JOHN PODHORETZ: PIN THE FAIL ON THE DONKEY
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/pi_the_fail_on_the_donkey_75AD9tpaTdPp0AjOEIjzcK
The IRS, AP and Benghazi scandals were all about making Obama look better. Now they’ll drag down the Democrats for years to come
The Obama administration’s sudden plunge into scandal territory has two aspects — the actual and the political.
The first, and most important, has to do with what actually happened. Why did the administration promulgate a false account of the terror attack on Benghazi? Why did the Internal Revenue Service target conservative groups for special scrutiny? Why did the Justice Department act in an unprecedented fashion toward The Associated Press for publishing details of a foiled terror plot the White House was planning to discuss openly the next day?
It is inevitable we will find all of this out. On Banghazi, for example, the White House was forced to release 100 pages of e-mails on Benghazi but seems to have left out hundreds more; it will be unable to shield them forever.
CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson released a highly revealing story on Friday in which administration officials said they regretted not sending a terrorism-response team to Benghazi and regretted not having convened their panel of high-level terrorism advisers afterward. One official told Attkisson, “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”
Being an idiot is not a hanging offense, to be sure. Nor is doing everything you can to hide your idiocy six weeks before an election by focusing your ire on a video rather than on the al Qaeda group that killed four Americans. It doesn’t rise to the level of criminality, but it sure is a policymaking scandal, and one about which the American people should have been better informed before they chose a president last November.
That is a scandal, even if no one is going to jail over it.
On the AP story, Attorney General Eric Holder has behaved in an extremely peculiar fashion. He said the AP’s publication of the story put lives at risk when the CIA told the AP there was no security risk involved in publishing it.
Holder also told the media he had formally recused himself from all aspects of the AP investigation — and then had to acknowledge to Congress on Thursday that he had taken no formal steps to do so. In other words, he did not actually recuse himself.
Holder extended the life of that story by behaving as though it is something he wants to stay far away from.
And on the matter shaping up to be the biggest source of woe for the administration, congressional investigators will try to turn the IRS inside out to determine the source of the decisions to put conservative groups under pressure liberal groups did not experience.
Comments are closed.
