May 13, 2013 — Scott Johnson
It’s difficult to find humor in anything related to the murder of our ambassador to Libya and his colleagues in Benghazi, but the Accountability Review Board convened by Hillary Clinton has seeds of of comedy in it. As scandal management, the Accountability Review Board (report here) amounted to something like performance art. Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing represented two of the three whistleblower witnesses who testified before the House committee
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May 13, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The White House has set up a Twitter account through which it is praising our Dear Leader in a style befitting the megalomaniacal leader of a one-party state. You really have to see it to get a fuller understanding of the Age of Obama, though I should warn readers that, as in the case of New York Times editorials, you may lose brain cells scrolling through the thing. In one
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May 12, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Last month Time’s Joe Klein decried the Obama administration’s “incompetence” implementing Obamacare. This month Klein expressed relief in an “Exclusive” report. In his “Exclusive” Klein praised the administration for streamlining the complex 21-page online Obamacare application to a mere three pages. Klein called it “a spiffy, new three-page application for individuals (find it here)” (footnote omitted). He added: “There will be a seven-page application for families (11 including the appendix),
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May 12, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Two of my all-time favorite books on historical subjects unraveled the fraught controversies deriving from cases involving Communist spies. In Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, first published in 1978, Allen Weinstein settled the case referred to in the subtitle. Random House published an updated edition in 1997 and the Hoover Institution has just issued a third edition (the one linked above) in honor of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the book’s publication.
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May 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
I learn via Twitter that the video below featured this past Wednesday on the Tonight Show has gone viral. BuzzFeed explains: “Pumpcast News” is a Tonight Show sketch in which actor Tim Stack, posing as the anchor of a (fake) news show aired at gas station pumps, starts to talk directly to the unsuspecting gas station patrons. While usually the intention of the sketch is to frighten and shock normal
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May 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
John has undertaken a series comparing Benghazigate to Watergate. Benghazigate is still unraveling, so the comparison presents certain difficulties, but we are still in the dark concerning some of the most basic facts regarding the Watergate scandal as well. Nixon spokesman Ron Ziegler characterized Watergate as a “third-rate burglary.” The Democrats, by contrast, characterized Watergate as something vastly greater than the crime on the surface. According to Senator Ervin, this
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May 11, 2013 — Scott Johnson
A thoroughgoing dishonesty permeates the Obama administration. From Obamacare to Benghazi, this is the gang that can’t talk straight. Philip Klein catches the president in the act of being himself, peddling instantly classic doubletalk: As part of a Mothers’ Day weekend defense of his signature legislative accomplishment, President Obama claimed that the law represented the “largest health care tax cut for working families and small businesses in our history. “
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May 10, 2013 — Scott Johnson
David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale and the author, most recently, of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats). He wrote “Why do we live in America-Lite?” for us, briefly summarizing the themes of the book. Professor Gelernter returned to expand on the themes of his book in “What keeps this failed president above water?” and in “Don’t say we didn’t warn
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May 10, 2013 — Scott Johnson
You may have read in the news that John Yoo has suffered the indignity of being banned from Russia by the government of Vladimir Putin. Yoo and 17 others were banned in a tit for tat response a day after the United States imposed sanctions on Russians guilty of human rights violations. Yoo was in good company, included in a group of four men who Russia’s Foreign Ministry said were
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May 9, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Benghazi hearing before the House Oversight Committee had been previewed over the weekend in stories featuring some of the highlights of the witnesses’ testimony to staff behind closed doors. In the event the testimony of the witnesses was if anything more dramatic than we might have anticipated. The bombshells were flying Fast & Furious. Three New York Times reporters have a good story summarizing the testimony. John Podhoretz renders
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May 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The bombshells were flying Fast & Furious, you might say, at the House Oversight Committee hearing on Benghazi today. The former deputy chief of mission in Libya told the committee: “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya.” We commenced this series in response to Obama administration spokesman Susan Rice’s round of Sunday post-attack gabfest appearances asserting: ”What happened this week…in Benghazi was a result, a direct result of a
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May 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings is the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee before which the Benghazi hearing was held today. He did his best to carry water for the White House and the former Secretary of State. Rep. Cummings earns his own entry in this series, as both a fool and a knave, for his advice to the Benghazi witnesses, before the families of the loved ones murdered in
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May 8, 2013 — Scott Johnson
As the massacre of our fellow Americans in Benghazi returns to the news in a big way today, with the hearing scheduled in the House, it is well to remember the promotion of the Muhammad video by President Obama and Secretary Clinton in this context. It shows the politicization of the massacre by the Obama administration from the first moment on. The Obama administration’s attribution of responsibility for the massacre
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May 7, 2013 — Scott Johnson
When a left-wing academic wins the recognition of the American Political Science Association, it is at best an event full of sound and fury signifying nothing but the left-wing tilt of academia and the left’s domination of the institutions conferring honors and renown. When a conservative of some stripe achieves such recognition, it suggests (to me) that his or her undeniable excellence has overcome the resistance of the judges. Such
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May 7, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison is the first Muslim elected to Congress and one of its leftwardmost members. I wrote a backgrounder on him for the Weekly Standard just before he was elected to Congress and posted “Keith Ellison for dummies” on Power Line as a companion to the Weekly Standard article. Ellison is a key to understanding the Age of Obama, a thesis I explored in “From Keith
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May 6, 2013 — Scott Johnson
The Founders warned against the tyranny of the majority. They knew that unconstrained majorities were the bane of liberty. Up through their time, history had shown all known democracies to be “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” They formulated the Constitution to protect the rights of citizens against the tyranny of the majority. Publius put it this way in Federalist 10: The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced
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May 6, 2013 — Scott Johnson
Marc Thiessen recently recalled that after he was defeated for reelection in 1989, New York Mayor Ed Koch was asked if he would ever run for office again. “No,” Koch replied. “The people have spoken…and they must be punished.” In the 2012 elections, Minnesotans elected Democratic majorities in the state House and state Senate to go along with the Democratic governor (Mark Dayton) they (we) elected in 2010. It’s the
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