Benghazi and the IRS: Politics by Other Means

[Geee]

National Review:

What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections under false pretenses.

Winning elections, after all, is something Barack Obama is good at. He obviously loves campaigning and delivering grand orations to enormous adoring crowds.

He loves it so much that he flew off to Las Vegas to campaign the day after the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years.

 

What actually happened in Benghazi was out of sync with the Obama campaign line. Osama bin Laden was dead. Al-Qaeda was on the run. The global war on terror — well, don’t call it that anymore.

A deliberate effort to mislead the voters was launched. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House press secretary Jay Carney, and the president himself talked about a spontaneous protest of an anti-Muslim video — even though no evidence of that came from Benghazi.

[Valin]

May 15, 2013

On FOX News' "On the Record" with Greta Van Susteren, Senator Alexander said that HHS Secretary Sebelius's fundraising and coordinating with private entities to implement the president's healthcare law is "a pattern we've been seeing.....(Snip)

[Valin]

The IRS Scandal Is Not about the President

Kevin Williamson

May 16, 2013

 

One thing that I hope is not lost in the political maneuvering surrounding the IRS scandal: This is not mainly about the president, the Republicans, or either party’s political prospects. The first sentence out of practically every Democrat’s mouth has been: There’s no evidence the White House was involved. And that’s true enough, though there is very strong evidence that at least one Senate Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan, was pressuring the agency to investigate tea-party groups.

 

Whatever happens politically in the next few years, Barack Obama will leave office at the end of his term — and the IRS will still be there. The permanent bureaucracies have political interests of their own, which may or may not align with the interests of any given candidate or any given party at any given moment. A dangerous, abusive, and politicized IRS is a serious threat to the well-being of our country: The rectitude of such institutions is an important part of what makes a free society and a free economy work. Labor is cheap in Haiti and Afghanistan, but there is a reason that people do not invest in those places. Even India, which has relatively good law and honest courts but a great deal of piddling corruption, especially in the lower levels of the bureaucracies, suffers economically because of political corruption. If you do not have credible institutions, it is difficult to thrive.

 

I am no admirer of the income tax or the agency that administers it, but it is likely that both of them will endure in something like their present form for the immediate future. (But not forever.) If we are to have an IRS, it is critically important that we have a credible IRS. But we do not, and in fact have not for some time. While I do not trust the Obama administration very much at all and am especially skeptical of Eric Holder’s Justice Department, we should welcome the attention the president and his associates are paying to the issue. That is especially true of the FBI’s decision to open a criminal investigation into the matter.

 

(Snip)