“An Amazingly Scandal-Free Administration” ~ David Brooks

One just has to shake one’s head at the gullibility of the left (the right is not immune to it either!) in this Rachel “Madcow” blog-post: “An Amazingly Scandal-Free Administration” (h/t to a friend):

…New York Times columnist David Brooks, a center-right pundit, highlighted a notable exception.

“I have my disagreements, say, with President Obama, but President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him. He’s chosen people who have been pretty scandal-free.

“And so there are people in Washington who do set a standard of integrity, who do seem to attract people of quality.”

[….]

It’s even a point of pride among insiders. David Axelrod recently boasted, “I’m proud of the fact that basically you have had an administration in this place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal. And I think that says a lot about the ethical strictures of this administration.”…

More like a complicit Press and people in high places covering up. And much to Cummings chagrin, an oversight connection to the Obama administration and the IRS scandal has already been made. Here The Blaze reports on this article before Maddow highlights it:

…Let us set aside these events:

  1. Two officers found in contempt for lying to Congress.
  2. One officer being impeached.
  3. Veterans dying on waiting lists.
  4. Solyndra.
  5. Wiretapping reporters.
  6. Unconstitutionally rewriting our immigration laws.
  7. Fast and Furious.

Four other scandals, however, undermine the character of a free nation.

Article II in the Resolution of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon reads:

  • “He has … acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service … confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law.”

That was a scandal and Nixon was forced to resign.

The Obama administration has used the IRS to harass political opponents, to audit contributors to opponent’s campaigns and to abuse private information for political purposes.

The IRS officer responsible refused to testify before Congress and was voted in contempt. A criminal referral was sent to the DOJ and it was ignored.

The Commissioner of the IRS lied under oath and articles of impeachment for the commissioner have been filed.

No scandal here. Move along.

Gay Patriot has a post that has a great insight by Theodore Dalrymple that while used for a different purpose, fits here as well:

  • “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ~ Theodore Dalrymple

This understanding is enforced by Rachel “Madcow’s” own words when she aligns herself as more radical than one of the worlds most notorious propagandists/murderers in history! Mao Zedong  the total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million!

Um… wow!


Here are some of the Presidents scandals for contemplation:

MRCTV notes the Top-Twenty-Five-Hits list of scandals… Obama still had 31/2 years to go (via Natural News):

  1. Going to war in Libya without first seeking congressional approval.
  2. Bypassing Congress to issue an illegal executive order granting amnesty to illegal aliens, and ignoring the court order not to implement the order. 
  3. Canceling the border fence and other border security programs.
  4. The administration’s betrayal of the primary GM investors so he could give the company to his buddies in the UAW.
  5. Offering Joe Sestak a White House job to drop out of the Senate race against Arlen Specter
  6. The IRS targeting of conservative/tea party groups
  7. Offering Andrew Romanoff a White House job to drop out of the Senate Race against Michael Bennett.
  8. Dropping an already already-won case against the New Black Panthers.
  9. Refusing to prosecute African Americans for Civil Rights violations.
  10. Ignoring a court order to ease up on restrictions against deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and, instead, issuing tougher restrictions.
  11. Circumventing the Senate by setting up a “shadow cabinet” of Czars.
  12. Lying about the safety of admitting refugees into the country.
  13. Obama’s Justice Department’s refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus ignoring his constitutional responsibility to defend laws passed by Congress.
  14. Firing (and slandering) AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin after because he was investigating Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson a friend of the Obamas.
  15. Practicing crony capitalism and wasting taxpayer money with Green energy loans to Solyndra and other failing companies.
  16. A No-bid contract given to a company owned by a major Obama donor for a small pox vaccine that doesn’t work.
  17. Fast and Furious: Giving guns to Mexican drug cartels in an attempt to take away guns from law-abiding Americans. 
  18. Lying to America and the world by claiming a YouTube video caused the Benghazi attack.
  19. Receiving foreign donations for his 2012 campaign.
  20. Slashing the pensions of Delphi’s non-union employees leaving the UAW employees‘ pensions alone.
  21. Purchasing bullets to drive up costs/empty supply.
  22. Prosecuting Thomas Drake, an NSA whistle-blower who leaked unclassified information about government waste and fraud.
  23. Trading five Taliban “generals” for Bowe Bergdahl without giving Congress the 30 days notice required by law.
  24. Ignoring ISIS in 2012, because it didn’t fit his reelection theme
  25. Using the NSA to spy on congressional discussions with Israeli PM Netanyahu.

For another recap, here is Poor Richards summation:

Remember a very left leaning professor of law and a well known/trusted leftist legal theoretician said this of Obama:

You know what they say when you get the far ends of each side to agree… it’s probably true:

Larry Elder Focuses on Liberal Failure [Policies] in Baltimore

Here is an excerpt from the John Nolte article Larry Elder reads from at about the midpoint of the audio:

Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem…

…Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. It is the free people of Baltimore who elect and then re-elect those who institute policies that have so spectacularly failed that once-great city. It is the free people of Baltimore who elected Mayor Room-To-Destroy.

You can call the arson and looting and violence we are seeing on our television screens, rioting. That’s one way to describe the chaos. Another way to describe it is Democrat infighting. This is blue-on-blue violence. The thugs using the suspicious death of Freddie Gray (at the hands of a Democrat-led police department) to justify the looting that updates their home entertainment systems, are Democrats protesting Democrat leaders and Democrat policies in a Democrat-run city.

Poverty has nothing to do with it. This madness and chaos and anarchy is a Democrat-driven culture that starts at the top with a racially-divisive White House heartbreakingly effective at ginning up hate and violence.

Where I currently reside here in Watauga County, North Carolina, the poverty level is 31.3%. Median income is only $34,293. In both of those areas we are much worse off than Baltimore, that has a poverty rate of only 23.8% and a median income of $41,385.

Despite all that, we don’t riot here in Watauga County. Thankfully, we have not been poisoned by the same left-wing culture that is rotting Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, from the inside out. We get along remarkably well. We are neighbors. We are people who help out one another. We take pride in our community, and are grateful for what we do have. We are far from perfect, but we work out our many differences in civilized ways. Solutions are our goal, not cronyism, narcissistic victimhood, and the blaming of others…

…read more…

Andrew Klavan adds the following summation of what people get when they treat our Republic like a Democracy:

I can only add this excellent passage from a wonderful book I just read. I’ll have more to say on Theodore Dalrymple’s Admirable Evasions soon, but for now, here’s just a relevant taste:

Seeing victims everywhere you look is the zeitgeist, it is what gives people license to behave as they like while feeling virtuous. Virtue is not manifested in one’s behavior, always so difficult and tedious to control, but in one’s attitudes towards victims. This view of virtue is both sentimental and unfeeling, cloying and brutal: for it implies that those who are not victims are unworthy of our sympathy or understanding, only of our denunciation. Thus a dialectic is set up between libertinism on the one hand and censoriousness on the other, the latter being precisely the characteristic that seeing victims everywhere, and disguising from them the degree of their own responsibility for their situation, was designed to avoid.

Don’t think for a minute, though, that these brilliant diagnoses constitute a cure. The problem with democracy is that we get what they deserve. The democrat victim machine may have created the problem of Baltimore, but it’s the rest of us who are going to have to solve it.