http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-greatest-scandal-of-them-all/print/
An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
– attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero.
We have been reading of late of the blizzard of scandals that has buffeted the Obama administration. Every week or so a major storm wracks the political climate in the U.S., so much so that it is hard not to grow somewhat blasé. Whether it’s the odium of the Benghazi betrayal and ensuing cover-up; or the IRS training its sights on conservative and pro-Israeli organizations; or the DOJ seizing the phone records of News sources; or the Attorney General caught lying (or conveniently forgetting) about a subpoena against a FOX News reporter; or NSA snooping on Verizon customers under a court order granted in April, as if replicating thriller novelist Brad Thor’s grisly tale about internal espionage, Black List; or a follow-up spy program code-named PRISM, expanding an operation begun under George W. Bush that was relatively measured, judicially redrawn and discontinued in 2007, but now, in the words of Matthew Vadum; “a warrantless surveillance program on steroids”—the time comes when we expect nothing less of a meretricious administration.
The scandals go back years: the Affordable Health Care Act passed in the middle of the night and encrypted in thousands of pages that nobody seems to have read; a multi-billion dollar stimulus project that didn’t stimulate anything; the defrauding of Chrysler’s secured creditors in favor of the UAW when the auto company went bankrupt; the Fast and Furious gun-running plan yet to be clarified by the Attorney General; the loans and grants to crony Green entrepreneurs who regularly fail to meet their goals and end up in default; the numbing disgrace of a Muslim outreach scheme that has seen known terrorists and dubious Islamic groups and individuals welcomed at the White House and operating to influence policy at the highest levels of government. The net result is always the same: a modest degree of public indignation followed by business as usual. Sarah Palin is on the money when she laments that “Obama supporters…naively and blindly (despite failure after failure and scandal after scandal) continue to give him the benefit of the doubt.” After all, this may be a scandal-prone administration, there have been others, let’s move on.
In an article for the Wall Street Journal titled “The Decline of the Obama Presidency,” Fred Barnes argues that Obama’s second term is coming undone not because of scandals but because of inept decisions made during his first term—his sclerotic partisanship, his alienating of potential allies, his broken promises. For Barnes, the scandals themselves are not the major factor in “the Obama breakdown,” though they “have worsened his plight and made recovery next to impossible.” Even The New York Times editorializes that the Obama administration has “lost all credibility.”
In a most important way, however, we have tended to miss the point. We do not have the leisure of indifference or jaded boredom. Concerned citizens have no choice but to grapple, in the succinct depiction of PJ Media’s Roger Simon, with “the absolute Orwellian madness that is the Obama administration.” The issue is not simply that the U.S. government under the suzerainty of Barack Obama is beset by a concatenation of scandals or has proved itself incompetent. Indeed, pace Barnes, poor decision making may be considered scandalous as well. But the real scandal is Barack Obama himself, a man demonstrably unfit to be president of the United States, who makes the hapless Jimmy Carter and the sleazy Bill Clinton look like choir boys. The scandal is that America is being led by a man about whom we know all too little, who has placed his salient records under seal (including his original birth certificate)—a man who, as Bill Schanefelt writes in in an article titled “President Photoshop” in American Thinker, has “left surprisingly few documented footprints in the sands of time”; who is assiduously liquidating the economy; who is gutting the military while rendering it a politically correct monstrosity; whose foreign policy lies in shambles as he cozies up to dictators and theocrats or sits on the sidelines twiddling his thumbs; and who gives every indication of having managed to evade the responsibilities not only of his position but of genuine adulthood.
