Three Major Scandals

                The Obama Administration is battling on three fronts as Americans are asking more and more questions about what is happening and why.  The three issues include the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, the IRS targeting conservative individuals and groups, and the DOJ illegally tapping twenty telephone lines at the Associated Press in an effort to identify a whistleblower.  The Administration is trying to cover up all three scandals with lies and more lies.

                The terrorist attacks in Benghazi jumped into the headlines last week during congressional hearings.  The testimonies of three whistleblowers were at direct odds to the reports out of the Obama Administration.  It seems that the more we learn about the attacks, the more lies we hear.  The lies have come from a variety of people, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Jay Carney, and others.

                Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote:  “There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects.  But there can also be dishonest differences.  Last week’s testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.”

                Glenn Beck highlighted the lies that he considered to be the “most important and revealing falsehoods” that were “fed to the American people” about what happened in Benghazi.  He noted that there were more lies, but he chose only the “top” twenty and listed them in no particular order.

1.   Susan Rice, UN Ambassador:  “Our current best assessment based on the information we have at present is that in fact what this began as was a spontaneous, not a premeditated, response to what had transpired in Cairo.”  (The testimonies of whistleblowers prove that the Obama Administration knew in advance.)

2.   Barack Obama, US President:  “What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests.”  (Testimony proves that the video was not the cause.)

3.  Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s campaign spokesperson:  “But the entire reason that this has become the, you know, political topic it is is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.”  (No, it is because four Americans were killed and the Administration lied to Americans.)

4.   President Obama:  “That is what we saw play out in the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video, sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world.”  (He was still blaming the video days or weeks later.  This is important because he is using the defense that “we corrected it” by calling it an act of terror two days later.)

5.   President Obama to the UN:  “I know there are some who ask, why don’t we just ban such a video.  The answer is enshrined in our laws.  Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”  (He is still blaming the video and claiming that “some” people were calling for freedom of speech to be limited.)

6.   Hilary Clinton, then Secretary of State:  “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior along with the protest that took place at our embassy in Cairo yesterday as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet.”  (She blamed the video.)

7.   Victoria Nuland, State Department:  “We can all condemn this reprehensible video.”  (She blamed the video.  This makes three people from the State Department, one political operative, and the U.S. President.)

8.   Jay Carney, White House spokesman:  “Find the video that has been so offensive to Muslims to be disgusting and reprehensible.”

9.   Hillary Clinton:  “To address the video circulating on the Internet that has led to these protests.”  (She blamed the video – again.)

10. Susan Rice:  “Was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video.”  (She blamed the video – again.)

11. Jay Carney:  “And it is in response, not to United States policy, not to obviously the administration, not to the American people.  It is in response to a video.”  (He blamed the video – again.)

12. Jay Carney:  “Now we do not yet have indication that it was preplanned or premeditated.”  (“One of the people in Benghazi called the State Department with concerns warning of the attack” days before the attack.)

13. Joe Biden, U.S. Vice President:  “Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security and we did not know they wanted more security again.”  (Reporter:  “And CBS has learned that the U.S. mission in Libya reportedly – repeatedly asked for better security before last month’s attack on the American consulate in Benghazi.  A State Department officer says there were 13 confirmed security threats in the six months before the attack.  Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed three weeks ago.”

14. Jay Carney:  “The White House and State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two – of these two institutions were changing the word consulate to diplomatic facility because consulate was inaccurate.”  (He continued the lies.)

15. President Obama:  “And make no mistake:  We will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.”  (No terrorists have been arrested, but the poor guy who made a video is still in prison.)

16. President Obama:  “You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who is extremely offensive video directed at Mohammed and Islam.  We had nothing to do with the video.”  (He blames the video – again.)

17. David Axelrod, President’s right-hand man:  “It’s not a matter of blaming, that’s just the facts.  Sometimes intelligence has to catch up with the reality on the ground.  This was one of those cases.”  (Did he throw the CIA under the bus?  Good intelligence normally comes from information on the ground.  The Administration knew within a few hours that it was a terrorist attack but still blamed the video for more than two weeks.)

18.  Stephanie Cutter, mastermind of Obama’s re-election team:  “First I pretty the faux outrage from the RNC and the Republican Party.”  (Did she actually blame Republicans for trying to get to the truth about what happened in Benghazi?)

19. Hillary Clinton:  “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they would go kill some Americans?”  (It does make a difference to many Americans, including the friends and families of the men who were killed.)

20.  Jay Carney:  “Let’s be clear:  These protests were in reaction to a video that had spread to the region.”

                The second scandal, the one at the IRS, may have been broken just to take heat from the Administration about Benghazi, but the President and his administration are being caught in lies about this issue also.  The President said yesterday that he heard about the problem the same time that all of us did, but Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, admitted the administration knew about the scandal since April 22. 

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, told Glenn Beck on his TV show that the White House Counsel’s office was notified of the IRS issue three weeks ago.

                David Limbaugh, writer, author, attorney, and brother of Rush Limbaugh, wrote:  “It’s disgraceful that government bureaucrats, whether on their own initiative or at the direction of superiors, singled out anyone for special scrutiny, but what their selection criteria were makes it even worse.  Reportedly, the IRS field office in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status decided to focus on groups making statements that [criticize the administration and what they are doing.]

                “Surely, we all understand the awesome and, frankly, horrifying power the IRS has come to have in our system, which originally didn’t even contemplate an income tax, much less oversight of it by such a monstrous bureaucratic leviathan.  What could be more chilling and destructive to our liberties than a government targeting – that’s its word, not mine – private citizens and organizations based on their political and ideological views?

                “If the First Amendment means anything, it is that the full force of the federal government will be used to safeguard, not suppress, the liberties of American citizens to utter political speech, especially speech critical of the government.  But instead, this IRS sought [to] abuse groups that criticized the administration and groups that wanted to teach people that under our Constitution, such government officials have no right to do this type of thing.

                The third scandal for the Administration comes from the discovery that the Department of Justice (DOJ) illegally tapped twenty telephone lines at the Associated Press (AP) in order to track down the identity of a whistleblower.  This is not the first time that this Administration has gone after whistleblowers, a practice that “sends a clear warning message to anyone thinking about ratting on the government.”

                The Blaze reported:  “The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls and the duration of each call, for the work and home phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Harford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

                “In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012.  The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters….”

                Buck Sexton, formerly an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (assigned to the Counterterrorism Center and Office of Iraq Analysis) and currently national security editor at The Blaze, wrote:  “In just one week, President Barack Obama’s political machine has switched from endless campaign to survival mode.  And for the first time in Obama’s presidency, the damage to his regime may be permanent.

                “Three revelations have come together like an avalanche.  First, there was a Benghazi hearing that proved beyond any reasonable doubt that this administration is feckless, dishonest, and cravenly politicized.  But in its aftermath on Friday, an executive branch information dump dropped another bombshell:  the IRS does indeed target and intimidate conservative groups….

                “As the country was still reeling from the gut-wrenching testimony of three Benghazi whistleblowers and the IRS mea culpa, yet another log was thrown onto the bonfire of the Obama administration’s credibility.  Yesterday the Associated Press broke a news story that Obama’s Justice Department collected phone data on dozens of AP reporters as part of a national security leak investigation….”

                I am stunned that so much is happening at such a rapid rate, and I am curious as to the end result.  Many people think that this avalanche of investigations will bring down the Obama Administration, and some are calling for impeachment of the President.  Others think the scandals will be “swept under the rug” after a few questions are asked.  Still others think that employees at the lower levels will take the blows and the leaders will go free. 

Barack Obama has tried very hard to stand clear of anything that might stick to him and has effectively avoided doing any governing – just campaigning.  The fact that the scandals are coming from four different Departments – State, Justice, Finance (IRS), and Defense - with Secretaries supposedly answering directly to him indicates to me that he is responsible in one of at least two cases:  He knew about the issues and authorized them or he was not doing the work we pay him to do.  In either case, he keeps lying to us to cover up the scandals. 

We pay our Presidents $400,000 each year to administer the federal government, to supervise the federal employees, to oversee law enforcement officers and the military to keep us safe from foreign and domestic enemies, and to uphold our laws.  Those are his basic responsibilities, and he failed.  He is either intentionally doing wrong as part of his “fundamental transformation” of America or he is inept and cannot do the job.  I believe that we are way past the point where we should hold him accountable for his willing destruction of our nation or his inability to do the job.  I think it is time to put him under oath and start asking him some direct questions.