NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ^ | Wednesday, May 15, 2013 | S.E.
Cupp
Boy, oh boy. What many called the worst week yet for the Obama White House
has spilled over into another, with news that the Department of Justice secretly
obtained telephone records of Associated Press reporters and editors to root out
the cause of a (rare unwanted) leak of national security information.
Is it a fishing expedition, a witch hunt or something in between? Time will
tell — if, that is, anyone ever comes forward with an explanation. Whether on
Fast and Furious or Benghazi, the typical M.O. of the administration has been to
slow-play answers and hope that we all forget.
That will be hard to do now that the list of administration travails is
growing. There was White House spokesman Jay Carney’s struggle to answer pool
questions last Friday about a flood of Benghazi emails revealing the State
Department’s desire to scrub terrorism links from talking points. There was, the
same day, news that the IRS has been unfairly targeting conservative non-profits
for their tax-exempt applications.
Through it all, the powers-that-be have either insisted, “We had no idea,” or
calmly stated, “Nothing to see here.”
There is, in fact, lots to see. The Benghazi, IRS and AP stories threaten to
prove what conservatives have claimed all along: that this isn’t just Big
Government, but government with a vengeance, one that will dispatch its tax
collectors if it doesn’t like your politics, or unleash the FBI if it doesn’t
like your reporting, or punish you for whistleblowing.
Of course, the administration insists it has legitimate explanations for each
and every infraction — but those are getting increasingly tough to take. And
this government, which suddenly seems less reverent of the First Amendment than
any recent predecessor, is led by a former constitutional law professor.
The White House, liberal media and Democratic elected officials have swatted
away all these assertions as nothing more than right-wing conspiracy, political
propaganda, black helicopter paranoia and, most routinely, unadulterated hatred
for President Obama.
All of that may in fact animate many of the inquiries — and the passion with
which they’re spun by political opponents. But it doesn’t make any of the
accusations themselves untrue.
While the IRS’s actions may, in the end, be written off as low-level staffers
run amok, the implications of the other simmering scandals are far more
damaging. Look closely, and the AP story appears to bolster claims by the right
that the administration was reluctant to implicate Al Qaeda in the attack on the
Libyan mission for political reasons.
Follow the logic:
The story that allegedly drove the DOJ to pull all those phone records
revealed that the CIA had intercepted a 2011 airliner bomb plot in Yemen. Good
on the CIA — except that bombshell contradicted an earlier statement from the
White House that it had no credible information that Al Qaeda was plotting an
attack to coincide with the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death.
It isn’t surprising that the administration would want to bury the terror
threat after assuring voters in an election year that Al Qaeda had been
“decimated.”
For those of us looking to draw attention to all these issues, it’s been
infuriating to see many in the press — the very victims of this government
overreach — ignore and dismiss them even as their sources were being prosecuted
under the Espionage Act more times than all previous administrations combined.
Hopefully, though, now that these stories have become impossible to ignore,
the press will finally wake up.
Even before news of the AP story broke, last Friday it seemed as though many
in the White House press pool had finally had enough. Almost to a person,
reporters pressed Carney on statements that seemed categorically untrue. The
press pool seemed united in its sheer contempt for the way the administration
had withheld, manipulated and distorted information.
With the latest revelations that potentially dozens of reporters at one news
organization alone were secretly investigated, one can only hope the outrage
over these abuses of power continues to guide a media that has been reluctant to
ask too many tough questions.
DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this fine day and read posts from around the world. The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it! You may leave your opinion, but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!
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