The number of people remaining who still believe that President Obama meant it when he promised us as a candidate that he'd run the most ethical administration in history has shrunk asymptotically close to zero, at least among those who are paying attention. No doubt the bulk of the reason is that the Obama administration seems to be stacking up scandals like airliners holding over an airport in the midst of a thunderstorm. You might say that the administration has the scandals coming at us fast and furious. The strategy seems to be to overwhelm us with crimes and misdemeanors and other legal dubieties to the point where we're no longer shocked by any of it.
It's a little like listening to the Vice-President's goofy Bidenisms. After a while the stupidity is no longer outrageous, and the offensiveness no longer offends. It just fades into the Washington background noise. So it is with scandal in this administration.
Stimulus money awarded to political supporters in unions or corporate execs who ran poorly performing green energy businesses; the refusal to prosecute Black Panthers who were almost certainly engaged in voter intimidation; the Fast and Furious operation which illegally put thousands of guns in the hands of Mexican killers who used them to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Mexicans as well as two American border agents; the refusal to provide requested security to our diplomats in Libya who paid for this egregious incompetence with their lives; the deliberate fabrication of a story to deflect blame from the administration in the wake of these murders. The list goes on.
And now three new scandals have emerged just this week which surely must set some sort of record for vigorous government malfeasance.
It turns out that by all appearances the IRS was using its power to punish political enemies of the administration. Conservative groups who applied for tax exempt status were made to fill out a battery of forms that were impossible to complete or to answer fully. Groups that had the words "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in their name or organizations established to educate people on the Constitution (of all things), Obamacare, and the workings of government all were targeted.
Moreover, the IRS was apparently imposing similar burdens on Jewish groups that supported Israel.
This is an extremely serious abuse of power, the very sort of abuse that causes many to loathe big government, and although there's no evidence that the IRS was taking orders directly from the President, it's nevertheless the case that they were acting in concert with his penchant for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Indeed, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said today that what the IRS was doing was a good thing, presumably because it was directed at groups he doesn't like.
Then the Department of Justice was caught in flagrante seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. If this had happened during the Bush administration the din emanating from newsrooms across the country would pain the ears, and truth to tell the Washington press corps does seem to be a bit disturbed by this gross infringement of the First Amendment and, even more, perhaps, by what they see as a betrayal by an administration to which they have so happily given up their virtue.
Finally, it turns out that Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has been shaking down health service corporations for big donations to fund Obamacare. Since these corporations are pretty much at the mercy of HHS for their economic livelihood, when the Secretary suggests that it'd be nice if they'd pony up some cash to help get Obamacare off the ground, what these execs hear her saying is that if you want to do business with the federal government you better dig deep and fork over.
You can get the details of these stories at the links. There's a lot more to each of them. The impression one gets while reading the accounts is of an administration out of control - unfettered by morality, law, Constitution, or competence - seeking to arrogate to itself as much power as it can amass before the 2014 midterm elections perchance sweep the Democrats out of the House and the Senate.
I used to think that Mr. Obama wanted to emulate Robert Mugabe and turn the U.S. into an economic Zimbabwe. Now it's beginning to look as though economics is only one facet of Mr. Mugabe's government that this administration envies.
