Barack Obama, Crimes Against America, The Imperial Welfare State created by DNC Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Soros and other progressive socialist operatives.
Scandals
and Crimes against
the U.S. Constitution -
Barack Hussein Obama
CRIMES AGAINST
AMERICA
CRIMES
AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION
There is
another vital point to understand about Marxist-Leninist economics: The
greatest damage is done to the middle class. With his customary bloodthirsty
malevolence, Lenin said,
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie
[middle class]
is to
grind them between the millstones
of
taxation and inflation.”
You may
suppose that Obama isn’t implementing that aspect of Marxist-Leninist
economics, but you would be mistaken. It’s true that income tax rates haven’t
risen under Obama and inflation has only surfaced in a few areas (e.g., food
and energy) but what you need to understand is that government borrowing is a
tax hike on future taxpayers.
Obama’s unprecedented deficit spending has been
subsidized by the Federal Reserve, whose balance sheet has swelled as they have
bought more and more federal debt (more than 60 percent of the total last
year). Whenever the Fed’s zero interest rate policy ends, some combination of
massive tax hikes and/or raging inflation will ensue, devastating the middle
class.
Already,
Obama’s economic policies have hurt the middle class. They have enervated the
job market, raised food and energy bills, and been accompanied by falling
incomes and net worth. If these are the results of Obama’s partial steps in a
Marxist-Leninist direction, imagine the damage that would be wrought by a
fuller implementation of such an agenda.
Obama is at best a “socialist”
sets an almost impossibly high bar for any leader, and at worse he is a
Communist that will kill you and your entire family?
Even Vladimir Lenin himself couldn’t meet
that standard. Actually, Lenin tried to implement pure socialism when he first came
to power, but when his policies caused the Russian economy to collapse all
around him, in 1921 he abandoned literal socialism and replaced it with a
pragmatic, expedient reform program called the “New Economic Policy.”
Under
NEP, Lenin permitted various privatizations while seeking state domination of
the “commanding heights” of the economy.
President Obama has emulated Lenin in
striving to increase state control over such “commanding heights” of our
economy as energy, health care, finance, and education, with smaller forays
into food, transportation and undoubtedly some areas I am overlooking.
Besides
mimicking some of Lenin’s policy strategies, Obama also has adopted Karl Marx’s
strategies for gradually socializing an economy. That being said, Obama’s
economic program is taken directly, if not deliberately, from the
Marxist-Leninist playbook, and on that basis one may say that Obama tends
toward Marxist-Leninist economics.
Besides adopting the
Leninist strategy of seeking greater control over the commanding heights of the
economy, if one reviews Marx’s 10-point platform for how to socialize a
country’s economy in stages (“The Communist Manifesto,” one finds
that Team Obama and his congressional progressive allies have taken actions to
further the goals laid out in all 10 of the planks in the Marx platform.
Here
are some examples, with Marx’s wording being revised for simplicity’s sake:
1. State control of real
property. Team Obama repeatedly has
thwarted the development of domestic energy supplies by asserting government
ownership and asserting arbitrary regulatory control over massive acreage.
2. Progressive income taxes. Obama has an Ahab-like
obsession with raising taxes on “the rich” even though the top 1 percent of
earners already pay 39 percent of the total income tax.
3. Abolition of inheritance. Obama favors re-institution of estate taxes.
4. Confiscation of the
property of emigrants and rebels. Team Obama has declared
war on offshore tax havens; has sought legal jurisdiction to tax the offshore
income of multi-national corporations as well as foreign citizens and banks
that have any investments in America (causing Switzerland’s oldest bank to
recommend that its clients avoid all American investments);
5. Centralization of the country’s
financial system in the hands of the state. Dodd-Frank was a huge step in this
direction.
6. State control of means of
communication and transportation. Team Obama has attempted to cow conservative media outlets like
Fox News into submission through denunciation and has suggested reviving the
so-called “fairness doctrine” and imposing heavier licensing fees on station
owners. In the area of transportation, Obama insinuated government into the
auto industry, has favored the high-speed rail boondoggle, and wishes he could
compel us all to convert to “green transportation.”
7. Increase state control
over means of production. Through his green energy
subsidies, his failed cap-and-trade scheme, now via EPA regulation, Obama has
sought state control over the industry on which most other industries
depend—energy.
8 Establishment of workers’
armies. Obama has ramped up the number of Americans working for Uncle
Sam by securing a large expansion of Americorps and winning passage of his
Serve America Act. He also has done everything he could to strengthen labor
unions.
9. Control over where people
live. Team Obama doesn’t go quite this far, but one of the clear
implications of cap-and-trade is that government could start to limit human
mobility by controlling how far they can travel by capping energy consumption.
In Brian Sussman’s book, “Eco-Tyranny,” you can read an executive order that
Obama signed on October 5, 2009 that would “divide the country into sectors
where all humans would be herded into urban hubs” while most of the land would
be “returned to a natural state upon which humans would only be allowed to
tread lightly.” (Marx wanted more equal distribution of the human population
between town and country, whereas Obama favors urban concentration, but both
want to control where people live.)
10. Free education. Obama has sought a
federal government monopoly on student loans for higher education, and in his
2012 State of the Union Address, he called for additional funds for new federal
education programs.
As Americans increasingly
feel the pinch of higher prices for food and fuel, the Federal Reserve’s QE2
policy of creating more money has been called into question. Asked if the Fed
bore some responsibility for these vexing price increases, Fed Chairman Ben
Bernanke essentially replied, “It’s not our fault.” Instead, Bernanke blamed
the price increases on “global supply and demand conditions.”
Is Chairman Bernanke
correct? To use a well-known phrase: Not exactly.
Far be it from me, as an
economist, to downplay the importance of supply and demand in determining
prices. Certainly supply and demand have been pushing food and fuel prices
higher. But those factors don’t account for all of the increases. For Bernanke
to claim that the Fed’s inflationary monetary policies have not put upward
pressure on prices is preposterous.
Let’s examine some of the
causes of higher food and fuel prices more closely.
First, fuel: For decades,
it has been federal policy to declare huge tracts of domestic territory
off-limits to petroleum production. Team Obama—whose secretary of energy,
Steven Chu, publicly declared in 2008, “Somehow we have to figure out how to
boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” (i.e., $8 per gallon)—has
been the most radical anti-drilling administration ever. With government having
succeeded in artificially suppressing supply to such a great degree, prices for
oil and gasoline can’t help but be higher than they should be.
Second, food: For
decades, federal policies have been designed to boost food prices above their
free-market level in order to benefit well-organized, well-funded and
politically influential agricultural interests.
In recent years, federal policy has given a turbo-boost to prices of
agricultural commodities by mandating increased usage of ethanol in our gas
tanks. We are literally burning up
millions of acres of corn, a basic food staple. Inevitably, less corn available
for food means a higher price for corn. The higher price for corn ripples
through the economy, resulting in higher prices for competing grains and
livestock that feed on grain—voilà , it gets more expensive to eat.
The ripple effects of
government-induced higher corn prices are international. Since food, like oil,
has a global market, higher agricultural commodity prices are necessarily
global. As food prices have risen, life has become increasingly precarious for
the masses of poor people, such as those in the Middle East who have risen in
protest and toppled governments. In turn, the rising political instability of
the world’s key oil-producing region has imposed an uncertainty premium on the
price of crude oil, further driving up gasoline prices here in the United
States.
Clearly, Ben Bernanke was
right to cite supply and demand factors as contributing to higher food and
energy costs. He was too delicate, too politic, to point out the culpability of
government policy in perpetrating this mischief. Without a doubt, federal
policies have made food and fuel more expensive for Americans, with an
additional international feedback loop whereby higher food prices trigger
political instability in the Middle East, driving up oil prices even further.
However, Bernanke and the
Fed are not blameless here. If the prices of a small number of commodities rise
while most prices do not, we would reasonably conclude that those price
movements are dictated by supply-and-demand factors. But when prices in general
rise, that is the smoking gun that points to an inflationary monetary policy.
Since the Fed’s QE2
program was launched last September, the Commodities Research Bureau index of
19 basic, widely used commodities has risen by almost 40 percent. Has demand
risen and supplies fallen significantly for all commodities since September?
The odds against such an improbable coincidence are astronomical.
Instead, the answer is
obvious: The Fed has flooded the financial system with newly created money, and
the inevitable result of a lot more money bidding for approximately the same
supply of goods is markedly higher prices. Indeed, for Bernanke to deny partial
responsibility for higher prices is more than disingenuous, since the Fed’s
stated goal last September was for prices to rise more rapidly. Does the Fed
now regret getting what it wished and aimed for?
The solution to the
problem of soaring prices of food and fuel lies in Washington. If Congress, the
president, and the bureaucracies would restore free markets in food and fuel
markets, prices would come down. If Bernanke and the Fed would quit expanding
the supply of Federal Reserve Notes, upward pressure on prices would be
diminished. It’s that simple, economically. Whether Washington’s frequent
perverse, wealth-destroying policies can be reversed politically is another
matter
Benghazi
the
murdering of Americans in Benghazi Libya. CBS 60 minutes exposed the lie and the
reporter was suspended pending termination.
Sunday night's CBS news program 60 Minutes' was a devastating--and
surprising--expose on the slaughter of Americans in Benghazi, Libya last year
including American Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other brave
Americans. Oh, and no surprise, former
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D) and President Barack Obama's (D) repeated
assertions that the entire deadly incident was caused by the silly you tube
video, "The Innocence of Muslims," mocking Islam, were wrong. Or as
Clinton so notoriously put it, Was it because of a protest or was it because of
guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What
difference at this point does it make? As CBS summarizes, "Benghazi was a
planned, sophisticated attack by al Qaeda against a barely protected American
outpost." This lack of protection makes a great deal of difference as
there were numerous indications of al Qaeda activity in the area and repeated
early warnings of planned attacks. The
segment left a great deal unsaid: why did the USA have a consulate in Benghazi
and what was really going on there and of course, why wasn't outside aid and
rescue attempted? On the evening of
September 11, 2012, Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic compound
in Benghazi, Libya, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S.
Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith. Stevens was the
first U.S. Ambassador killed on duty since 1979. Several hours later, a second
assault targeted a different compound about one mile away, killing two CIA
contractors, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen Doherty. Ten others were also injured in
the attacks.
WWII Memorial Obama shut down According to emails obtained by
National Review Online, the U.S. National Park Service employees were also
constantly monitoring the news for any negative media attention. Moreover, the
emails show that government shutdown exceptions were granted to National Park
Service employees. The Obama administration tried to make political hay out of
the government shutdown by closing the National Mall and denying access to
monuments, but the decision backfired when the veterans defied the signs and
fences and entered the WWII Memorial. The vets were taking part in the
Mississippi Gulf Coast Honor Flight, established in 2011 to help fly the
state's WWII veterans to Washington, D.C. and to provide tours to monuments
dedicated in their honor.
Obama
told the American people that it was necessary to shut down the Mall and blamed
Republicans for creating the hardships. However, the emails reveal that the
Department of the Interior and National Park Service did not have to shut down
the monuments but did so to make a point. On September 30, Tom Buttry, a legislative
correspondent in Senator Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) office, stated that it would
actually be easier and less costly to keep the mall open than to shut it down:
While I
understand that these memorials have remained accessible to the public during
past shutdowns (I’d imagine with the mall being so open, it'd probably [be]
more manpower intensive to try to completely close them), I wanted to do my due
diligence and make 100 percent sure that people could visit the outdoor
memorials on the National Mall in the event of a shutdown.
IRS Lois
Lerner the
force of government to stop the Tea Party In 2013, the United States Internal
Revenue Service (IRS) revealed that it had selected political groups applying
for tax-exempt status for intensive scrutiny based on their names or political
themes. This led to wide condemnation of the agency and triggered several
investigations, including a Federal Bureau of Investigation criminal probe
ordered by United States Attorney General Eric Holder. Initial reports
described the selections as nearly exclusively of conservative groups with
terms such as "Tea Party" in their names. Further investigation by
media outlets revealed that some liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement
had also triggered additional scrutiny, but not at nearly the same rate as
conservative groups. Congressional Republicans have argued that no liberal
groups were targeted. According to Salon, the only tax-exempt status denial by
the IRS related to the targeting involved the revocation of a previously
granted tax-exempt status for a progressive group. The use of target lists
continued through May 2013. Ms. Lerner’s email warning to colleagues to be
careful about what they said in electronic communications issued less than two
weeks after the IRS internal auditor shared a draft report with the agency
accusing it of targeting tea party and other conservative groups.
A month
after the email, Ms. Lerner would plant a question at a conference to reveal
the scandal, just before the inspector general’s report was made public.
Ms.
Lerner’s email was turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee last week, more than a year after lawmakers sought it as part of
their investigation into the IRS targeting.
Republicans
said the email shows Ms. Lerner was aware that Congress was investigating the
agency and that she was preparing to intentionally hide agency discussions from
lawmakers.
Ms.
Lerner’s email record has become a major scandal in and of itself after the IRS
revealed that her computer hard drive crashed in 2011, causing the agency to
lose thousands of her messages.
The IRS
tried to recover some of the messages by asking others on the email chain to
dig through their mailboxes, but the agency acknowledged that some messages may
be permanently lost.
Some
Republicans have questioned whether the IRS took enough steps to try to recover
the emails from the hard drive in 2011.
Fast and
Furious the
running of illegal guns to drug cartels in Mexico "Gunwalking",
or "letting guns walk", was a tactic of the Arizona Field Office of
the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF),
which ran a series of sting operations between 2006 and 2011 in the Tucson and
Phoenix area where the ATF "purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to
sell weapons to illegal straw buyers, hoping to track the guns to Mexican drug
cartel leaders and arrest them." These operations were done under the
umbrella of Project Gunrunner, a project intended to stem the flow of firearms
into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the
United States. The Chambers case[who?] began in October 2009, and eventually
became known in February 2010 as "Operation Fast and Furious" after
agents discovered some of the suspects under investigation belonged to a car
club The stated goal of allowing these purchases was to continue to track the
firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures
in Mexican cartels, with the expectation that this would lead to their arrests
and the dismantling of the cartels. The tactic was questioned during the operations
by a number of people, including ATF field agents and cooperating licensed gun
dealers. During Operation Fast and Furious, the largest "gunwalking"
probe, the ATF monitored the sale of about 2,000 :203 firearms, of which only 710 were recovered as
of February 2012 :203 A number of straw purchasers have been arrested and
indicted; however, as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel
figures had been arrested. Guns tracked by the ATF have been found at crime
scenes on both sides of the Mexico–United States border, and the scene where
United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed December 2010. The
"gunwalking" operations became public in the aftermath of Terry's
murder. Dissenting ATF agents came forward to Congress in response. According
to Humberto BenÃtez Treviño, former Mexican Attorney General and chair of the
justice committee in the Chamber of Deputies, related firearms have been found
at numerous crime scenes in Mexico where at least 150 Mexican civilians were
maimed or killed. Revelations of "gunwalking" led to controversy in
both countries, and diplomatic relations were damaged. As a result of a dispute
over the release of Justice Department documents related to the scandal,
Attorney General Eric Holder became the first sitting member of the Cabinet of
the United States to be held in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012. Earlier
that month, President Barack Obama had invoked executive privilege for the
first time in his presidency over the same documents.
DHS Border
Patrol Open
Borders the rush of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens the Border Patrol and Customs have already engaged in a number
of “purges” where agents close to retirement were forced to retire even though
they still had room for advancement. “They want employees who are loyal to DHS
and CBP, which is why the old BP logos and decals have been pretty much removed
off the vehicles,” Agencies like CBP, ICE, TSA, and the like were placed under
DHS' roof for command and control purposes,” Ramirez continued. “However the
real purpose has been to keep the facts from reaching the public. In point of
fact, DHS is a propaganda ministry in its own right, given the blatant
misinformation released by top officials. In the wrong hands it could easily
act in a way similar to ‘State Security’.” Concerned lawmakers and activists
across America from all points on the political spectrum have for months been
seeking an explanation about the Obama administration apparently stockpiling
weapons of war for domestic use. Estimates suggest, for example, that the
federal government has committed to purchasing up to 2 billion rounds of
ammunition over several years while rolling out dozens of armored vehicles
known as MRAPs on U.S. soil. Meanwhile, the controversial Department of
Homeland Security and its boss Janet Napolitano are refusing to provide real
answers. Now, however, at least one
member of Congress is proposing to stop funding DHS unless and until it
explains the controversial arms buildup, which has sparked widespread suspicion
even among Obama’s most devoted supporters.
FEMA Concentration Camps - This could be exactly the motivation that Obama has for the
continued funding of numerous FEMA camps throughout the country. Heck, we have
even heard our community organizer in chief speak about his proposal of
‘prolonged detention.’ He has explained that he intends to incarcerate anyone
that he feels poses a threat to America and may potentially commit a crime in
the future. I certainly do not want Obama defining just exactly who would be a
threat to his version of America. In 2009 a bill passed in the House, HR 645
that was to “direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national
emergency centers on military installations.” Yet, it seems that none of our politicians
want to acknowledge these…with the exception of freedom lovers like Ron Paul
who has spoken out against this. You do understand that FEMA has been
assimilated into the Department of Homeland Security, right? This means that in
the case of a national emergency or the declaration of martial law, FEMA would
report and answer directly to the president. Therefore, FEMA actually has the
right to suspend constitutional rights and detain people indefinitely. Hmmm,
could be an excellent tool for Obama to implement his prolonged detention
ideas. In fact, these FEMA camps have been, and are being, built all over the
country. Obama has ordered this construction and to get it done as quickly as
possible. There is speculation that there are as many as 100 of these camps.
FEMA has already divided the country into 10 different zones. This all seems a
little excessive for helpful centers that are designed to be used in times of
natural disasters, right? Plus, consider the fact that all of these FEMA
facilities have several layers of fencing and all have barbed wire at the top,
pointing towards the inside of the fence. Why would this be needed if you were
just helping people…why be afraid that someone might get out? There are also
electronically operated turnstiles guarding the single entry point and cameras
closely watching these supposedly empty sites. I am not one to go in for
conspiracy theories, but I think it is safe to assume that questions need to be
asked about all this. Sure, maybe there are good reasons for the building of
these facilities. Maybe Obama really is sincere about his program of prolonged
detention…but inquiring minds want to know more.
Syrian
Red Line the
killing of hundreds of thousands of people by Obama's refusal to help
Crimea
Invasion and Putin the
expansion of the old Communist Soviet Empire
Common
Core the manipulation of history and young minds in the classroom
VA Veterans Administration Death Waiting List for cash bonuses and awards
Solyndra Solar Scam the spending of billions of taxpayer
dollars with no results
Keystone
Pipeline never
to be build so wealthy friends can haul oil on their railroad
Federal
Reserve the
creation of trillions of fiat-fake money destroying the dollar
Welfare
Food Stamps over
50 million people being fed daily by the government
ObamaCare the ACA Affordable Care Act Communist
Socialist control over medical care
Iran
Nuclear Program given
time to build a complete nuclear weapons system
Iraq
Premature Troop Withdrawl and
Obama's failure to protect the investment in blood and money
ISIS and
other Islamic Caliphate members
allowed to build a nation of terrorists
Planned
Parenthood funding
by Obama allowed to kill hundreds of thousands of Negros
Illegal
Aliens by
the millions allowed to remain inside the United States without deportation
Main
Stream Media bribed
and bought and paid for by Obama and controlled by the FCC
LGBT Gay
Marriage Movement
against the wishes of the American people
Unemployment Under-employment raging across
America
False Government
Reporting and
broadcasting half truths and lies-staged White House briefings
Bundy
Cattle Ranch as
BLM raids the lone rancher who was late paying fees
DHS
Department of Homeland Security TSA airport security abusing individual rights
The Lying
Obama President
Obama clearly a liar and continues to lie to the America people
Dictatorial Power Obama ignores Congress and uses Executive Orders
against the people
DOJ Department of Justice is racial - radical - and resists the
Constitution
NSA National Security Agencies spying on each American and others around the
world
IRS Lois Lerner IRS Commission Koskinen corruption destruction of records
EPA Gina McCarthy War on Coal - Closing Power Plants - Surging Energy
Prices
DHS Jeh Johnson Open Borders - FEMA domestic camps and prisons
Bergdhal Taliban Five (5) Terrorist Trade from GITMO for the Traitors
Return
NSA Snowden Security Collapse allowing the discovery of illegal government
activity
Caliphate Formed Islamic Muslim Taliban Al-Qaeda ISIS Army Syria
Iran Iraq
Here’s a short list of the many scandals Team Obama thinks it can make America forget:
The great “stimulus” heist: Obama seems to think nobody will remember he grabbed almost a trillion dollars for “stimulus” spending, created virtually zero private-sector jobs with it, allowed a great deal of the money to vanish into thin air, and spent the rest of his presidency complaining that he needed hundreds of billions more to repair roads and bridges.
Vast sums of taxpayer money were wasted on foolish projects that came close to the Keynesian economic satire of hiring some people to dig holes, and others to fill them in. Obama added insult to injury by appointing Vice President Joe Biden as the “sheriff” who would supposedly find all that missing stimulus loot.
Americans mostly ended up footing the bill for was an army of government jobs, and a lavish network of slush funds for the Democratic Party and its union allies. We’re supposed to forget about all that because years later, Obama’s weak economy finally dragged itself to something like normal “official” employment levels… with the U.S. national debt doubled, and our workforce rate reduced to Carter-era lows. Sorry, Democrats, but that’s more than just failed policy. It’s one of the worst government-spending scandals in our history. Democrats will howl to the moon over far, far smaller abuses of taxpayer money during the Trump administration, should any occur.
Operation Fast and Furious: Obama partisans seem to think any given example of abuse or ineptitude by their man stopped being a “scandal” the moment it seemed clear he wouldn’t be impeached over it. Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration’s insane program to use American gun dealers and straw purchasers to arm Mexican drug lords, is a scandal with a huge body count, prominently including Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata, plus hundreds of Mexican citizens. Agent Terry’s family certainly thinks it qualifies as a scandal.
It is difficult to imagine any Republican administration surviving anything remotely close to Fast and Furious. The media would have dogged a Republican president without respite, especially when it became clear his Attorney General was putting political spin ahead of accountability and the safety of the American people. Remember, AG Eric Holder escaped perjury charges by claiming he didn’t know what his own subordinates were doing – a pioneering, but sadly not unique, example of an Obama official using his or her incompetence as a defense. For years afterward, we would hear some version of “I’m not a crook, I’m just completely inept” everywhere from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
But this was Barack Obama, so the media downplayed Fast and Furious news… to the point where viewers of NBC News learned about the scandal for the first time when Holder was on the verge of being held in contempt by Congress for it.
The relatively benign explanation for the astounding Fast and Furious scandal is that Obama’s Justice Department wanted to release guns into the Mexican wild, like so many radio-tagged antelope on a nature show, and follow them to arrest the big fish of organized crime. (In case you were wondering, no, the guns didn’t actually have radio tags in them – that was tried in the much smaller, and utterly disastrous, Bush-era program Obama’s team used as a model for their vastly larger and more careless program.) This explanation becomes more difficult to believe, the more you know about how careless the program was, and how abruptly it was shut down after Agent Terry’s death.
The more sinister take on Fast and Furious is that the Obama administration wanted to create gun crimes in Mexico so they could complain about lax regulations on American gun sales – “for the purposes of creating a narrative that they could use in America to try and thwart our Second Amendment constitutional rights,” as Andrew Breitbart put it during a 2012 interview.
No matter which interpretation you subscribe to, or how much you think Barack Obama knew about the program when he made scurrilous claims of executive privilege to shut down investigations, it’s an insult to a large number of murder victims to claim it wasn’t a scandal. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives hasn’t learned as much from the OFF debacle as we might have hoped.
Incidentally, the Border Patrol named a station in southern Arizona in Agent Brian Terry’s honor. On New Year’s Eve, persons unknown fired rifle shots at a Border Patrol vehicle near the station.
Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress: This was a result of Operation Fast and Furious, but it merits distinction as a separate scandal in its own right. Holder was the first sitting member of a president’s cabinet in the history of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress.
Of course, Democrats closed ranks behind Holder, the White House protected him, and the media allowed Holder to spin the contempt vote as mere “political theater.” In reality, it was a difficult step that responsible members of Congress didn’t want to take, and it was fully justified by Holder’s disgraceful conduct in the Fast and Furious investigation. No reasonable person could possibly review the way OFF was handled and conclude it was an example of transparency and accountability.
ObamaCare: Everything about ObamaCare is a scandal, from the President’s incessant lies about keeping your old plan if you liked it, to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s “we need to pass it to find out what’s in it” dereliction of Congressional duty.
ObamaCare is a scam, pure and simple – sold on false pretenses by people who knew it wasn’t going to work the way they promised. It doesn’t feel right to dismiss it as a “failed” scheme when so much of the failure was intentional. The bill was so sloppily crafted that Democrats were basically signing blank sheets of paper when they rushed it through Congress in a foul-smelling cloud of back-room deals. ObamaCare’s designers precipitated a constitutional crisis by forgetting they left in a provision to cut subsidies for states that didn’t set up health-care exchanges – a provision that would have killed the entire program stone-dead two years ago, if it had been enforced as written.
The Supreme Court rewrote ObamaCare on the fly twice to keep it alive, which is a scandal in and of itself. President Obama delayed and rewrote the law so often it was impossible to keep track of the changes, cutting Congress out of the loop completely. (Actually, someone did keep careful track of them, and the tally was up to 70 distinct changes by January 2016.)
That made some of Obama’s rewritten mandates and deadlines blatantly illegal – but then, the Affordable Care Act isn’t really a “law” in the sense American government understood the term. In practice it became something entirely new, an enabling act that gave the executive unlimited power to do whatever it thought necessary to keep the system running. If subverting the American system of government isn’t a scandal, what is?
And let’s not forget the scandal of ObamaCare’s disastrous launch, foisted on the American people even though its designers knew it had severe flaws – the billion-dollar website that cost another billion dollars to fix after it crashed, accompanied by a constellation of state exchanges that blew up like Roman candles of bureaucratic incompetence. Let us not forget the absolute zero accountability for this disaster, mismanaged by everyone from President Obama to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who treated the biggest new government program in several generations as though it were a minor side project that could be handled by subordinates with minimal supervision.
Spying on journalists: Establishment media came about as close to falling out of love with Barack Obama as ever when his administration was caught spying on journalists.
Why, if the reporter subjected to the most egregious surveillance, James Rosen, didn’t work for Fox News, the mainstream media might have started treating Obama like a (shudder) Republican. Rosen was treated so badly that even Attorney General Eric Holder eventually admitted feeling a bit of “remorse” about it. Apparently he felt so much anguish that he suffered temporary amnesia and forgot to tell Congress that he signed off on the request to wiretap Rosen while he was testifying under oath.
The IRS scandal: The selective targeting of conservative groups by a politicized Internal Revenue Service was a scandal grenade Democrats and their media pals somehow managed to smother, even though the story began with the IRS admitting wrongdoing.
Democrats suffocated the scandal by acting like circus clowns during congressional hearings, but at no point were the actual facts of the case truly obscured: yes, pro-life and Tea Party groups were deliberately targeted for extra scrutiny, their tax exemption applications outrageously delayed until after the 2012 election without actually being refused. If anything remotely comparable had been done to, say, environmentalist and minority activist groups by the IRS under a Republican administration, the results would have been apocalyptic.
There’s also no question about the facts of the follow-up scandal, in which IRS officials brazenly lied about having backups of relevant computer data. The American people were expected to believe that multiple state-of-the-art hard drives failed, and were instantly shredded instead of being subjected to data recovery procedures.
Luckily for the politicized IRS, the Justice Department was hyper-politicized under Obama too, so no charges were filed, and scandal kingpin Lois Lerner got to enjoy her taxpayer-funded retirement after taking the Fifth to thwart lawful congressional investigation.
Benghazi: This is the clearest example of Obama and his supporters thinking all of his pre-2012 scandals ceased to exist the moment he won re-election. Benghazi has been investigated extensively, and argued about passionately, since the night of September 11, 2012. Nothing can change the absolute fact that the Obama administration’s story for the first few weeks after the attack was false, and they knew it was false. They spun a phony story to buy themselves a little time during a presidential election campaign, and it worked.
Nothing can change the fact that Libya was a disaster after Obama’s unlawful military operation. Nothing can obscure the truth that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was sent into a known terrorist hot zone without a backup plan to ensure his safety. Everything else from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their defenders is pure political spin. They dragged the story out for years, until they thought it couldn’t hurt them any more. That doesn’t erase its status as a scandal. (And they were evidently incorrect in their belief that it couldn’t hurt them any more!)
Hillary Clinton’s secret server: While we’re on the subject of Hillary Clinton, her secret email server is an Obama scandal, too. She perpetrated her email offenses while working as his Secretary of State, and contrary to Obama’s false assertions, he knew about it.
Plenty of Obama officials other than Clinton played email games, most infamously EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who created a false identity for herself named “Richard Windsor” to get around government transparency rules.
The Pigford scandal: Named after a landmark lawsuit from the Bill Clinton era, the abuse of a program meant to compensate minority farmers for racial discrimination exploded under Obama. After years of left-wing attacks on Andrew Breitbart for daring to speak up about the scandal, the mainstream media – no less than the New York Times – finally admitted his critique of the program was accurate in 2013.
Once again: if careless mishandling (or deliberate politicized misuse) of huge sums of taxpayer money isn’t a scandal, what is?
NSA spying scandal: Opinions about the nature and intensity of this scandal vary wildly across the political spectrum, but there’s no doubt that Edward Snowden’s pilfering of sensitive National Security Agency data was a debacle that damaged national security. We had the ghastly spectacle of Attorney General Holder thanking Snowden for performing a public service by exposing surveillance programs Holder’s own administration didn’t want to talk about.
President Obama and his administration made many false statements as they tried to contain the political damage. The fallout included significant losses for U.S. companies, and diplomatic problems for the United States. Just about everything Obama did before, during, and after the Snowden saga damaged the relationship between American citizens and their government.
Polluting the Colorado river: The Environmental Protection Agency managed to turn the Colorado River orange under this greenest of green Presidents. Of course there was a cover-up. Would you expect anything less from this “transparent” administration?
The GSA scandal: The General Services Administration was caught wasting ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money on lavish parties and silly projects. Heroic efforts to resist accountability were made, leaving puzzled observers to ask what it took to get fired from government employment under Barack Obama. (Alas, it was hardly the last time that question would be asked.) Oh, and of course there was a cover-up from the Most Scandal-Free Administration Ever.
The VA death-list scandal: The Department of Veterans Affairs has long been troubled, but the big scandals broke on Obama’s watch, most infamously the secret death lists veterans were put on while executives handed in phony status reports and signed themselves up for big bonuses. Obama was more interested in spinning the news and minimizing his political exposure than addressing problems; in few areas outside ObamaCare has his rhetoric been more hollow, his promises more meaningless.
Solyndra: The marquee green energy scandal wrote “crony capitalism” into the American political lexicon, as corners were cut and protocols ignored to shovel billions of taxpayer dollars at companies with absurdly unrealistic business models. President Obama’s ability to pick bad investments was remarkable. Luckily for him, American taxpayers covered his losses.
Shutdown theater: Obama hit the American people hard during the great government shutdown crisis of 2013, doing everything he could to make American citizens feel maximum pain – from using “Barry-cades” to keep war veterans away from their memorials, to releasing illegal alien criminals from detention centers. It was an infuriating lesson for voters in how every dollar they get from government is a dollar that can be used against them, when they are impudent enough to demand spending restraint.
