Monday, May 20, 2013

Questions and Evasions

Why won't Mr. Obama or his underlings tell us where the President was during the attack on the American ambassador to Libya? If the President was doing what he's supposed to do, as these people insist he was, why won't they tell us where he was, whom he was speaking to, and what he was doing?

The attempts to dodge these questions are not only laughable they make it impossible not to believe that the President was not on the job during this crisis and that his staff fears that if the public knew what he was doing they'd blow their stack.

Here's white House staffer Dan Pfeiffer making a complete buffoon of himself on Fox News Sunday yesterday twisting himself into rhetorical pretzels to avoid having to answer these questions:
Media apologists as well as administration spokespersons like Pfeiffer repeatedly insist that 1) We'll get to the bottom of this unprecedented skein of scandals as long as the Republicans don't "play politics" with them, and 2) The important thing now is to put all these impertinent questions aside and focus on making sure these kinds of scandals don't happen again.

But this is arrant nonsense. Any criticism the Republicans make of the administration's conduct in these scandals will inevitably be interpreted by the Democrats as "playing politics," and they know it. The call to refrain from political game-playing is simply a ploy to intimidate the Republicans into shutting up about the scandals so that they'll be allowed to die down and fade away. We can be very sure that if the Republicans were to keep quiet the Democrats certainly wouldn't do anything to "get to the bottom" of them and the media wouldn't demand that they do.

The second assertion is equally nonsensical. The only way we can intelligently undertake to insure that such things don't happen in the future (other than refusing to elect liberal progressive Democrats) is to ascertain what happened this time. If we don't know what and why things went wrong in Benghazi, in the Department of Justice, and in the IRS, how can we know what to do to fix them?

The congressional Republicans owe it to the country to find out what happened in Benghazi, to find out why the Department of Justice was surreptitiously purloining journalists' phone records, and why the IRS targeted over 500 conservative and religious organizations for onerous, intrusive, political delays and harassment. The GOP also owes it to the country to continue to investigate Fast and Furious, and the EPA's and SEC's practice of discriminatory treatment of conservative and religious groups.

This is an administration riddled with corruption. It has reduced itself to the level of Putin's Russia or Chavez's Venezuela. Mr. Obama and his progressive soulmates are turning the U.S. into a third-world nation in terms of the way the government exercises power, and the only people who can stop him are the Republicans in the House of Representatives. They better not shut up.