Scandal-Free

In something of a stunner former President Obama averred recently that his administration had been "scandal-free." This is certainly an amusing assertion, one reminiscent of his infamous assurances that Obamacare would not only allow people to keep their doctors but would also drive the cost of insurance coverage down.

His profession of the ethical purity of his tenure could be true only if one defines a scandal as something considered to be such by the media and which is assiduously pursued by the majority of journalists at the major networks and newspapers until it finally dominates the 24/7 news cycle.

In other words, if a scandal is defined as whatever the media decides is a scandal, then the Obama administration was indeed free of any taint of disgrace because no matter what the Obama administration did the majority media would have insisted on either excusing it or looking the other way.

If, however, a political scandal is defined as an event that should bring discredit or disgrace to a person or administration and which should result in significant firings and/or legal jeopardy, even if such consequences never eventuate, then the Obama administration was, as David Harsanyi reminds us, as rife with scandal as any in modern times.

Here's a partial listing of the Obama administration's infamies:

• Fast and Furious, a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.
  
  The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons, but an off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.
  
  Attorney general Eric Holder became the first AG in history to be held in contempt of Congress because he refused to cooperate with the congressional investigation into this scandal.
• The administration interfered with law enforcement's attempt to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terrorist organization Hezbollah because the administration didn't want to upset the Iranians during the negotiations that would culminate in over a billion dollars being shipped to Iran in return for a promise not to build nuclear weapons for ten years.
• The Obama DOJ illegally spied on political reporters and other citizens in order to ferret out the source of White House leaks and then lied about what they were doing.
• The IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively and prejudicially targeted conservative groups before elections and they subsequently admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’ demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy.
• Although they knew the assault on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya was a complex terror attack, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut television ads to placate radicals in Islamic nations by repeating the claim that a video motivated the attack and they then even apologized for American free speech, which was a scandal in itself.
  
  Worse, however, the administration detained the man who produced the offensively amateurish “Innocence of Muslims” video and initially charged him with lying about his role in its production. This was a blatant attack on free expression. Yet most of the mainstream press continued to take the administration’s word and report that the video was indeed the cause of the “protests.”

Of course there were other scandals that elicited little more than yawns from the media. As Harsanyi says:

Democrats in general just kept pretending that every accusation [against the Obama administration] was merely a partisan, racist plot to undermine the president. Whether it was bypassing process and oversight to fund cronyistic green projects that enriched political and ideological allies with tax dollars, or the Secret Service’s embarrassing debauchery, or Hillary Clinton’s attempts to circumvent transparency or, perhaps the most immoral, the Veterans Affairs’ negligence regarding veterans, they would never admit they faced a scandal.

No one has gone to jail for any of these disreputable acts and few people lost their jobs because of them.

You can read more of the details of each of the above Obama administration scandals at the link. Meanwhile, if you think that any of this wretched misconduct did not really amount to a scandal and that Obama's claim to have run a scandal-free administration is not actually absurd, simply ask yourself what the reaction would've been had Donald Trump and his administration perpetrated or indulged in anything like it.

The media outrage would have been volcanic, and the attempts to destroy this president would have been even more obsessive, compulsive, and relentless than they already are.