What Is Obama Hiding?

[Geee]

American Thinker:

There has been plenty of conjecture regarding Obama's biography. Clearly, he has a penchant for fiction and does not care to fact-check his own life. Nor does he care for others to fact-check or scrutinize what he has been doing as president. Has this been why he has been decimating the taxpayers' best friends in Washington: the inspectors general?

Inspectors general are investigative officials charged with monitoring government programs for waste, fraud, incompetency, corruption, and the like. They are the taxpayers' first line of defense against a rampaging, out-of-control, and corrupt government. Unlike many if not most government programs, inspector general programs have a sterling return on investment. For example, Daniel Levinson, inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department, has been an unheralded hero for taxpayers. Since he took his job a few years ago, his investigations have led to more charges for health care fraud than ever before, and his office has returned about $11 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund (see this glowing profile in Business Week). Even in Obama's Washington, that is serious money: those billions that will be available to care for our nation's seniors. Levinson certainly is as deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom as Bob Dylan.

Inspectors general are a natural enemy of, let's say, a politician who hails from Cook County and who likes to spend with abandon. This is particularly true when the beneficiaries of the spending are donors and supporters who can be paid back for their support with other people's money. Didn't Barack Obama define politics as a way to punish enemies and reward friends? Such is politics done the Chicago Way.

Looking at the past three years of Barack Obama's presidency, there appears to have been a plan all along to blunt the effectiveness of inspectors general. This has been done by a variety of ways: by trying to force through Congress new and richly funded programs akin to "slush funds" without providing for the oversight that comes from the inspector general program; by stonewalling and attacking Darrell Issa, who as chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee (the two words "reform" and "oversight" are anathema to Barack Obama) has called for expanding the power of inspectors general; brutal public personal attacks on various inspectors general that are meant to drive them from office and chill the investigative efforts of others; and by deliberately failing to fill vacancies in the ranks of inspectors general -- a dereliction of duty on the part of Barack Obama that earned the president a stinging rebuke in a recent Washington Post editorial ("Where are the inspectors general?").