DEFICIENCES & ANNOYANCES-75

People are quite right to be tired of the story of that slug, Sterling and to the list can be added the fortunately now defunct story of the missing Malaysian aero-plane as tragic as it was, however there was quite quickly no additional reliable news to be reported so it was unnecessary for the news media to keep dragging out the story. The Benghazi episode is a different matter. It also illustrates a couple of important points. Presidential administrations have a tendency to conceal, obfuscate, and cover-up embarrassing mistakes and miscalculations and the current administration is one of the worst in that regard. When Republicans are in control of even one branch of congress they make a hash of their investigations. Instead of convening a half dozen House committees that have different objectives and prerogatives, are not well focused, and therefore are not efficiently conducted, a House Select Committee should have been setup from the start. Count on the Republicans to be stupid. At least the chairman of this now soon to be convened committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), a former no nonsense prosecutor, is a good choice. It is now abundantly clear that the White House and the State Dept. changed the narrative of what caused the terrorist attack in Benghazi from an organized premeditated one to a spontaneous uprising based on an anti- Muslim video that practically no one saw. The objective was also clear. During the 2010 presidential campaign President Obama had said General Motors was alive and Osama ben Laden was dead and Al-Qaeda was on the run. This resurgence of an Al-Qaeda affiliate group in Libya did not mesh with the narrative put out by the Obama administration so it had to be changed even if that meant misleading the American public. As what happened became known and supporting facts slowly came out, poor Jay Carney had to twist himself into a pretzel to attempt to spin the story. As Charles Krauthammer said, “Carney is not paid enough for his job as Presidential Press Secretary.” There are still a number of important questions that the public has a right to know: 1.) Who in the White House and/or State Dept. selected Susan Rice and fed her false information to infamously disseminate to the public on those five TV shows on the following Sunday? The selection of Rice was curious in the first place because, as the American UN Ambassador, she was not directly involved. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton should have been the one doing the talking. 2.) Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, briefed Obama hours after the attack. At that point they knew that it was a planned terrorist attack. What did they tell the president? 3.) Hillary Clinton telephoned Obama around 10:00 P.M. that evening to discuss the attack. What did she tell him and what did they both do after that? We know Obama was never in the White House Situation Room and that he went on a fund raising trip to the West Coast the next day. 4.) Despite requests from American Ambassador Stevens and others in Libya for additions security none was ever given. Why not? And for that matter what was Ambassador Stevens doing in such a dangerous place as Benghazi, which was a hotbed of unrest and terrorism? 5.) Even if military help could not have arrived in time to save the four dead Americans during the seven hour attack, and that is a debatable point, why was no effort made? Especially in the military as they famously try to save their own. Let us hope that even at this late date the Special Committee in the House will be able to come up with some valid answers. Now for the IRS scandal. Once again the Republicans in congress showed how inept they are. The main key to unraveling the malfeasance of the IRS and the duplicity of the White House in targeting mainly conservative group for special scrutiny and delays in granting tax exempt 501c3 status to their organizations is the testimony of Lois Lerner. When Lerner testified in front of a House committee for the first time the committee chairman should have told her that if she read an opening statement (and he would certainly know that she would) vouching for her own integrity, lawfulness, and probity she could not then refuse to answer questions from the committee or else she would not be allowed to make a statement. As it is now there is this argument whether she waived her constitutional right not to incriminate herself by refusing to answer the committee’s questions after she gave her opening statement. Even so, she should now be granted immunity from prosecution in order to compel her to say what she knows about this whole affair, which must be considerable. The story originally put out by the White House was that a few rogue agents in the Cincinnati IRS office improperly targeted some conservative groups for special scrutiny by submitting voluminous and personal questions to be answered, not asked of liberal groups, after receiving their requests for tax-exempt status. This was followed by long delays in considering the requests, again not imposed on liberal groups. Even Jay Carney at first was taking this line. The story had to change once e-mails concerning this matter came to light leading President Obama, in an interview, to say to Bill O’Reilly there not a “smidgen of corruption” involving the IRS after initially saying that he was outraged by the appearance of impropriety and would get the bottom of it. It is interesting that conservative Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, has received more pertinent and less redacted e-mails from the Administration by filing FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests than congressional committees have been able to obtain. It is clear that this administration does not respect the Republican House of Representatives, but does not want to get into a fight with the federal courts and all the controversy that would engender. It was in one of those e-mails that ensnared Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser, Ben Rhodes, and tied the White House directly to the IRS scandal. One would hope and expect that the House committees investigating the IRS would do so in an objective manner, searching for the truth and not resorting to partisan politics against the presidential administration. If they do not then it will redound to the benefit of Democrats and the administration, as a large percentage of people will be turned off by it as politics as usual in Washington. However, if the committees do their investigations fairly and objectively and it is Democrats who are viewed as obstructionists then it is they who will experience adverse effects in the November elections. A further ever growing, bipartisan scandal has now enveloped the White House. This is malfeasance by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Here the usual luck of President Obama has run out. Problems with the medical services and competency of the VA have been ongoing for decades without it blowing up into a full pledged scandal until now. A warning was given by the Bush team to the Obama team during the transitioning of the Bush administration to the Obama administration, yet nothing of any substance was done, nor had the Bush administration delved into it adequately during its time in office. However, it would be fair to say that with the country in a possible economic meltdown there were more pressing problems that needed to be addressed. Still, once this crisis had passed more could have been done. Further, at this time a new element has emerged which is the keeping of off-the-books lists of veterans who needed medical attention, but whose appointments were not officially listed until later and some times much later so as to make it seem that waiting times were considerably shorter than they actually were. Especially egregious were the conditions of the untreated veterans who died waiting for medical help. This situation has outraged Democrats in congress as well as Republicans, as well it might, for moral and political reasons. With bipartisan inquires and probing into these problems with the VA this issue is not going away any time soon and, unlike the other administration scandals, will not be largely ignored by the Main Stream Media (MSM). On Nov. 12, 2007 then Senator Obama said, “After seven years [this] administration has …..neglected the planning and preparation necessary to care for our returning heroes…..” And in 2012 President Obama continued to favorably compare the performance of the VA during his administration to Bush’s. What was it that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright said about chickens coming home to roost? There are exceptions on all sides of course, but as a general proposition I believe it can be said apodictically that Republicans are stupid, Democrats venal, and the MSM, since Obama first became a presidential candidate, previously was biased on the left has now evolved into being downright corrupt in either how political and social news are reported or not reported.