"To the President’s other men and women in the White House and elsewhere -- who took risks to provide us with confidential information. Without them there would have been no Watergate story told by the Washington Post.” "All the President’s Men” Dedication, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
May 15, 2013
By: Linda Case Gibbons
Threaten anyone with an IRS audit or tell them you have secretly monitored their phones and watch their faces.
Panic. Raw fear. That’s because anybody who is anybody knows the power of that threat.
Richard Nixon and J. Edgar knew that and now Barack Obama is giving it a whirl. That’s how bullies roll.
As Hillary and Holder and Obama have shown us, the buck stops with anyone lower than them on the administrative ladder.
Who’s going down? Well, first they pick ’em, then they kick ’em under the bus. After that they have that agency -- State Department, White House, Department of Justice, the IRS -- investigate themselves.
"They” (fill in the blanks) _________ (Hillary, Obama, Holder, Napolitano) when asked, never have heard about__________ (Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS, The Associated Press phone record seizure), and are unable to talk to anyone who works for them within the government who might know.
Whatever the scandal, the government, according to (Hillary, Obama, Holder, Napolitano) is riddled with rogue, low-level employees who cause whatever the scandal is.
These employees are poorly trained, or untrained, we are told, but they definitely boldly and arrogantly decide policy for years without oversight. Some unnamed rogues at the IRS targeted conservative groups "they” say.
These rogues even denied tax-exempt status to a pro-life organization, conditioning approval as a non-profit on the commitment not to protest outside Planned Parenthood abortion clinics, so says the public interest law firm, The Thomas Moore Society.
Does that sound right to you? Does that sync up with most Americans’ experiences on the job, cavalierly deciding policy without your boss’ knowledge?
According to this administration, darn it, it happens to them all the time.
And when this administration is pressed about something that has happened, that is illegal, "they” find a wrinkle in the law that makes it all okay.
Just this past week a tidbit of news slipped through the cracks among all the other scandals swirling around.
Fresh from stumping for the president in violation of the Hatch Act in 2012, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius now is busy raising funds to implement Obamacare, hitting the very groups she will be regulating under Obamacare, the health care industry, including insurance and pharmaceutical executives, circumventing Congress.
Sounds wrong, doesn’t it? But no one in the government is able to figure out whether she is violating federal laws or not. Sure looks like it, but someone in her department said it was okay…
Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Congress today, but as usual, didn’t know anything.
He "recused” himself from discussion of the AP phone record seizures, said he had a conflict of interest since he so often interfaces with the press. Therefore, he explained, "someone else” was handling it. No name of who that someone was, and of course the someone was not in attendance at the hearings.
As with Fast and Furious, Holder never bothered to meet with the guy who was "handling it” in advance of his Congressional appearance. He just doesn’t know, Holder says. Whatever it is, name it. Benghazi, AP, IRS. It’s ongoing. It’s complex.
But rest assured he and Obama and Hillary and Napolitano are consistently "outraged” at whatever "it” is, and they will make sure "it never happens again.” They can’t tell you how they will do that, but they will not tolerate "it,” we’re told.
Although Holder is the man who is supposed to be the head "Legal Eagle” in this country, he never knows exactly what is on point for anything, in this case what legal constraints there are on obtaining phone records for some 100 AP reporters and editors on 20 phone lines within the AP without a warrant, or so he tells the Congressional Committee.
And he never bothers to research the law, but in this case he adds, he has faith that his colleagues who did this know the law and they would never violate those laws, whatever the laws are and whoever the people are who did this. Trust him.
Thirty years ago President Nixon’s actions as president revealed a man with profound paranoia, a man who saw the world as a hostile place. He responded by abusing the power he had as president to protect himself from what he perceived as "people out to get him,” Nixon’s "Enemies List.”
"Never forget,” Nixon told national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”
Now, thirty years later, like Nixon, Obama, too, has an enemies list.
Nixon was afraid of losing the upcoming election in 1972, and so he did what he could to neutralize his Democratic opponent.
After "the shellacking” he took in the 2010 elections from the Tea Party, Obama, like Nixon, made sure that he would not lose in 2012, and the IRS was part of that plan, targeting perceived "enemies” in the conservative camp, because, like Nixon, Obama is determined to win at all costs.
Lois G. Lerner, head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division came out this week to apologize when the news broke about the IRS targeting conservative groups. With her apology she also claimed there was no political bias behind the IRS targeting these groups for extra scrutiny.
Though described by the IRS as "apolitical,” it just so happens Lerner is married to an attorney, Michael R. Miles. Miles is a partner in Sutherland Asbill and Brennan, whose firm hosted a voter registration organizing event for the 2012 Obama re-election campaign and whose partner, David I. Adelman, was appointed by Obama to be the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Singapore.
And while Lerner could not name any liberal groups which were targeted by the IRS, Obama’s half -brother’s charity, the Barack H. Obama Foundation was granted tax exempt status by the IRS in a month, with a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008, while conservative groups waited more than two years for approval and had to fill out lengthy and frighteningly intrusive questionnaires.
This week Obama "fired” Steven Miller, the acting commissioner of the IRS, in an effort to pacify an outraged public, but neglected to mention that Miller was leaving the department anyway in June. Someone's under the bus, but no one is punished.
So Obama monitors the press, placing in jeopardy the whistleblowers or sources upon which the free press depends.
He stacks the deck against conservative groups by denying them the ability to exist by dragging his feet over granting tax exempt status to them for years, just as he did with oil drilling permits. That takes care of all of them.
He uses tax information on conservative groups and donors for political advantage and then denies he knows anything about all of it.
At this point there is a consensus that at best this president is incompetent; at worst he has engaged in criminal acts punishable by law.
Like a game of checkers, Obama trades Benghazi for IRS, IRS for Associated Press and then says "King Me,” which surprises no one since so many of his speeches include his frustration at having to adhere to the constitution and the rule of law when playing president.
So the gamesmanship continues, keeping Americans off balance so they won’t do to him what the American people did to Richard Nixon.
In Watergate, the scandal was uncovered for what it was when the cavalry -- Bernstein and Woodward -- rode in to spread the truth. But now that the scandals are piling up in the corner of the Oval Office, where are our Bernsteins? Where are our Woodwards?
Could it be that the Washington Post uncovers only Republican scandals? Is it possible we will wait, like the Americans in Benghazi, and the journalistic cavalry will never come?
Hold the line, America.