Obama Isn't Embarrassed About His Scandals. He Should Be.

Much has been written about Donald Trump's difficulties in separating fact from fiction, but the current resident of the White House isn't the only one to paint a biased view of reality. Recently, Barack Obama rewrote the history of his administration when he claimed, "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us."

Mr. Obama's remarks came in a closed-door meeting at MIT in Boston last Friday and were reported by "Reason." Per the report, attendees "had to agree that they would not record, photograph, tweet, or report on the event before being granted a seat in the audience." Nevertheless, a recorded copy of the speech was made available to the libertarian-leaning website.

In the speech, the former president admitted that his administration made mistakes, but said, "We didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us." Then he added, "I know that seems like a low bar" to audience laughter.

"Generally speaking, you didn't hear about a lot of drama inside our White House," Obama continued.

It may be revisionism, wishful thinking or the mental effects of old age, but if President Obama can't remember any scandals from his administration, I sure can. In fact, the scandals of the Obama Administration were so numerous that it would take too much time to list them all, but let's review a few of the biggest ones.

1. Solyndra. The Solyndra scandal emerged from the 2009 stimulus bill. The government provided loan guarantees to the tune of more than $500 million to a solar panel manufacturer that subsequently went bankrupt, leaving taxpayers holding the bag. The company lied in disclosures to the government, but regulators say the Obama Administration pressured them to approve the subsidies.

2. Fast and Furious. Obama's DOJ and ATF concocted a scheme to trace smuggled guns to Mexico under the code name "Fast and Furious." Ultimately, about 2,000 guns were illegally purchased and many were allowed to cross the border into Mexico. Hundreds have been recovered in connection with crimes in both the US and Mexico. Two were used in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010. The scheme sparked an international incident when it was revealed that the ATF had allowed guns to flow across the border to Mexican drug cartels.

3. IRS Targeting. The IRS admitted to targeting conservative Tea Party groups and denying their tax-exempt status based on their political beliefs. A DOJ investigation, which was hampered by the loss of Lois Lerner's emails when her computer crashed, found that "poor management is not a crime."

4. Near doubling of the National Debt. A major underreported scandal of the Obama years is his spending spree. CNN fact checkers confirmed that the US borrowed more on President Obama's watch than all other presidents combined. The heavy spending of the Obama Administration will be a weight around the necks of American taxpayers for generations to come.

5. Benghazi and the Video Tape. On Sept. 11, 2012, terrorists attacked the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing five Americans. The Obama Administration blamed the attack on protests of an anti-Islamic video tape in an effort to protect Mr. Obama's campaign narrative that the Islamic terror threat was winding down on his watch. The Obama Administration's mismanagement of the crisis and subsequent cover up was a major scandal.

6. Clinton Email Scandal. The Benghazi investigation led to the revelation that Hillary Clinton used an unsecure private server as Secretary of State. The subsequent investigation of Clinton's mishandling of classified information, apparently with President Obama's knowledge, led directly to the memo from FBI Director Comey a week prior to the 2016 election that shifted the race to Donald Trump's favor.

7. Russian Cyberattack on 2016 Election. Much of President Obama's relationship with Russia was scandalous, from his promise to have more "flexibility" after the 2012 election to his appeasement of Vladimir Putin during the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and parts of Ukraine. However, the icing on the cake was Obama's mishandling of the Russian cyberattacks on election infrastructure and manipulation of US public opinion on social media. There was ample warning of Russia's activities and President Obama did very little to hinder them.

I could go on, but I won't. It should be apparent that the Obama Administration was both incompetent and scandal-plagued. The United States is still feeling the effects of Obama's mismanagement and will be for years to come.

Perhaps what President Obama meant is that he remembers these scandals and just isn't embarrassed by them. If that's the case, he should be.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Valerie Jarrett pronounces Obama scandal-free

Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama, triggered a collective national “WTF” moment on Sunday when she said on CNN that the Obama Administration had been scandal free. Jarrett, who might have been playing Rip Van Winkle for the past eight years, said, “The president prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”

Pardon us while we scoff.

The Obama Administration started off with a scandal as a plethora of Obama appointees, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, were revealed to be tax cheats. The problem didn’t go away after the original round of confirmations in 2009. In 2012, Investor’s Business Daily found that 36 Obama aides owed almost a million dollars in back taxes.

The president’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, was tainted by backroom deals to get Democrats on board. The phrase “Louisiana Purchase” took on new meaning as the revelations of $200 million for Louisiana’s Medicare in exchange for Senator Mary Landrieu’s vote angered Americans. In the end, even with the secret deals, Obamacare required quasi-constitutional maneuvering to get through the Senate with no Republican votes.

Does Valerie Jarrett not consider it embarrassing that the president was awarded the dubious distinction of having told the Lie of the Year by Politifact for his statement that, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” As it turned out, many Americans could not keep their plans because insurers canceled them since they didn’t comply with the new law. Even plans that weren’t canceled weren’t the same after Obamacare. Premiums skyrocketed as new federal mandates went into effect.

How about the Solyndra scandal? Obama’s administration put hundreds of millions of dollars into green companies, many of which promptly went bankrupt. Does that count as a scandal?

How about Fast and Furious? Obama’s ATF released illegal guns into Mexico where they were used to arm drug cartels. One of those guns eventually killed a US Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry.

Is the politicization of the IRS worthy of being called a scandal? The targeting of political opponents by the Internal Revenue Service is positively Nixonian. The main difference is that Nixon’s IRS commissioner refused to comply with similar unethical orders from the Nixon White House.

Originally published on The Resurgent

Why isn't Trump attacking Hillary?

This week was perhaps the most damaging week of Hillary Clinton’s career. FBI Director James Comey’s decision to recommend that she not be charged for mishandling classified information was overshadowed by the facts that he laid out. Comey called her “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information and judged that her account, as well as email accounts that she was in contact with, were likely compromised by “hostile actors” that could threaten the security of the United States. How has Trump responded to the FBI assault on the basic competence of his opponent? He spent several days embroiled in a controversy over an allegedly anti-Semitic tweet and then came out of in favor of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi. Why isn’t Trump attacking Hillary?

To be sure, Donald Trump did accuse Clinton of offering a “bribe” to Attorney-General Loretta Lynch by floating the possibility that Lynch might keep her job in a Clinton Administration. The Washington Post noted that Clinton has never publicly stated that Lynch might be welcome in her White House, but that the New York Times had attributed the idea to Democrats close to Clinton.

NBC News also reported that Trump had criticized Director Comey’s decision at a rally in North Carolina on Tuesday, July 5, the day of the FBI announcement. Trump used his pet name for Clinton, “Crooked Hillary,” and told the audience, “You didn't have to be careless. You didn't even have to really know that what you were doing was wrong, and you're guilty. The laws are very explicit. Stupidity is not a reason that you're going to be innocent, OK? It's not a reason.”

At that point, Trump seemed to veer off message. He became distracted by a controversy about a Trump campaign tweet that featured a six-pointed star that some associated with a Star of David. The tweet featured Hillary Clinton in front of a pile of cash and carried the logo, “History made: Most corrupt candidate ever.” The phrase, “most corrupt candidate ever” was inside a six pointed star that has been variously described as a “Star of David” and a “sheriff’s star.” CNN notes that the meme originally appeared “on an anti-Semitic, white supremacist message board.”

Trump said in a tweet that his campaign should not have removed the controversial meme and defended the star on Wednesday, July 6. CNN commented, “Trump's comments on Wednesday revived a controversy that appeared to be quickly fading under the weight of the news that Hillary Clinton's private emails included classified information, and that she will not face charges. On a day when Clinton's controversies dominated the airwaves, Trump resurrected his own.”

By Wednesday night, Trump was totally off message. Rather than spending time attacking Clinton’s judgement, Trump told a North Carolina crowd that Saddam Hussein was a great anti-terrorist.

“He was a bad guy -- really bad guy. But you know what? He did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn't read them the rights. They didn't talk. They were terrorists. Over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism,” Trump said.CNN points out that Trump supported the Iraq War in 2003.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a state supporter of terrorism. The “9/11 Commission Report” stated that “Baghdad actively sponsored terrorist groups” and “Saddam used foreign terrorist groups as an instrument of foreign policy.”

Donald Trump not only is wrong about history, his comments further focused attention on himself and distracted attention from Hillary Clinton’s disastrous week. This is not the first time that Trump has gone easy on Clinton.

On June 2, Clinton sharply mocked Donald Trump on foreign policy. “Donald Trump's ideas are not just different, they are dangerously incoherent,” she said in Reuters. “They're not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.” She went on to speculate that Trump might start a nuclear war if elected to the White House simply because “somebody got under his very thin skin.”

One might expect a broadside against the Secretary of State who presided over the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and the rise of ISIS, the bungling of the Arab Spring and the Iranian uprising, the implosion of Syria, the failed Russian reset, and, of course, the debacle at Benghazi. One would be wrong.

Rather than challenging Hillary on the substance of her speech or attacking her own record, Trump responded with tweets as Hillary predicted he would do during her speech. The first gave a general challenge to Clinton’s credibility while the second criticized her poise.

“Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton!” Trump tweeted. “Reading poorly from the teleprompter [sic]! She doesn't even look presidential!”

In fact, Trump’s attacks on Hillary seem very restrained. Compare his criticism of Clinton to his concerted attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the judge assigned to his Trump University fraud case. Trump spent weeks and devoted large amounts of air time to attacking Judge Curiel’s Mexican heritage just after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee. The time might have been better spent unifying the Republican Party or launching attacks on Hillary Clinton, who had yet to secure her own nomination.

The Wall Street Journal reported that, after clinching the Democratic nomination, Clinton ran 20,000 ads to get her message out to potential voters. For the same period, Trump ran none. Zero. Not a single commercial. This total shutout in advertising is almost certainly what allows Hillary to maintain a lead over Trump in spite of her seriously damaged campaign.

While Trump may be attacking Hillary at his campaign rallies, his criticisms are overshadowed by his own outlandish and rambling comments. Time and time again, Trump’s antics have distracted the news cycle from Hillary’s troubles. Whatever his strategy or motive, his anti-Hillary message is not getting out to voters. Trump is destroying his own campaign.

Read it on Conservative Firing Line

Is Hillary electable?

Hillary Clinton has finally announced her candidacy for president. Her candidacy was begun with a tweet and a two-and-a-half minute You Tube video, of which only about 40 seconds is Hillary giving her announcement and rationale for seeking office.

In contrast to the Republican hopefuls, who kicked off their presidential campaigns to adoring crowds, Hillary’s campaign began with a soundbite on social media followed by a trip in her “Scooby” van to Iowa with no organized campaign stops along the way. Hillary’s presidential announcement was almost secretive in comparison to the Republicans, with no rallies, no crowds of supporters and no questions from the media.

Hillary’s trip to Iowa is more akin to a fugitive sneaking across the state line than a triumphant politician arriving to assume her mandate. When Clinton’s “Scooby” van stopped at an Ohio Chipotle restaurant, the presumptive Democratic nominee was incognito, hiding behind a large pair of sunglasses. She not only did no campaigning, but she was only recognized when the manager examined the store’s surveillance videos after being tipped by a New York Times reporter than Hillary had visited the restaurant. Neither employees nor other customers had recognized the former First Lady.

Dick Morris, a longtime confidante of the Clintons, explains that the subterfuge is part of Hillary’s nature. Unlike her extroverted, fun-loving husband, Hillary is “hidden, paranoid, secret, controlled, and scripted” according to Morris. Where Bill was a natural campaigner, Morris calls Hillary a “born bureaucrat” who sticks “to a script, blundering when she make the slightest departure.”

The current crop of scandals that are already dogging the Clinton campaign can only serve to heighten Hillary’s sense of secrecy and paranoia. She has hidden from the media for the past several months as the scandal of her personal email server and deleted emails developed. Questions about the legality of sending classified documents via unsecure personal email and an unsecure server mean that Hillary has to consider that any questions that she answers might come back to haunt her in a criminal proceeding.

Keeping Hillary away from the media and real voters also minimizes the chance of an embarrassing gaffe. Ms. Clinton is known for a number of misstatements, such as when she asked congressional Benghazi investigators, “What difference, at this point does it make?” or when she claimed that the Clintons were “dead broke” upon leaving the White House in 2001.

One embarrassing error has already occurred. Hillary’s long-awaited announcement also came with a serious typo according to Bloomberg. A press release heralding her announcement claimed that she had “fought children and families all her career,” omitting the word “for.” Although the wording was quickly corrected, it is shocking that such a high profile announcement on a multibillion dollar campaign could have seen the light of day.

Similarly, Hillary’s campaign logo, a blue “H” with a red arrow, quickly became the target of widespread ridicule. Many claimed it resembled a road sign that pointed toward a hospital or the FedEx logo. Julian Assange claimed that it was based on the WikiLeaks logo.

Hillary has long been assumed to be inevitable by many on both the left and right. Now with her lack of campaign skills, scandals, and a slipshod campaign becoming evident, the question is whether she is electable at all.

Hillary’s biggest advantage over any Republican is that she is well known. Many Republican candidates are new to the national stage and not familiar outside the GOP. According to Gallup, 90 percent of Americans are already familiar with Hillary. No Republican even comes close.

The downside for Hillary is that, while she is well known, she is also a polarizing figure. Even the Huffington Post puts her approval rating almost equal with her disapproval at 47 – 46 percent. Further, polls that use likely voters rather than adults give her a much high negative rating. Republican candidates are not as well known, but have much lower negatives.

While Hillary’s name recognition gave her an early lead in polling, there are signs that her lead may already be fading. Karl Rove pointed out in the Wall St. Journal that recent polling in 15 battleground states showed Ms. Clinton trailing a generic Republican. Recent polling available on Real Clear Politics also shows several races around the country where Republicans Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry hold slight leads over Ms. Clinton.

Nevertheless, Hillary’s failings may be more than offset by several factors. First, whoever the eventual Democratic nominee is will win at least 40-45 percent of the popular vote. The worst Democratic wipeout in recent history, Richard Nixon’s 1972 trouncing of George McGovern, still saw McGovern win 37 percent of the vote even as he lost 49 states. Ms. Clinton would undoubtedly do much better than McGovern. With normally reliable Democratic states such as those carried by John Kerry in 2004, any Democratic candidate can be expected to win at least 200 of the 270 electoral votes needed just by appearing on the ballot as a Democrat.

Second, Ms. Clinton now heads the Clinton money machine. Hillary is backed by many on Wall Street including friends at Goldman Sachs. The Clintons also have a well-established network of foreign contributors. Republican candidates will be struggling to establish support networks for the first time, which will put them at a disadvantage. Additionally, it seems unlikely that Hillary will face a serious primary threat, which will enable her to get a head start on general election campaigning and fundraising.

Finally, Hillary will benefit by default if the Republicans nominate someone who seems more extreme and unlikable than she is. Hillary’s negatives will only take Republicans so far. The Republican nominee must be able to close the deal with moderate and independent voters. This will require the ability to present a positive vision to voters and not simply focus on negatives like Ms. Clinton’s poor record or promising to repeal Obamacare. The Republican candidate must convince voters that he cares about them more than Ms. Clinton does.

Despite her problems, Ms. Clinton’s money and network alone make her a formidable candidate, but not an inevitable one. Conservatives would do well to remember that she has only run in three elections, twice for the Senate and once for president. Of these, only one, the 2008 Democratic primary, was a tough race. Hillary lost.

 

Read the full article on Examiner.com

IRS and press harassment similar to other Obama scandals

The Obama Administration has become embroiled in three simultaneous scandals over the past few weeks. Much speculation has been made about what President Obama knew and when he knew it. Regardless of whether President Obama gave the order or had personal knowledge of spying on reporters or the harassment of conservative groups, the charges are well within the character of an administration well known for executive overreach and disregard for the law. The Obama administration has been hallmarked by disregard for the rule of law since its early days.

In the spring of 2009, the Obama Administration ignored established bankruptcy law to cast aside secured creditors of Chrysler and GM in favor of unsecured but better connected creditors such as the United Auto Workers pension according to National Affairs. Creditors were denied their right to have input on the company reorganizations through a sub rosa plan in which the assets of “old” Chrysler and GM were “sold” to “new” Chrysler and GM, bypassing creditors in the process. When some investors stood up for their rights, President Obama attacked them as “speculators” in a speech at Chrysler.

The closing of dealerships in the aftermath of the auto bankruptcies fueled speculation and rumors that the Obama Administration was using the auto bankruptcies to target political opponents. The Washington Examiner pointed out at the time that dealers on the list of closures had donated millions to Republicans, but only $200 to Obama. The list of closures seems to have been dictated by Steve Rattner, President Obama’s “car czar.”

On the heels of the auto bankruptcies came “Fast and Furious.” In the spring and summer of 2009, Democrats from Secretary of State Clinton to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) claimed that 90 percent of the guns used in Mexican crimes came from the United States. While claim is not accurate, thousands of the guns that actually did get to Mexico from the United States apparently were allowed across the border by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE). Whistleblowers later told Congress that they had orders to let smugglers take illegally purchased guns across the border into Mexico. As Examiner reported in 2011, several of the illegal weapons were found at the scene of the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 15, 2010. The guns turned up at numerous other crime scenes in Mexico as well. In 2011, another American officer, Jaime Zapata, was murdered in Mexico with a gun that had been tracked by the ATF according to CBS News. The Mexican government was not pleased with the revelations that the Obama Administration allowed thousands of illegal guns into their country.

After the BP oil spill in 2010, President Obama issued a unilateral moratorium on deepwater drilling. When a court ruled that the drill ban was unconstitutional, the Department of Interior still refused to issue new drilling permits. This led a federal judge to hold the Obama Administration in contempt of court for its “determined disregard” for its continued drilling restrictions.

In the spring of 2011, after dithering for months, President Obama approved U.S. intervention in the Libyan civil war. Obama notified Congress within 48 hours as required by the War Powers Act, but neglected to seek congressional approval within 60 days. Obama also failed to end American involvement within 30 days of the deadline for seeking congressional approval as required. The N.Y. Times called the Libya intervention “illegal” and said that it “set a troubling precedent that could allow future administrations to wage war at their convenience — free of legislative checks and balances.”

The matter is all the more stark because President Obama had said in 2007 that “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” After Libya, Politifact rated the statement a “full [flip] flop.”

Also in 2011, the Obama Administration’s loan to Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer, went sour. While most analyses of the Solyndra scandal focus on the poor judgment involved in making a loan that ultimately cost taxpayers $535 million according to Yahoo, laws might have been broken here as well. According to the Christian Science Monitor, it may have been illegal for the Obama Administration to restructure Solyndra’s loan to put private creditors ahead of taxpayers.

In 2012, the Supreme Court affirmed the power of the government to compel its citizens to purchase a private product, keeping Obamacare’s individual mandate intact. The legal status of other parts of Obamacare remains questionable. The mandate that all insurance policies cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs has been successfully challenged in court as a violation of the freedom of religion.

Since 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services has issued more than 1,200 Obamacare waivers to companies according to The Hill. As noted in Examiner, the language of the Affordable Care Act did not permit such waivers. In 2013, Politico reported that members of Congress were secretly negotiating an exemption from Obamacare’s requirements under concerns that staffers would face sharp increases in premiums when Obamacare goes into effect.

More recently, faced with a $1.5 billion shortfall in funds to implement Obamacare, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius resorted to soliciting donations from insurance companies according to the Washington Post. As Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) points out in the Wall St. Journal, the Constitution and other laws do not permit the government to spend money that has not been appropriated by Congress. Soliciting donations from companies that Sebelius regulates is likely a conflict of interest as well.

Earlier this year, President Obama received a strong rebuke from a federal court for several appointments that he had made to the National Labor Relations Board. The president styled the appointments as recess appointments even though Congress was still in session. The decision, described on Examiner, stated that Congress, not the president, decided when it was in session and then went a step further, stating that recess appointments could only be used to fill vacancies that arise during a recess. A second appeals court issued a similar ruling in May after the NLRB ignored the first court’s ruling and continued to issue decisions on cases heard by the invalid members.

President Obama also has a record of issuing executive decrees when Congress fails to act. In December 2010, the EPA announced plans to regulate carbon after Congress failed to pass cap-and-trade legislation. At the same time, the FCC unilaterally issued “net neutrality” rules in spite of a court ruling stating that the agency did not have the power to regulate the internet. Before even asking Congress to enact new gun control laws, the president signed 23 executive orders relating to guns.

The new scandals, lying to public about Benghazi, spying on reporters to ferret out leakers within the administration, and using federal enforcement agencies to quash political opposition, are merely the latest in a long line of abuses of power by President Obama and his deputies. The common threads among all of the Obama scandals are abuse of executive power disregard of the law for political gain. The new trio of scandals is no different.

A form of this article was originally published as Atlanta Conservative Examiner.

Obama can relax, he won’t be impeached

The “perfect storm” of political scandals that has embroiled the Obama Administration over the past few weeks has some conservatives and Republicans speculating that President Obama might be impeached or be forced to resign in disgrace. While there are plenty of serious accusations of misconduct in the White House and federal government, the scandals are all still in their infancy and President Obama’s precise role is not known. It is all but certain, however, that the president will not be impeached.

The first scandal, the cover-up after the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, is the most advanced. The White House released emails earlier this month that showed that references to al Qaeda had been scrubbed from the administration’s talking points about the attack according to ABC News. ABC reported as early as Oct. 9, 2012 that the street protests were non-existent. More than two weeks after the attack, President Obama was still blaming a “crude and disgusting video” that allegedly “sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world” in a speech to the United Nations. President Obama’s only mention of al Qaeda in the speech was to call it “weakened” in reference to Osama bin Laden’s death. There is still no satisfactory explanation as to why there was no rescue attempt.

The second scandal involves abuse of power by Internal Revenue Service. The IRS admitted on May 10 that it had targeted conservative groups for additional scrutiny during the run-up to the 2012 election. It quickly became apparent that the problem was much more widespread than the IRS had admitted. In fact, the IRS approved no conservative groups at all for a 27 month period beginning in February 2010 according to USA Today. There were other abuses as well, including audits of Obama’s political critics and attempts to force a pro-life group to stop protesting Planned Parenthood according to Examiner. The IRS had even planted the press conference question that Lerner answered to ignite the scandal in an apparent attempt to preempt a government report on the matter.

President Obama and his aides claimed to learn of the scandal “when it came out in the news” according to Yahoo News, however multiple reports show that the White House counsel learned about the internal investigation of the matter several weeks earlier. Lois Lerner, the IRS official who broke the story, learned about the matter as early as 2011 according to the Washington Post. Several senators were also aware of the investigation, but had been unable to get answers from the IRS before Ms. Lerner’s apology.

The third scandal, the Obama Administration’s broad seizure of Associated Press phone records, may prove to be the most dangerous to Obama. In the course of investigating a leak, the Department of Justice, in another scandal that was wider than initially admitted, secretly subpoenaed phone records for five AP offices and hundreds of reporters over a two month period according to the Washington Post. Typically, government investigators ask news organizations for records or at least provide advance notice of such a subpoena. In this case, the DOJ did neither.

The government cites national security concerns for the phone records, but the case in question, the report of an al Qaeda bomb plot disrupted by federal agents, was actually the subject of a White House news conference on the same day that the AP published its story according to NBC News. Further, the press conference by counterterrorism advisor John Brennan contained an important detail that the AP story lacked: the fact that an inside informant had helped to disrupt the plot. Obama claimed not to know the details of the AP case as late as May 16, three days after the story broke according to Mediaite. Attorney General Eric Holder claimed to have recused himself from the investigation according to USA Today.

The Associated Press scandal may prove most dangerous for Obama because the media has traditionally been sympathetic to Democrats. By launching heavy-handed investigations of media outlets, the Administration risks transforming the cozy relationship to an adversarial one. The problem is compounded by the recent revelation that the FBI secretly monitored a Fox News journalist as a “criminal co-conspirator” in a 2009 leak case. Ironically, the failure of the media to look deeply into other Obama Administration scandals such as Fast and Furious and Solyndra may have encouraged members of the administration to pursue ever more risky political strategies on the assumption that they would not be subjected to rigorous fact-checking by the media.

Regardless of the severity of these scandals, there is almost no chance that any combination of them will result in the president’s impeachment. Under the Constitution, the House of Representatives has the power to impeach the president for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors” which are not defined. Since the House is controlled by Republicans, a vote to impeach should pass handily, so why impeachment so unlikely?

The second step is that the impeached president must then be tried in the Senate in order to be removed from office. The Democrats currently control the Senate 55-45 (including two independents who would probably vote with the Democrats). The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to remove the president. This means that even if all Republicans in the Senate voted to remove Obama from office, they would still need the votes of 21 Democrats or independents. It would be pointless and possibly counterproductive for Republicans to impeach Obama when they are not able to remove him from office.

In all of U.S. history, only two presidents have been impeached. Neither was removed from office. In 1868, Andrew Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by a single vote after seven senators broke party ranks to support the president. In 1998, Bill Clinton was also acquitted with 45 guilty votes on a perjury charge and 50 votes on an obstruction of justice charge, 21 and 16 votes short of removal respectively. Several Republicans voted for acquittal while no Democrats voted guilty.

The chance that Obama might be forced to resign is slightly better, but still a long shot. Richard Nixon was the only president to resign from office. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid impeachment. President Obama is unlikely to take similar action since the threat of impeachment is so remote. President Obama would probably not consider resignation unless he lost the support of his Democratic base.

Liberals can breathe a sigh of relief that President Obama’s job is probably safe. On the other hand, conservatives can take encouragement from the possibility that Obama may be so damaged by the scandals that he is unable to advance his second term agenda. Likewise, the Democratic Party’s troubles means that Republicans might have better odds in the 2014 midterm elections. Republicans can take comfort from the fact that if Obama were removed from office, Joe Biden would be next in line.

Originally published on Examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/article/scandals-won-t-result-obama-impeachment

IRS scandal is worse than Benghazi for Obama

Over the past week, the Obama Administration has been repeatedly rocked by scandals. Beginning with last week’s hearings on the pre-election attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the death of ambassador Chris Stevens, President Obama has endured a steady stream of bad news.

Although the Benghazi hearing has raised the ire of conservatives, the real danger to the Obama Administration comes from the domestic scandals. In particular Obama’s problems with the Internal Revenue Service can fire the imaginations and anger of the American people.

As reported by Examiner last October, the fundamentals of the Benghazi fiasco were known within weeks after the attack. The recent hearings have confirmed that President Obama lied about the nature of the attack to avoid having his foreign policy questioned just before the election. Benghazi never captured the public’s imagination, however. Even though a U.S. ambassador, a consulate employee, and two former Navy Seals were killed by al Qaeda-linked militants, the media mostly ignored the story of the cover-up. The American public, weary of war after more than a decade of fighting, seemed unwilling to get angry over the attack, even if it was the result of Obama’s foreign policy or Secretary of State Clinton’s refusal to reinforce the consulate’s security forces. This week’s revelations of IRS bullying and Justice Department subpoenas of Associated Press phone records seem likelier to hit home, each for different reasons.

In the best of times, the IRS is probably the most reviled federal agency. Nobody likes taxes. Tax collectors have been unpopular with taxpayers since long before the days when Matthew and Zacchaeus repented of abuse of power in their chosen profession. More recently, the IRS scandal began with an apology from Lois Lerner, director of the Exempt Organizations Division, for what she termed as the targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny on their applications for tax exempt status. The problem, she said, lay with low level workers in Cincinnati who acted independently. It quickly became apparent that the IRS confession barely scratched the surface.

· In 2009, the IRS tried to force board members of a pro-life group to sign a statement promising “under perjury of the law, they do not picket/protest or organize groups to picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood” in order to gain tax exemption according to the Thomas More Law Center.

· In 2010, Z Street, a pro-Israel group, sued the IRS after being told that its application would take longer because it was “connected to Israel” according to the Jewish Press.

· In September 2010, the Weekly Standard reported that Austan Goolsbee, the head of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, criticized Koch Industries, citing confidential tax information that was not publicly available.

· Anne Henderschott, a Catholic professor and blogger, was targeted by the IRS for audits after she wrote several articles challenging liberal Catholic groups who supported Obamacare. According to the Blaze, many of the questions in the audit were political.

· In April 2011, Secure America Now, an organization critical of Obama’s foreign policy toward North Korea, Iran, Israel and Libya had its tax exemption held up twice by the IRS according to the WSJ. The investigation intensified after the group produced a popular video about the Benghazi attack.

· In May 2011, Bloomberg reported that the IRS had attempted to retroactively tax gifts made to tax exempt groups “supporting Republican causes.”

· In March 2012, the Puffington Host published private information about donors to the National Organization for Marriage that it admitted had been obtained from the IRS.

· In June 2012, Idaho businessman Frank Vandersloot was subjected to a series of audits after being mentioned in an Obama campaign as one of several “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” who donated to Romney. VanderSloot passed the audits with flying colors.

· From December 2012 to January 2013, the IRS gave the left-leaning group Pro Publica confidential tax information about conservative groups.

· In April 2013, just a few weeks before the scandal broke, CNET reported that internal IRS communications state that Americans have “generally no privacy” in electronic communications such as email and Facebook chats. The IRS position is that no warrant is required to access email. This in spite of judicial rulings to the contrary.

As new victims of IRS abuse come forward, it is evident that the IRS harassed only conservatives. It is also apparent that the problem went beyond merely denying tax exempt status to conservative groups. The IRS sought membership lists from conservative groups, targeted Obama opponents with audits and slow-tracking of approvals, and leaked confidential tax information to liberal groups. The IRS also apparently tried to influence and limit the political speech of individuals and groups opposed to President Obama.

Contrary to the official IRS explanation, at least two IRS offices were involved. According to the Washington Post, letters to conservative groups seeking information about donors also came from the Washington, D.C. and California offices. At least one group was told that their application was under review in Washington.

While such heavy-handed tactics were once the province of many Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK according to historian James Bovard, Congress has since enacted legislation to restrict political contacts between the IRS and the White House. To put President Obama’s current predicament into perspective, the second article of impeachment against Richard Nixon involved using tax information for illegal purposes and auditing political opponents.

The matter of the Justice Department’s AP investigation is less pressing to most Americans, but has the potential to turn members of the media against the Obama Administration. The New Yorker called the AP investigation “aggressive.” The Wall Street Journal notes that the AP subpoenas were “broad, violating normal Justice practice of narrowly tailoring requests that concern the media.” The Justice Department overreach may entice a press corps that mostly sympathizes with Obama to take a more adversarial tack.

President Obama immediately tried to distance himself from the scandals. On May 13, he called the IRS an “independent agency,” an assessment that Factcheck.org disputes. The IRS is actually a branch of the Treasury Department. The president appoints the heads of both the IRS and the Treasury Department, a fact subtly acknowledged by President Obama when he fired Acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller on Thursday. Miller would have left the post in June anyway.

President Obama’s problems may not be solved that easily. Abuse of power in federal agencies seems to be increasing under President Obama. According to the Wall St. Journal, the Environmental Protection Agency has favored groups that share its political agenda, charging conservative groups for Freedom of Information Act requests while waiving fees for liberal groups. Earlier this year, a court ruled the president’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional, but the board keeps issuing rulings. In Obama’s first term, several courts decided that the EPA acted outside its legal authority as Examiner reported last year. Obama’s Interior Department was held in contempt in 2010 for refusing to issue new drilling permits after Obama’s unilateral drilling moratorium was ruled unconstitutional.

Whether President Obama personally ordered the IRS to investigate and bully conservative groups or not, there can be little doubt that he set the tone that encouraged the harassment. Kimberly Strassel points out that many of Obama’s speeches that deride conservative groups as “less than reputable” and made thinly veiled calls for their investigation. Senate Democrats went even further notes Karl Rove. On two separate occasions, in 2010 and 2012, Democratic senators sent letters to the IRS demanding investigation of political groups.

Voters are angry about the IRS scandal. A Rasmussen poll released Wednesday indicated that a majority of Americans feel that the IRS agents responsible should be punished. Forty-one percent believe they should be fired while 29 percent support a formal reprimand. Sixteen percent believe that jail time is warranted. Fifty-seven percent believe that the investigations were politically motivated and 55 percent believe that President Obama and his top aides were aware of what the IRS was doing.

While impeachment hearings will not be held any time soon, it is also unlikely that the IRS abuse of power scandal will disappear any time soon. Americans will likely think of their own tax troubles when they hear the tales of politically motivated audits. The problem may be even worse for Obama if voters realize that the IRS will be responsible for much of the implementation of the new health care rules under Obamacare.

Originally published on Examiner:

http://www.examiner.com/article/domestic-scandals-more-dangerous-to-obama-than-benghazi

Obama not taking bipartisan tack after election

President Obama won a narrow election victory over Mitt Romney earlier this month, but if voters expected the president to take a more conciliatory tone and seek a middle ground with Republicans, they are likely to be disappointed. In spite of the fact that President Obama is the only president to have been reelected with less support than he won in his first election, he has doubled down on the policies that cost him much of his popularity in his first term.

One of the first actions taken by the Obama Administration after the election was to reopen talks with the committee drafting the United Nations arms trade treaty. According to Reuters, the talks on the treaty will resume on March 18. The treaty was scheduled to be signed last July, but opposition from groups concerned that the treaty would infringe on Second Amendment rights led the Obama Administration to table the treaty until after the election.

An unnamed U.S. official told Reuters, “We will not accept any treaty that infringes on the constitutional rights of our citizens to bear arms.” Nevertheless, many Second Amendment activists believe that the treaty could subject the U.S. arms industry and Second Amendment rights to the control of the U.N. Critics also point out that it could make it difficult for legitimate freedom fighters to defend themselves against tyrannical governments.

The president has also taken a hard line with respect to negotiations for a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff. Yahoo News reports that when talks resume this week that the president will ask Republicans for $1.6 trillion dollars in tax increases over ten years. This is double the $800 billion in new taxes that President Obama had sought during the 2011 budget negotiations. The president’s request is also higher than the automatic tax increases scheduled to kick in if the country reaches the fiscal cliff. According to Businessweek, the automatic tax increases are estimated at $536 billion.

The fiscal cliff also includes $100 billion in spending cuts for 2013 according to Businessweek. Many of these cuts would affect the defense budget. The White House did not specify what level of spending cuts President Obama would be willing to accept under a compromise. As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, the emergency stimulus spending of 2009 has now become a permanent part of the baseline federal budget.

Annual deficits for the federal government have been in excess of a trillion dollars for each year of President Obama’s administration. Combined spending cuts of $100 billion and tax increases of $500 billion would still not allow the federal government to operate in the black.

Two of President Obama’s potential second-term cabinet picks also seem calculated to provoke Republican opposition. Susan Rice, the apparent frontrunner for Secretary of State, and John Kerry, a potential Secretary of Defense, have already drawn strong opposition.

Susan Rice, currently the ambassador to the United Nations, has been criticized for her role in the administration’s misstatements in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. A statement by Rice that the attack was the result of an anti-Islamic video was featured prominently in the days after the attack. Subsequent information revealed that the president and administration officials knew as the attack was occurring that it was a terrorist attack, not the result of a spontaneous mob.

President Obama reacted to the criticism with outrage, telling the Wall Street Journal, “If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador, who had nothing to do with Benghazi and was simply making a presentation based on intelligence that she had received and to besmirch her reputation, is outrageous.”

John Kerry is also a controversial nominee. Kerry was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, losing to George W. Bush. Kerry is perhaps most well known for his 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which he said that American soldiers in Vietnam “had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam….” During the 2004 campaign, a number of veterans came forward to dispute Kerry’s account.

CNS News also notes that Kerry has long supported engagement with Syrian President Bashar Assad. Kerry met with Assad at least six times and shortly before the Syrian uprising began in March 2011 he was still voicing his belief that “Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.”

Democrats control the senate, which is responsible for confirming presidential appointments. Republicans do have enough support to filibuster controversial nominees, however.

President Obama’s second term is still several months away from its official beginning, but the battle lines are already being drawn. It seems that voters who hoped that giving the president a second chance to make good on his promises of bipartisanship will probably be not be satisfied in the near term.

 

Read this article on Examiner:

http://www.examiner.com/article/obama-seeks-confrontations-after-election?cid=db_articles

Voters need truth about Benghazi cover-up before election

An emerging aspect to the Benghazi attack story is the Obama Administration’s cover-up of the truth. From the beginning, President Obama and members of his administration have claimed that the attack was the spontaneous work of a mob protesting an anti-Islamic film. It is now apparent that the Administration knew even as the attacks were going on that it was a preplanned terrorist attack.

For over a week after the attack, President Obama and other government officials clung to the fiction that the attack was a reaction to “Innocence of the Muslims,” a film ridiculing Mohammed that had already been on Youtube for months. Charles Woods, the father of Ty Woods, one of the Americans killed in the attack, told radio host Lars Larson that Secretary of State Clinton vowed to have the filmmaker “arrested” and “prosecuted” in apparent disregard for the First Amendment.

In a timeline of the attacks and their aftermath posted on Oct. 26, Factcheck.org points out some of the flaws in the Administration’s claims. There was no mob at the Benghazi consulate in spite of President Obama’s claims to the contrary. State Department reports say that everything was calm until the attack started at approximately 3:40 p.m. At 6:07 p.m., while the attack was still in process, the State Department Operations Center emailed the White House and the Pentagon as well as several other agencies to tell them that Ansar al-Sharia had claimed responsibility for the attack. The attack continued until about 8:30 p.m. when Libyan security forces drove off the surviving attackers. The attack continued for approximately four to five hours.

Even though there were reports of al Qaeda involvement even while the attack was still in progress, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, and other Administration officials persisted in blaming the film for over a week after the attack. There is no reasonable reason to deny al Qaeda’s involvement for national security reasons since the fact that there was no mob was common knowledge in Libya. The only logical reason to shift the blame to Youtube and away from al Qaeda is for President Obama’s political benefit.

Examiner previously described reports that the Obama Administration denied requests to increase security before the attack. Now there are reports that requests for assistance during the attack were denied as well. Fox News reports that CIA operators were denied permission to assist the Americans under attack inside the consulate. The unnamed sources “on the ground in Benghazi” said that a small team heard the shots from a safe house and requested permission to help. They were ordered to “stand down,” but several members of the team, including former Navy SEAL Ty Woods, ignored the order and were able to evacuate survivors from the consulate, possibly preventing even greater loss of life.

When they returned, the safe house itself came under attack. The CIA team again called for help and were again denied. The Fox News report indicates that a team member on the roof with a laser target designator asked for an airstrike by an AC-130 Spectre gunship. More than seven hours after the initial attack began, a mortar attack on the CIA safe house killed Ty Woods and Glen Doherty, another former SEAL.

The Fox report notes that the CIA denied the report. “We can say with confidence that the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi," said spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood. "Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate.”

The Fox report also states that two American surveillance drones were on the scene during the attack. In spite of the fact that these drones could send real time information and video to Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters that officials had no clear idea of what was going on and could not provide assistance.

As yet unconfirmed are reports that General Carter Ham, commanding officer of the U.S. Africa Command, was relieved of his command because he was about to ignore orders not to help the Americans in Benghazi. Rumors are swirling that the general had a rapid response unit ready to go when he was ordered to stand down. The general responded that he was going to aid the consulate anyway. Less than thirty seconds later, the general’s executive officer relieved him and assumed command. The rescue mission did not take place. Defense Secretary Panetta previously claimed that Ham advised against a rescue mission.

Coverage of the rumor in the Washington Times notes that the Pentagon claims that Ham’s removal was planned in advance. Nevertheless, the article also states that Ham was in his post for only a year and a half. The normal tour length for such a command post is three years.

The reports of the circumstances surrounding General Ham’s dismissal are unconfirmed at this point, but given the other untruths coming from President Obama and his Administration they are plausible. In contrast to Obama’s claims that a Libyan mob killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, it now appears that the only Libyan mob was the one that found Stevens, at that point still alive, in the ruins of the consulate and took him to the hospital according to the Associated Press. At that point, U.S. and Libyan relief forces were still not on the scene.

Mark Thiessen of the Washington Post reported on Sept. 13 that the president’s public schedule showed that the last “daily” intelligence briefing that the president received was on Sept.5, more than a week before the attack. A spokesman for the National Security Council did point out that a printed copy of the President’s Daily Briefing is delivered to the president every day.

Additionally, the Long War Journal reports that a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and al Qaeda member was involved in the attack. Sufyan ben Qumu was transferred to Libyan custody in 2007. He was released by Qaddafi’s government in 2010.

On Friday, in response to repeated questions about the allegations, the president answered as quoted by USA Today, “Well, we are finding out exactly what happened. I can tell you, as I’ve said over the last couple of months since this happened, the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we’re going to investigate exactly what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. Number three, find out who did this so we can bring them to justice. And I guarantee you that everyone in the state department, our military, the CIA, you name it, had number one priority making sure that people were safe. These were our folks and we’re going to find out exactly what happened, but what we’re also going to do it make sure that we are identifying those who carried out these terrible attacks.”

The FBI team dispatched to investigate the attack did not arrive in Libya until Oct. 4, three weeks after the attack. According to the New York Times, the Obama Administration blamed the delay on the Libyan government.

The investigation of the entire Benghazi matter is ongoing, but will not be complete until after the election. This is unacceptable. Voters deserve to know the truth about the attack in Benghazi and they should know before the election.

Originally published on Examiner.com:
http://www.examiner.com/article/voters-deserve-truth-about-benghazi-cover-up-before-election?cid=db_articles

Reasons to NOT vote for Obama

Early voting has already started in many states for this year’s elections. In the rest, Election Day is now only two weeks away. The number of undecided voters is dwindling as most have already decided on which presidential candidate to vote for. This column is directed toward these undecided voters as well those who lean toward President Obama.

The most obvious reason not to vote for President Obama’s reelection is the economy. Even though the economy has officially been recovering for the recession for more than three years, most Americans still do not feel the recovery. Unemployment remains high. The poverty level is higher than it was when President Obama took office. Despite an increase in the U.S. population, fewer Americans are working today than when President Obama was inaugurated. In August, twice as many Americans went on food stamps as found jobs according to Forbes.

Much of the blame for the lagging recovery belongs to President Obama. In spite of his 2008 campaign promises, President Obama has passed a bundle of tax increases for the middle class as well as the wealthy. The most infamous of these is the individual mandate, which was ruled by the Supreme Court to be a tax, but Forbes lists seven additional taxes that hit the middle class. Obamacare itself contains a bevy of new taxes in addition to the individual mandate. Investor’s Business Daily found 20 more taxes totaling more than $675 billion.

In addition to taxes, President Obama has also dramatically increased the number of expensive regulations with which businesses must comply. The American Action Forum estimates that Obama’s regulations, including Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, cost the economy more than $488 billion. The paperwork required to comply with these regulations is equal to what it would take to build 220 Empire State Buildings.

These factors combine with the federal debt that has increased by more than 40 percent under President Obama and the looming fiscal cliff, which is comprised of even more tax increases coming at the end of this year, to create uncertainty for businesses. This uncertainty and the cost of the tax increases that Obama has promised if he is reelected make businesses hesitant to expand and hire and consumers reluctant to spend.

An additional factor in the country’s economic difficulty is President Obama’s hostility to oil-based energy. As Examiner noted last spring, approvals for drilling permits under President Obama have fallen from 73 percent to 23 percent. Time for approving a permit has increased from 60 days to more than 90. Obama has canceled oil leases issued by the Bush Administration, issued new regulations to discourage fracking, and rejected the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring Canadian oil to U.S. refineries. The cumulative effect of these policies is to drive up the prices of oil and gasoline. High energy prices contribute to the poor state of the economy.

On foreign policy, Obama has had one big success, the killing of Osama bin Laden. His failures are only now becoming apparent. The fiasco and subsequent cover-up surrounding the al Qaeda attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is only the tip of the iceberg. More serious and far-reaching are Obama’s policies regarding Israel and Iran.

President Obama claims to be a friend of Israel, but his actions tell a different story. President Obama seems to see a moral equivalence between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists. He is the only president to ever propose that Israel go back to its pre-1967 borders. This would leave Israel with an indefensible and narrow frontier. More recently Obama declined to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, and his administration has reportedly pressured Israel not to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.

With respect to Iran, President Obama is fond of pointing to the tough sanctions in place on the rogue regime. What he fails to mention is that congress passed those sanctions over his objection. President Obama also issued 20 waivers to the sanctions. Countries receiving waivers include China, Iran’s largest trading partner. Yahoo News notes that Obama will have to decide whether to renew the sanctions after the election.

Iran is not intimidated by President Obama and or the sanctions. It has scarcely been a year since Iranian agents attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador with a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C. In the Jerusalem Post, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is gleeful that America’s debt is weakening the country. “How long can a government with a $16 trillion foreign debt remain a world power?” he asks.

President Obama’s term has also seen the erosion of personal freedom. The freedom not to buy a government mandated product is only the most obvious loss. Freedom of religion has also been disregarded by the administration, most notably in the Health and Human Services mandate that requires all insurance policies to cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs.

Most disturbing, during and after the September 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in the Middle East, the Obama Administration was openly critical of the freedom of speech. Even before the Benghazi consulate was attacked, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt released a statement condemning the anti-Islamic film that allegedly sparked the attacks. The text of the statement, available on Politifact, says, “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.” Fox News reports that when he spoke to the United Nations later in the month, President Obama said that the “future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” The man responsible for the film was arrested in California on charges that he violated his probation.

If Obama’s record so far is disturbing, even scarier is what might lie ahead. Reuters reported last March that President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that “This is my last election ... After my election I have more flexibility.” The exchange evidently related to missile defense, but the same logic applies to every controversial issue from abortion to gun control to taxes.

Given that Obama has shown that he is willing to circumvent congress with executive orders, there is no practical limit to what he can do as long as congress does not override his veto. The president has used executive orders or rulemaking by executive branch agencies to change U.S. immigration law, implement net neutrality, and implement a cap-and-trade carbon regulation system. Further, the president unilaterally launched a war in Libya without informing congress and made several recess appointments while congress was still in session.

Some leftists have opined that a benevolent dictator might be what the United States needs to break the gridlock in Washington and get things done. Such an executive, who does not blanch at using his autocratic powers, might very well be what we get in a second Obama term. The problem with this idea is that the American economy is simply too complex to be micromanaged. And a benevolent dictator is still a dictator.

Next:  Reasons to vote FOR Mitt Romney

This article was first published on Examiner.com

http://www.examiner.com/article/reasons-to-not-vote-for-obama

Benghazi security scandal may sink Obama campaign

On Wednesday, October 10, Congress began hearings on the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. In the aftermath of the attack, Obama Administration officials claimed that the attack was the spontaneous response to “The Innocence of the Muslims,” an internet video that also allegedly sparked protests in other Muslim countries.
Doubts were cast upon the administration’s story almost immediately. According to timelines compiled by CNN and USA Today, the president of Libya contradicted Obama’s movie claim on September 16. It was not until September 18 that an administration official, Director of National Intelligence Matthew Olsen, acknowledged publicly that the attack was a terrorist attack. It was not until September 26, more than two weeks after the attack, that the attack was carried out by Al Qaeda. The Obama Administration also denied that there was any intelligence that the attack was imminent and that officials had no knowledge of the impending danger.
Now State Department officials are testifying before congress that both claims were not true. According to CNN coverage of the hearings, Eric Nordstrom, the former regional security officer, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that he had made repeated requests for more manpower at the Benghazi facility. At the time of the attack, there were five security officers, three who were assigned to the consulate and two who had traveled with Ambassador Stevens. Nordstrom had requested a total of twelve agents.
According to Wall Street Journal coverage of the hearings, Lt. Col. Andrew Wood of the Utah National Guard and former commander of the Site Security Team, security was actually cut at the consulate prior to the attacks. The 16 member team was replaced by Libyans trained by the State Department.
The State Department disputed Nordstrom and Wood’s testimony. House Democrats noted as well that budget cuts by Republicans had led to diplomatic security funding below what the White House had requested.
The congressional testimony is supported by Ambassador Stevens own journal, which was discovered by CNN. According a Huffington Post report, the journal showed that Stevens was concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism and Al Qaeda in Libya. Stevens noted that there were constant threats to security and even believed himself to be on an Al Qaeda hit list.
The reports of the Obama Administration’s failure to take Al Qaeda seriously and protect American diplomats are explosive. This is especially true considering that they come only a month before the presidential election. President Obama is already slipping in the polls after his lackluster debate performance last week and the new revelations about the Libya attacks present a new obstacle to his recovery.
If the matter is not pursued in the press, it almost certainly will be by Mitt Romney and the Republicans. The unfolding story of the Benghazi attacks and how they occurred will certainly be an issue in the upcoming presidential debates. The third debate between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney is dedicated to foreign policy and will be held on Oct. 22. The subject will probably also be raised at tonight’s vice presidential debate between Vice President Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan as well the town hall debate between Obama and Romney on Oct. 16.
President Obama has largely avoided fallout from several other administration scandals. He was elected in spite of his ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright and ‘60s radical Bill Ayres. The Solyndra scandal never totally captured the attention of the press and media. The president was able to maintain his distance from the Fast and Furious program, in which the federal government allowed illegal guns to cross the border into Mexico. One of those guns resulted in the death of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The publicity surrounding the Benghazi security scandal may mean that President Obama is unable to avoid damage to his reelection campaign.
Originally published on Examiner.com:
http://www.examiner.com/article/benghazi-fallout-threatens-obama-campaign