Mega Political Debacles Roil The Obama Administration

by Don Azarias
June 1, 2013
In just a short week, President Barack Obama has been so preoccupied swatting away at the endless accusations being lobbed at him not only by Republicans but also by his own Democratic allies. And it’s starting to look like the damage done to his presidency is, at this point, irreversible.
Legal experts believe that these offenses are at the same level as the Watergate scandal that brought down the Richard M. Nixon’s presidency.
While the Obama administration is having its worst political week, the GOP is having quite a field day and receiving plenty of ammunition that it can use later to score hit after hit on an unwilling target when the day of reckoning comes.
The current brouhahas are as follows: (1) The last September’s fatal attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, (2) The targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants by the IRS and (3) The Justice Department’s broad subpoena of Associated Press (AP) phone records.
So far, there’s no evidence that Obama was involved in any of these debacles. But do you really believe that? I don’t. And if we let history be our guide, a president usually is held accountable for everything bad that happens in his administration. The Republicans now have enough ground to call for congressional hearings to remind Obama that, as the nation’s chief executive, he is bound by the U.S. Constitution to preside over a government by the people, under the law, and not by fiat.
As it was during his first term, Obama is facing enormous political problems that include soaring deficits, mass unemployment, failure to enact gun control legislation, unending conflicts in the Middle East, war in Afghanistan, unstoppable nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran, China’s growing military build-up that threatens the United States’ allies in Southeast Asia and, of course, a recalcitrant Congress on Capitol Hill. Now talk of impeachment is even back as the GOP is looking into possible corruption and coercion charges committed by the Obama administration.
The first scandal involves the Obama administration’s handling of last year’s terrorist attack on the United States diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, when US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed.
The “cover up” in this case is the alleged “doctoring” of the initial version used to describe the attack which ABC News later found out was revised 12 times.
According to the ABC News, it has obtained State Department e-mails showing that official talking points on the attack were “extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.”
The edits also included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well as references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.
The second scandal came to light when an IRS official revealed at a meeting of tax lawyers that the agency had inappropriately singled out Tea Party movement and other conservative groups for extra examination of their claims for tax-exempt status. The group felt that they were discriminated against by getting special scrutiny from federal authorities.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell recently called on President Obama to make available for questioning, during a scheduled congressional hearing, everyone who knew about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, and demanded “no more stonewalling.”
It was determined that the targeting began in 2010, shortly after the emergence of the conservative Tea Party movement, which helped Republicans, in the election that year, pick up seats in the Senate and control of the House of Representatives.
Congressional Republicans are making allegations that the Obama administration is using the IRS to go after its political opponents. The GOP claims that the IRS are checking out conservative groups without applying the same type of scrutiny to liberal groups.
In the third scandal, it is believed that Obama’s Justice Department sought AP’s records to find the source of a leak that informed an AP story about a failed terrorist attack. However, the Justice Department didn’t tell AP what it was doing until two months after it obtained the records. This is in complete violation of the Justice Department guidelines for subpoena issuance.
Under the guidelines, subpoenas concerning the press cannot be issued without the express approval of the Attorney General who is currently Eric Holder. Further, before a subpoena is issued, the government is honor bound to negotiate with the party to which it is directed.
The spirit of the First Amendment enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, as intended by the Founding Fathers, was meant to protect the freedom of the press and the citizens’ right to a free speech. However, the Obama administration’s unlawful investigation of a major news agency, like the Associated Press, is a blatant abuse of power by the executive branch of the federal government.
The political uproar resulting from this particular case has sparked bipartisan outrage, with several GOP and Democratic officials questioning Holder’s department’s actions in the matter. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said the attorney general should resign over the issue, adding: “Freedom of the press is an essential right in a free society.”
These political debacles could easily spill over into the 2014 mid-term election year and like what happened in 2010, it caused the Democrats a lot of grief. Haven’t they learned their lesson yet?
It is my personal belief that no U.S. president’s administration should be allowed to get away with using powerful federal agencies and departments to suppress political dissent, spying on and intimidating of journalists, and lying and covering up of the aftermath of a terrorist attack like what happened in Benghazi, Libya.
In a Democratic society, it’s imperative that the truth prevail. Apparently, Obama and his minions are far-removed from it.