His Nose Keeps Getting Longer

Over the last 24 hours, I have been contemplating a post on the Obama administration’s scandals. “Scandals?” you may ask. “What scandals?” Well, sure, if you are a New York Times reader you may not be aware of them. And normally an administration doesn’t get knee-deep in scandal until its second term, which Barack Obama isn’t likely to enjoy. But if you step back from the daily spin of the news cycle for a moment–sort of like watching a boxing match with the sound turned off–you might conclude that the Obama administration has been more scandal-ridden than most people realize. Let’s just itemize a few:

1) Fast and Furious: Why did the administration not just allow thousands of guns to get into the hands of Mexican drug gangs, but affirmatively facilitate and even finance the gun-walking? No explanation has been advanced other than the theory that Obama and Eric Holder wanted to discredit gun dealers in order to enlist support for gun control measures. Maybe that wasn’t the reason for Fast and Furious; but if not, what was the program’s purpose? No Obama administration official has been willing to explain. Fast and Furious was implicated in the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American border patrol agent. Has there been a comparable scandal in any recent administration? Not that I know of.

2) Green Energy: The Obama administration short-cutted bureaucratic procedures to slide billions of dollars to allies of the Democratic Party who ran “green energy” scams. Some of them went out of business, costing the taxpayers billions. Worse, many of them did not, which means that the energy markets have been distorted by government favoritism so that someone else–someone who hadn’t contributed enough to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign–was, perhaps, driven out of business instead. “Green energy” is the worst example of government cronyism in American history.

3) National security leaks: Obama administration officials, up to and including cabinet officers, have fed Democratic Party reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers stories about how Barack Obama has personally overseen a campaign of violent reprisal against Islamic terrorists. Now, I am entirely in favor of violent reprisal against Islamic terrorists–more so, no doubt, than President Obama–but the problem is that the administration’s leaks have endangered American intelligence sources, like the guy who infiltrated Yemen’s al Qaeda and emerged with a prototype weapon. His cover was blown by President Obama or his minions and he is now in hiding. Or the Pakistani who played a role in killing Osama bin Laden, whose cover was blown by the Obama administration and has now been sentenced to decades in prison, where he is likely being tortured, at this moment, by Islamic radicals. Remember Valerie Plame? She commuted to her desk job in Langley, Virginia, and was in no danger of arrest, imprisonment, murder or torture, but the disclosure that she was an employee of the CIA, a fact that was known to many who were acquainted with her, was deemed a scandal of major proportions, warranting not just a criminal investigation but a Hollywood movie. Do you suppose there will be any criminal investigation of the Obama administration officials, perhaps including cabinet officers, who endangered the lives of American intelligence sources for political gain? Let alone a movie? Just kidding, of course.

4) Obama’s politicized Department of Justice: Under Barack Obama and Eric Holder, the Department of Justice has sponsored pep-fests for the Democratic Party, dropped prosecutions of New Black Panthers who intimidated would-be voters with clubs, engaged in discriminatory hiring of leftist lawyers, and attempted to facilitate criminal voter fraud by blocking efforts by states to promote ballot integrity. DOJ’s attempt to impede the war against Islamic terrorism by promoting criminal trials in federal court has been beaten back by Congress, but we shouldn’t forget what Obama and Holder intended for us–show trials where, for the first time in history, the villain was not the criminal defendant/mass murderer, but rather the public servants who ran him to ground.

There are more, but this sampling is enough for the moment. Fortunately, not everyone is fooled. Cartoonist Michael Ramirez is among the most astute commentators of our era; here is his view of President Obama as an inveterate liar:

Seven months from now, whatever remains of the increasingly pathetic Obama administration will be driven from Washington by the cleansing wind of resurgent conservatism.

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