Feelings.

Via Matt Welch, behold the ne plus ultra of Obama counterterror apologetics courtesy of “New Yorker” contributor Jane Mayer. The next time The One launches a war that even his own lawyers think is illegal or drops a bomb on someone in Yemen because their movements are suspicious or detains someone indefinitely without trial, know [...]

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Tick tock.

Reporters are knocking off early, readers are firing up their grills, and there are not one, not two, but three scandals swirling around the executive branch. We have, in other words, the makings of a five-alarm news fire. All O has to do is light the match. Here’s your thread to guess; name the story [...]

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Accountability.

For years, administration officials have used the power of the federal government to isolate their opponents. Meanwhile, the unionized employees who populate the IRS and other agencies across the country routinely take their cues from union bosses, whose political donations and speeches show their support for the White House. When it comes to rewarding friends [...]

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Accountability.

Via RCP, most Democratic hacks in seeking to limit Obama’s culpability for IRS-gate go no further than noting that Doug Shulman, the commissioner during the malfeasance, was a Bush appointee. (And a donor to the DNC, although you never hear that mentioned.) Pelosi checks that box here but goes a step further. Because the federal [...]

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Plus: Heckling!

Here’s the transcript. I defy you to tell me what the point of the speech is. The reaction among conservative twitterati is nearly unanimous: The speech is a distraction, designed to knock Scandalmania off the front page. I disagree, just because … there’s nothing here that’s distracting. He’s offering a robust defense of drone warfare [...]

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Leaks.

Like most journalists, I find it disturbing that the Justice Department went fishing for sources in the phone records of the Associated Press without giving the news organization a chance to take the matter to a judge. We can now add to that the department’s dive into the emails and phone calls of Fox News [...]

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"Everybody knew about this investigation long before the election."

Via Mediaite, there are only two possibilities here. One: Such is the denial and obfuscation at MSNBC over Scandalmania that Republicans are now being blamed for not building a time machine and exposing Obama’s scandals before anyone (except the IRS) knew for sure there was a scandal. I hope that’s what Finney’s suggesting here, just [...]

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Collateral damage.

You can read the PDF of his letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee disclosing the number here. If you’re having trouble grasping the magnitude of it, let Greg Pollowitz help you: #fact Obama has killed more US citizens than foreigners waterboarded under Bush — Greg Pollowitz (@GPollowitz) May 22, 2013 Correct. Three jihadis, most famously [...]

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Trust.

Monday’s revelation amounts to the fifth iteration of the Obama administration’s account of events, after initially saying that the White House had first learned of the controversy from the press… Carney pushed back at reporters frustrated with the shifting narrative. “I said that I didn’t know (these details) until Friday, but I’m getting this information [...]

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Partisanship.

Nothing surprising here, but after Democrats spent the entirety of Bush’s second term loudly despairing over civil liberties and freedom of the press being trod upon in the name of counterterrorism, polls like this will remain forever blogworthy. HA readers already know all about their well-timed reversals on drone strikes and Guanatanamo, but the DOJ’s [...]

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Incrimination.

Can’t do better than Popehat’s wry take: IRS Official to Reaffirm Importance of Constitutional Rights In Response To Congressional Inquiry latimes.com/news/politics/… — Popehat (@Popehat) May 21, 2013 Hey, remember when Steve Miller insisted there’s nothing illegal about the IRS targeting a particular political faction for extra scrutiny? He was wrong, potentially: There are civil-rights laws [...]

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What?

Via the Right Sphere. Am I reading this correctly? President Dronestrike, who’s been known to liquidate people from the air in places like Pakistan with no more evidence than that their movements show the “signature” of a terrorist, now won’t go in and grab five jihadis whom the feds have reason to believe murdered a [...]

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Nixonian?

While denying involvement in high crimes and misdemeanors, the Obama administration appears to be pleading guilty to lesser crimes of bureaucratic incompetence. But that is an unsustainable position for a president who wants Americans to believe again in the power and grace of good government, particularly as it relates to the implementation of Obamacare. –IRS [...]

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Messages and messengers.

It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I agree with the president. It happens even less often, but sometimes I agree with the president and his wife in one weekend. But President and Michelle Obama both delivered commencement speeches at historically black colleges worthy of praise. First, President Obama spoke with the all-male graduating class [...]

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Endgame?

This was written, I believe, before the news broke this morning about the DOJ quasi-indicting James Rosen for the crime of practicing journalism. So if Dems in the know were whispering before, they’re downright murmuring now. If Holder goes, who becomes conservatives’ new least favorite cabinet member? Kerry or Hagel? Nevertheless, the controversies are undermining [...]

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“The overall goal is to restore my honor.”

For the second time today (or third?), the word “Kafkaesque” seems appropriate. Subpoena this man. “I had no involvement to any degree with decisions on security and the funding of security at our diplomatic mission in Benghazi,” [Raymond Maxwell] said… The State Department declined to comment on the reasons that Maxwell and the other officials [...]

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Damage.

As could be expected, the folks in the [IRS] determinations unit on Main Street have had trouble concentrating this week. Number crunchers, whose work is nonpolitical, don’t necessarily enjoy the spotlight, especially when the media and the public assume they’re engaged in partisan villainy. “We’re not political,’’ said one determinations staffer in khakis as he [...]

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Abuse.

So many people are sad about America and cynical about its government. They don’t expect anything good to happen. They think certain poisons have entered the system and nothing can be done about it. Leviathan will not be cut back or tamed, Leviathan will go on abusing the citizen. People are all too willing to [...]

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Trust.

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal [...]

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Politics.

Republicans must guard against the temptation to count on scandal to deliver election victories in 2014 and 2016. It is a lesson they should have learned in 1998.
 Republicans expected to make large gains in Congress that year but ended up losing five House seats and standing pat in the Senate. The problem was not [...]

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Charades.

We already knew last night that he was planning to leave, rendering O’s big IRS scalp-taking a joke, but what we didn’t know for sure was whether the White House was aware that Miller was inching towards the exit. Answer: Yep, they were. His term is actually limited by statute. Miller, a 25-year career IRS [...]

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Optics.

Via Greg Hengler, I’m sure this has been done before by other presidents, simply because the optics are sufficiently bad that Team O wouldn’t have tried it without precedent to cite in its defense. Free advice to future administrations, then: Discontinue this practice. These guys aren’t valets. The slogan is not “The Few, the Proud, [...]

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When it rains, it pours.

Remember that time in 2012 when President Obama unilaterally declared the Senate in recess so he could make “recess” appointments? During the “recess,” he appointed three people to the National Labor Relations Board and controversial Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The case has been winding its way through courts since [...]

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Reprisals.

The whole point of Holder’s presser on Tuesday, I thought, was to stress that the DOJ had to take extraordinary action in subpoenaing the AP’s phone records because the leak itself was so extraordinary. The clear impression was that the AP’s story had put the public in danger by compromising operations in Yemen, therefore the [...]

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Damage control.

More than 50 major media organizations on Tuesday sent a letter to the Department of Justice protesting the seizure of two months of The Associated Press’ phone records and calling for the department to “mitigate the damage it has caused.” In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Deputy Attorney James M. Cole, the [...]

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