t serious about repairing the scandal’s profound moral damage. As Gabe at Ace points out, “…the most obvious of crimes related to the IRS scandal [is] the public release of confidential information, something punishable by up to a year’s jail time.”

UPDATE: Per ABC, Pfeiffer later tweeted “Before folks quoting me out of context get too far ahead of themselves, of course the law matters, IRS conduct is wrong even if legal.”

Again, note Pfeiffer’s posture. While expressing outrage over what the IRS did, he carefully plants the suggestion that it might have been legal – which would mean that no prosecutions are needed. Sorry Mr. Pfeiffer, I don’t think so.

As the scandals engulfing the Obama Administration have proliferated and “gotten legs” this week, many of the conservatives I know or whom I hear on the radio have started drawing comparisons with what happened under Nixon, bringing up the word “impeachment,” and hoping that as  it becomes evident that these activities were not accidents but part of a coordinated strategy, Obama will eventually resign, or at least some of those who hold key posts of power in this administration–such as Eric Holder–will resign and that the Administration will be hopelessly tainted as the truth becomes known.

I hear that talk, and I think, it would be nice, but I can’t see it happening.  Maybe Holder will resign.  Maybe.

I can imagine the press starting to subject the Obama Administration to a little more scrutiny in the future, but “a little more” than none is still only a little bit of scrutiny, hardly enough to make a significant difference in public opinion.  While the outrage surrounding all of this may be enough for the Republicans to hold the House and to gain control in the Senate in 2014, there will still be formidable problems, and we’ll still have a very divided country.  The low-information voters in the electorate will still be willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt because most of them are either unwilling to see him for the cynical, partisan character he is, or they are unable to do so.

It is possible that after a year or two of scandals and after the outrage that is sure to follow the full implementation of Obamacare, Obama will end his second term with even lower approval ratings than George W. Bush ended his, but at this point, I think that’s about the most we can hope for, that, and maybe Holder’s resignation.  I’m not even sure any of this will derail the immigration bill, which is looking more and more like the next legislative disaster coming down the pike.

I’m not trying to be pessimistic, merely practical.  In the lead-up to the election in November, I knew that what happened  with the administration’s lies about Benghazi was an outrage, but after the election, it seemed evident to me that Obama, Hillary, and the entire administration were going to get away without any consequences.  The American voters had failed to demand answers and accountability and had just re-elected Obama.

Now that the scandals are starting to illustrate the kinds of things conservatives have been saying about Obama for years and years now, some liberals are upset with Obama, but others are busy trying to find more ways to blame conservatives for making an issue of the problems.   In one of the most ironic defenses of Obama I have encountered so far, David Axelrod offered the “incompetence” excuse, namely, that the government is just too big for Obama to really know what’s going on, an excuse we are sure to hear echoed in the days ahead.  Forgive me if I can’t forget that in November the American electorate rejected a man who was renowned for his management skills and his ability to lead large organizations successfully, all so they could re-elect the “community organizer.”

So what do our readers think?  Am I just being pessimistic about all this?  Is the investigation of these scandals likely to have real and significant consequences for our government, or are they a lot of talk that will amount to nothing, or at least nothing much?

The guy who would know, spoke on Morning Joe:

“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” said Woodward. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ I hate to show, this is one of the documents with the editing that one of the people in the state department said, ‘Oh, let’s not let these things out.’

“And I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, ‘Oh, let’s not tell this, let’s not show this.’ I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed. You look at the hydraulic pressure that was in the system to not tell the truth…”

Emphasis added.

And, as of this writing: No, the Benghazi e-mails still haven’t been released. Not all; not enough. They held back the most crucial ones, the e-mails from September 12 and 13, releasing only from September 14 on. Why?

UPDATE (from Dan): Jeff, are you anticipating a post I am planning? Or just reading my mind?
UPDATE (from Jeff): Dan, GMTA!

Back in October 2010, blogger Tigerhawk recalled what one of his Princeton classmates, who was originally from Romania, said about the nature of life under socialism:

One recurring tool of socialist tyranny is the capricious enforcement of unworkable laws.

He quoted the passage in making a point about the “capricious enforcement” which was an inevitable feature of the unworkable mess better known as Obamacare.

But two and a half years later, it’s evident that observation could just as easily have been applied to our byzantine tax code, our environmental regulations, and even laws pertaining to press freedoms under the Obama administration.  As Dan wrote earlier today, the only folks who are surprised by any of these scandals are the ones who haven’t been paying attention to what has been going with our government since January 20, 2009.

In the case of the Obama administration, though, it’s not strictly capricious enforcement, but selective enforcement, always with a partisan goal in mind.  The IRS targeting of the Tea Party and conservative organizations is appalling, but one would have to be naive not to believe, as ABC’s Trey Hardin noted today, that it wasn’t authorized by someone in the West Wing.  Hardin observed (audio at the link):

I will tell you this on the IRS front. I’ve worked in this town for over 20 years in the White House and on Capitol Hill and I can say with a very strong sense of certainty that there are people very close to this president that not only knew what the IRS were doing but authorized it. It simply just does not happen at an agency level like that without political advisers likely in the West Wing certainly connected to the president’s ongoing campaign organization.

And it’s not just the IRS.  Earlier today it came out that the EPA waived fees for leftist organizations and leftist journalists who requested information, but not for conservative ones:   “Conservative groups seeking information from the Environmental Protection Agency have been routinely hindered by fees normally waived for media and watchdog groups, while fees for more than 90 percent of requests from green groups were waived, according to requests reviewed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”  Yes, this would be the same EPA that has classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant, making the mere act of exhaling potentially troublesome.

A coincidence?  I think not.  This is the same administration committed to picking winners and losers on most matters.  Hence, it should surprise no one that while oil companies are prosecuted for the deaths of eagles and other protected species, the bird-killing wind farms are naturally given a pass.   Clearly, some energy companies are more equal than others.

It’s the same with journalists.  Just a day after the AP snooping scandal broke, the administration is playing favorites again.  Jake Tapper has gained a reputation as one who can be counted on to ask tough questions of the White House with greater frequency than the reporters at most of the other lamestream news organizations.  Well, today Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection is reporting that the White House played Jake Tapper by selectively leaking one e-mail with the apparent aim of creating a diversion in the reporting about the Benghazi cover-up.  Jacobson writes: “Like I said, this entire diversion of leaking a single email out of a chain of emails to Tapper was simply meant to put critics of the administration back on their heels and to provide an excuse for White House defenders to throw around words like ‘doctored.’”

And so what else do we see today?  Well, all of a sudden the administration’s lackeys in the press such as Hilary Rosen are now out expressing their sympathy for poor Jay Carney.  I guess they’re afraid of ending up as the subject of a DOJ snooping scandal or an IRS investigation or a selective leak.

And he can do simply by insisting officials on his time do what he promised, on his first full day in office, he would do:  by being transparent, by answering the various questions congressional leaders, reporters and pundits have been asking.

As you may know, yesterday, in his joint press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron, President Obama “dismissed criticism over the White House’s handling of the attack in Benghazi, calling the focus on the issue a ‘sideshow,’ and said any suggestion that the administration is engaging in a cover-up ‘defies logic.’”

There is only one way for the president to show that he’s not covering anything up and that’s to uncover the information about which his critics (and even some of his allies) have questions.

Such questions include:

• Who decided not to provide additional security for our mission in Benghazi despite repeated requests from those on the ground there?  Why?
• Who in the White House and State Department was involved in revising the Benghazi talking points and scrubbing them of terror references?  Was the Secretary of State aware of these revisions?  Was the president?
• Why did the president and Secretary of State rely on these talking points in various public appearances in the weeks following the attack even when there was clear evidence that the protests were neither spontaneous nor were they caused by the video in question?

Perhaps, people might be less cynical about government today if, instead of lashing out at Republicans, President Obama insisted that his appointees answer their questions. (more…)

Drudge, linking this New Yorker story, is reporting that the Press Corps may be turning on Benghazi:

And while we do see the story breaking through into the mainstream media, they still seem more fascinated with human interest stories than Democratic scandals.  Last evening at the gym, I caught ABC’s “World News with David Muir” to see the eponymous anchor lead off with a story about the brothers of the creepy Cleveland kidnapper/rapist.

“What did they know?” I read on the closed captioning.

Shouldn’t journalists be asking that question not about two men (apparently) wrongly incarcerated for a crime their brother committed, but about the immediate past Secretary of State and the incumbent President of the United States?  Did Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama knew the the Benghazi talking points had undergone “12 revisions” and were “scrubbed of terror reference”?  If they didn’t know (and there is so far no evidence that they did) which White House and State Department officials did?  And why did they do the revising and the scrubbing?

Was there any coordination between the scrubbers and the Obama campaign?  Or the Democratic National Committee?

And then we come to the questions about the other administration scandal brewing, the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.  Even the most liberal Republican Senator is outraged.  Susan Collins finds it “absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review” and thinks “it’s very disappointing that the president hasn’t personally condemned this and spoken out.”

The gentlelady from Maine just doesn’t “buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees:

After all, groups with ‘progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly. There is the evidence that higher level supervisors were aware of this. And the IRS was not forthcoming in telling Congress about the problem.

Once again, we have a similar set of questions. Who authorized this “targeting”?  Who crafted the list of crazy things the IRS asked of the Tea Party groups?   Had there been any input from the White House?  From the Democratic National Committee? (more…)

Over at the Corner, Daniel Foster embedded this video where George Will offers perhaps the most succinct summary of the issues involved in the Benghazi scandal, addressing even the primary flaw of the State Department’s accountability review board:

I particularly like Mr. Will’s reference the Punic Wars, the last of which ended 2,159 years ago.

Just caught this in Doug Powers’s piece on White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s Friday press conference:

Last November, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told this to reporters in regards to the Benghazi talking points: “The only edit that was made by the White House and also by the State Department was to change the word ‘consulate’ to the word ‘diplomatic facility,’ since the facility in Benghazi was not formally a consulate.” Jay Carney said the same thing at the time.

Powers also reminds that “ABC News reported that the Benghazi talking points went through at least a dozen edits”.

Could it be that Mr. Rhodes wasn’t telling the truth?  Or that the Deputy National Security Adviser just wasn’t misinformed?

SORT OF RELATED: Top Obama official’s brother is president of CBS News, may drop reporter over Benghazi coverage

In writing about the IRS Tea Party Snooping Scandal, Ace’s CDR M asks a question about the official response which could also apply to administration’s response to the Benghazi talking points:

Does anyone in position of authority know anything in this administration?

Once again, conservatives should not let up on this issue until we know who sanctioned the targeted investigations  – and who crafted the crazy things they asked Tea Party groups.

Basically, the excuse the Obama team is offering is that, oh, we’re not corrupt, we’re just incompetent.

—-

*And the Benghazi talking points doctoring.

UPDATE:  Seems they know a lot.  Just caught this on Yahoo!’s home page, AP Exclusive: IRS knew tea party targeted in 2011:

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general’s report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner.

Ed Morrissey has more.

Over at HotAir, they pose the crucial one: So, who changed the Benghazi talking points?

The White House needs not just to answer that question, but also to tell the American people which Obama Administration officials signed off on the changes – or were otherwise aware of them.  And whether President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton knew they had been doctored.

(And it would be nice if those who did the changing could explain, under oath and in front of cameras, why they did what they did.)

If Democrats say, well Benghazi was long ago and Republicans are just obsessing about Benghazi, then respond that the reason we keep bringing this up is because the Obama team refuses to answer the questions. And until we know the answers, we’ll keep pressing.

Should you think we’re being obsessive about this, then please tell us why the Obama team would rather. more than six months after Mitt Romney lost his bid for the White House, attack that Republican* than answer questions. And why, as even the left-leaning Yahoo! editors have observed, the president’s spokesman is becoming quite “defensive”: (more…)

Just caught this on Yahoo!:

Two quick points: (1) this was at 10 AM PST (1 PM GayPatriot blog time) Yahoo!’s top news item; (2) the editors chose a very unflattering picture of the former Secretary of State.

UPDATE:  Even AOL/Huffington Post is leading with the story (screen capture at 12:12 PST): (more…)

1. It’s a presidential election. It’s not close; the Democrat has way more popular support. A few of his dumb zealots break into Republican headquarters to spy needlessly. No person is injured, but it’s still unacceptable. The more so, because the president and his crew then lie to obstruct official investigations.
2. A Republican president was recently re-elected. A philanderer and “family values” hypocrite, he has an affair with his White House intern. It would have no public significance, except that it becomes a subject of testimony in lawsuits over his other affairs. And he lies about it, under oath. He, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, has now lied to a court.
3. A Democrat president must deal with a certain Third World dictator who has attacked four neighboring countries over a period of two decades, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. World intelligence agencies, and Republican leaders in Congress, are nearly unanimous that the dictator would be happy to launch yet another war, has been developing nuclear weapons, and may have nukes already. Acting on that consensus, the Democrat president gets legal approvals from Congress and the U.N. to invade (along with 40 other nations) and remove the dictator. The invasion works, but at a cost of several thousand American lives (including the occupation, afterward). It turns out that the dictator only had chemical weapons, plus some nuclear weapons research (no nuclear bombs, yet). That’s embarrassing, but multiple official investigations clear the President of any intentional wrongdoing.
4. A Republican administration pushes thousands of guns into Mexico, causing the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans. Republicans claim the administration only did what the previous Democrat administration did. But that is not true: the previous operations had controls to minimize deaths and maximize the intelligence-gathering on Mexican drug cartels, controls that the Republican effort abandoned (for reasons unknown). The GOP Attorney General does everything he can to obstruct Congress’ investigation, and eventually is found to be in contempt of Congress. He does not resign.
5. It’s a presidential election. It is going to be close; the Republican incumbent, plagued by four years of economic failure, is not way ahead. But he has been successful, he claims, in fighting terrorism. A month before the election, Islamist terrorists attack a U.S. consulate and kill an American ambassador, plus three others. The Republican administration had warnings and permitted the attack to succeed (through negligence or perhaps for reasons unknown). They lie to the American people about it, implying that it was not a terrorist attack, that they could not have stopped the attack, that the attack was somehow really a protest caused by a YouTube video that nobody ever heard of, etc. The lies work: the Republican wins re-election.

(more…)

Perhaps the appeal of Twitter is that often pith makes the point better than a well-crafted, thoughtfully argued essay.  Last night, Glenn Reynolds, whose Instapundit blog, proudly produces pithy commentary on the events of the day linked this tweet from Ari Fleischer:

Irony: Bush Admin accepted CIA talking points on WMD. CIA was wrong. O Admin altered CIA TPs on Benghazi. CIA was right.

Highly doubt we’ll see as much scrutiny of the Obama administration’s altering the talking points than we will of the Bush Administration’s acceptance of such points.

Odd how some accused Bush of lying for accepting the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in his office and not in the erring agency.

Interesting how so few bother to inquire into the Obama administration’s decision to alert the CIA talking points, as if the fault lay in the ether for the erring administration officials.

And on what evidence?

And why, as evidence mounts that U.S. officials on the ground in Libya knew from almost the very moments the attacks began, that this was a terrorist attack, that Democrats and their allies in the mainstream are strangely disinterested in this fabrication.

If you watched CNN tonight (at least from 5:40 PST until nearly 6:40), you’d be unaware of serious evidence brought to light today about the Administration’s duplicity on the Benghazi attacks. Seems some strange Arizona woman’s criminal actions have more bearing on the national interest than the Obama team’s misrepresenting a terrorist attack. Not to mention in its inept response to that attack.

RELATED: “Where Was the Commander-in-Chief For All of This?” (And why don’t our friends in the media care to ask?)

UPDATE:  Over at Commentary, Jonathan Tobin does a great job of fleshing out a point related to the question addressed in the title to this post:

Just as problematic was [senior diplomat Gregory[ Hicks’s telling of his shock when he heard U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice tell the country that U.S. intelligence had decided the attack was the result of film criticism run amuck. Given that he had already communicated to Washington the fact that the film wasn’t a factor in Libya and that U.S. personnel in Libya knew the assault was the work of an Islamist group connected to al-Qaeda, this makes the growing controversy about the truth behind the official administration talking points that the White House altered to downplay any connection to terror even more worrisome. (more…)

She didn’t make any reference to calls she made at 2 AM.  Gregory Hicks, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, “testified that Clinton had called him at 2 a.m., while the attacks were underway.”

At 2 AM she had learned that terrorists had attacked our mission in Benghazi.  Still, she peddled the notion that a video was to blame despite evidence that said video “was a non-event in Libya.”

Wonder if this story will get as much coverage today as the verdict in some trial in Arizona.

UPDATE:  Check out CNN’s home page at 6:12 GayPatriot blog time (3:12 PST): (more…)

In the immediate aftermath of the attack last September on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, our media acted more as amplifiers for the Obama campaign and the Obama administration, parroting campaign talking points (about the supposed inappropriateness of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s critique of the administration) and failing to question the official explanation for the attack (that it was a spontaneous uprising in response to a video about which no one ever heard).  In short, all too many in the legacy media reported the story as if their job was to amplify what they heard from the Obama team rather than investigate how said team handled the attack.

The first scandal is thus that of the media giving short shrift to a story with the potential to embarrass the incumbent administration in the midst of the presidential campaign.

The second scandal — and the much bigger one — is the attempts of that administration, with top officials, perhaps up to and including the then-Secretary of State and the President of the United States, to mislead the public for political gain.  Citing the Interim Progress Report released by five House Republican committee chairmen released last mont, Michael Barone reported that 

. . . the accounts given by the Obama administration at the time were misleading — deliberately so.

It noted that State immediately reported the attack to the White House Situation Room and two hours later noted an al Qaeda affiliate’s claim of responsibility. There was no mention of a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video.

Yet Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and press secretary Jay Carney spoke repeatedly for days later of a video and a protest. Clinton assured one victim’s family member that the video-maker was being prosecuted.

With more news trickling out in the nine days since Barone posted his piece, it’s becoming increasingly clear that there was a lot more deliberate misleading than initially reported. (more…)

That graphic links this post: John Bolton: Hillary Clinton Came Up With ‘Diplomatic Illness’ To Avoid Benghazi Testimony

Among the many things to fault about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 then-celebrated* speech on race was his failure to cite the most important speech on race in American history, Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

That great American dreamt that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  With that line, King defined the ideal we should all strive for–to judge an individual not by his skin color, but but his character.

That notion seems to be lost to many Democrats attacking Republicans for raising questions about Ambassador Susan Rice’s public statements on Benghazi.  As Victor Davis Hanson put it two days ago:

Susan Rice misleads the country and suddenly her critics are racists and sexists — does not mean that it does not work in deterring critics. A white liberal can all but destroy Condoleezza Rice or Alberto Gonzalez and feel very liberal, but a peep about Barack Obama or Susan Rice from a white male is akin to a KKK slur.

We will have truly realized Dr. King’s dream when defenders of an African-American figure subject to criticism don’t assume that his (or her) critics were motivated by her race.  They may well have been calling her character into question — or her actions.

And they will defend her character — or her actions — rather than make assumptions about her critics’ motives.

* (more…)