It’s fairly obvious that the President has had a bad week, what with the phony Benghazi hearings, the IRS fiasco and the grab of the AP e-mails, but what’s serious and what’s not, that’s the question.
Darrell Inhofe, the mind that’s not, has called for impeachment. That’s right Darrell, we didn’t impeach Bush or Cheney for allowing the 911 disaster, and starting two fake wars but let’s impeach Obama because the e-mails describing Benghazi weren’t in sync. It seems a shame to refer to this guy as a complete anything but a serous look at him does reveal a complete asshole.
So let’s take a brief look at Benghazi, because a brief look is all it’s worth. If you look past the political yammering of the likes of Inhofe, Cruz and McCain, what you realize is that this whole affair falls on the doorstep of the CIA and to some much smaller extent the State Department.
It was, after all, a CIA facility. If you don’t realize that you just ain’t paying attention. Chris Stevens, the most astute man we had in the area didn’t see what was happening and walked right into it, so where does anyone get off thinking that the President or the Secretary of State, who get their information from those on the ground, particularly the CIA, were supposed to know more than anyone else? We have seen in the last few years and certainly the decades previous, just how functional and more importantly how dysfunctional the CIA can be. They are a quasi-military organization tasked with providing intelligence and occasionally killing someone in the areas in which they operate.
If we didn’t know what was going on in Benghazi it was the CIA’s fault. If we didn’t know how to stop it, it was the CIA’s fault, if we couldn’t get help there in time, it was the CIA’s fault. They fell down on all three fronts, then, realizing that they had screwed the pooch, they tried to blame it on the State Department, which was dumb enough to accept part of the blame and start issuing idiotic statements that were either completely false, just false enough to be talking points or too stupid to be believed. This is incompetence, not politically devious behavior and it is what Thomas Pickering and his committee uncovered in their non-political investigation. This is opposed to what Darrell Issa and his jaded political congressional committee have wasted the taxpayers money, yammering about.
Even though Hillary Clinton, because of her class and her top dog status, accepted the blame, it’s clear that neither she nor the President had anything to do with this and any cries to the contrary are just political noise. This is not Watergate, this is Whitewater and anyone who can’t see the difference is too dumb to be part of the discussion.
Now, though, we find out that the basis for all the Right Wing yammering were the ABC reports of Jon Karl which were originally said to be based on the intercepted State Department e-mails but which we now discover were based on summaries of said e-mails and are wholly worthless for any investigative purpose. It seems that both the facts and even the suppositions on which the Republicans are basing their claims are, as usual, wrong. This is where intelligent human beings just drop the whole mess.
The next big card that the Republicans played was the IRS scandal. The problem with that one is, that it has been a scandal for decades and no one until now has done anything about it. The IRS broke the chops of liberal groups during the Bush administration and now they are doing the same to conservative groups. It was wrong then, it’s wrong now, but it is a wash.
The real scandal, however, isn’t that this time the IRS agents seemed to be picking on the Right, it’s that no one has been applying the various charitable statutes with any accuracy for longer than anyone can remember.
The Supreme Court’s idiotic Citizen’s United decision has opened the door to all kinds of ridiculous interpretations of everything, including the ludicrous concept that a corporation is a person and the idea that we can operate all kinds of political charities, get the deduction and not pay the taxes, as long as we falsely identify them as charities. Yes the current IRA agents came down on more Right Wing groups in this particular situation, probably because the right took more advantage of the loophole than did the left leaving more of them to look into.
Despite the above statement, I will grant that any political prejudice by the IRS agents was wrong and should be eliminated because next time it could, as it has before, work the other way, but the real problem is the law itself, a law, like many financial laws, that bought its way onto the books through the deep pockets of its rich backers.
Anyone who has ever dealt with the IRS about any charitable donations knows that the first rule to be satisfied is that the donor can receive no benefit from his gift. This is written in stone. This rule alone should prohibit any gift to any political organization from gaining tax-exempt status. The bottom line is that you give money to political causes because you want your guy to get elected. That’s beneficial to you, so right there it can’t be a tax-exempt gift. The fact that you’re not backing your guy with the money but just attacking the other guy is nothing but political obfuscation. For decades the IRS has been pussyfooting around this basic concept by whispering that if the gift goes to an organization that does charitable work along with political work things can be adjusted to work out. That is wrong!
Why were the IRS agents seeming to single out Right wing organizations? Well, maybe it’s because there are more of them being set up in the wake of Citizen’s United, or maybe there are a couple of agents who lean to the left. That’s wrong too, but the main reason seems to be that the powers that be at IRS are cracking down, needing to raise more money so we can help rebuild a country that was primarily destroyed by the very people who are now whining that they are being discriminated against.
Obama fired the temporary head of IRS today and appointed a new one. Let’s hope that’s the end of this. All the noise about it’s being a political move by the White House is just more horse pucky from the right.
The real problem that arose this week is the Justice Department’s grab of Associated press e-mails. So far no explanation has been forthcoming from Justice other than it has something to do with an interrupted, Yemen based al Qaeda plot to put a bomb on a U.S. bound plane. It seems that AP reporters knew about this incident but withheld reporting it for almost a month. Interestingly enough, a U.S. drone hit a target in Yemen the day before the story finally broke, killing Fand al-Quso, a senior al Qaeda leader who may or may not have been involved in the bomb plot.
Despite the fact that AP obviously cooperated with the government by withholding the story until our forces could act, the Justice Department has gone ahead with its unprecedented interference with the press, seemingly to gain access to the source of the AP story.
Why would they do this? Because the Obama government through its butt boy Eric Holder seems determined to squash freedom of the press. The Obama White House has indicted more whistleblowers in a little over one term than have been indicted by all previous Presidents combined. This attempt to emulate Big Brother in “1984” is the most dangerous and outrageous aspect of our present government’s attack on our personal freedoms. Obama has decided that he’s terrified of whistleblowers. He’s shown that by the crucifixion of Bradley Manning, the pursuit of Julian Assange, and now this. If Daniel Ellsberg had published the Pentagon Papers now he’d probably be facing a firing squad. By threatening the free press we threaten the last outpost of democratic freedom. Someone has to hold the politicians and the generals accountable. Why is Obama so afraid of this?