Phony Scandals or a Phony President?

The Only Thing "Phony" About Obama's Scandals Are the Stories He Tells About Them!

In Obama's latest campaign swing (someone please tell him the election was last November) he makes repeated references to "phony scandals" that have kept Washington (by which he means House Republicans) from giving in to his demands for more spending and higher taxes.

The remark has touched a raw nerve with those who are still waiting for answers to the growing number of scandals which have revealed the corruption and incompetence of the Obama Administration. It's now a worn out cliché to remind readers that if anything like Fast and Furious. Solyndra, IRS, Benghazi and the rest happened during a Republican Administration we would already have Special Prosecutors galore and Democrats filing impeachment charges. The news media that put the Valerie Plame "Leakgate" story during the Bush years at the top of the news for years. And who can forget when Republican senate candidate George Allen of Virginia referred to a Democrat aide as "macaca" only to have the Washington Post put critical stories with that word on their front page 12 times and run 40 other stories and editorials.

In thinking about Obama's latest insult to the truth I came across a column by Michael Graham in the Boston Herald which captured my thoughts exactly:

“Phony”? What’s phony about the fact that the IRS targeted citizens based on their ideology? That the discussion of this targeting went all the way up to the president’s hand-picked IRS chief counsel William Wilkins? That Wilkins met with Obama in April 2012 just two days before “new guidance” on how to handle Tea Party applications was sent from Washington to IRS operatives?

Imagine cub reporter Barack “WoodStein” Obama being told by his Washington Post editors in 1972 that the Nixon administration using the IRS to target its enemies was a “phony scandal.” Would he have agreed?

“Phony”? What’s phony about the family members of a Fox News reporter being spied on by the Department of Justice? About Attorney General Eric Holder lying about his knowledge of “potential prosecution” of the media by his department?

And then there’s Ben-ghazi. Almost a year later, we still don’t know where the president was when the terrorist attack started, whether the military was ordered to leave Glen Doherty to die, or why the White House continued to push the phony story of a video weeks after it knew it was a terror attack and not a movie protest.

Four dead Americans at a consulate the Obama administration knew was being targeted but left unprotected. On 9/11. With an ambassador in it. If that’s a “phony scandal,” how many dead Americans does it take to make a real one?

On the other hand, Obama has a point. All the talk about Benghazi and the IRS has taken attention away from another scandal — his horrible handling of the economy.

We’re in year four of the worst “recovery” since World War II. How awful is it?

Or to put Graham's final point another way, Obama gives a speech about phony scandals when the real scandal is his phony economic recovery!

Where's Obama's Outrage over IRS

One of the worst "phony scandals" is the IRS targeting of conservative groups. When the news first broke Obama went to the microphones on May 15 and said that the IRS conduct was:

Inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives. And as I said earlier, it should not matter what political stripe you’re from -- the fact of the matter is, is that the IRS has to operate with absolute integrity. The government generally has to conduct itself in a way that is true to the public trust. That’s especially true for the IRS.
...
I’ll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again by holding the responsible parties accountable, by putting in place new checks and new safeguards, and going forward, by making sure that the law is applied as it should be -- in a fair and impartial way. And we’re going to have to make sure that the laws are clear so that we can have confidence that they are enforced in a fair and impartial way, and that there’s not too much ambiguity surrounding these laws.

So that's what I expect. That's what the American people deserve. And that's what we’re going to do.

In the weeks following that strong statement Democrats have tried to push the line that this was nothing but a rogue operation by government employees in Cincinnati, with no tie to the Obama Administration. Yet recent testimony before a congressional committee investigating the matter finds that trail leads directly to the office headed by an Obama political appointee who just happened to visit the White House days before some of the rules targeting Tea Party groups was released. Too soon to say what the exact train of events was but certainly the matter is no where near resolved to the degree Obama himself demanded in that May 15th statement.

There are still so many unanswered questions about the who, what, why of the IRS scandal and same with Benghazi. Listen to the mother of Sean Smith, who died in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012, as she reacts to the idea that this is a phony scandal:

Then there's the video footage of Glen Doherty, one of the heroes in Benghazi who died trying to save others. It shows him full of life and humor. Doesn't his family, along with the others who were killed, have the right to know what happened and why?

The Obama pattern in all this is clear. Never take responsibility. Always try and change the subject or blame others. And know that the media that would jump all over any Republican if he or she did the same will go along with the coverup! It's corruption to the core!