One doesn’t need reams of reports or public-opinion polls to understand the gut plausibility of an IRS scandal in full flower. Yet the Obama administration seems not to have imagined that this burgeoning problem might require more attention than anything else Republicans are screaming about. Rather than a president in over his head, Obama is behaving like a president who doesn’t believe the onus should be on him to head off an appearance of impropriety at the pass.
No matter how old-school the IRS scandal feels, that naïve arrogance feels rather new on the scene—the sort of attitude given off by people who believe deep down that if you have the correct stance on policy, you ought to be immune to political attack.
One of the (many) ways in which it’s worse is that Watergate was purely a White House scandal, whereas many Democrats in Congress are complicit in this one. And sadly, there is no Democrat equivalent of a Howard Baker to go to the White House and tell the president that it’s over.
I know you’ll be as shocked as I am to learn that she lied about Benghazi in it.
Of course, in the nineties, she had an aide who testified to Congress that he lied to his own diary. It’s almost like this gang (as well as the Obama people, and there’s a great deal of overlap, notably Eric Holder) are congenital liars.
She’s really a fish in a barrel. She just isn’t generally an attractive target to people like Diane Sawyer. I wonder if the media is finally getting tired of her, and looking for another Obama?
An historic leader from The Economist, four days after the successful invasion (after it had finally become clear that it was a success):
…when all the thanks are made and all the contributions measured, there still remain the final artificers of victory, the men who, in the King’s words “man the ships, storm the beaches and fill the skies.” Although the first advances have been secured with surprisingly little loss of life, the hardest fighting lies ahead. In the weeks to come, thousands of men will lay down their lives or suffer disablement, will endure pain and hardship and strain, will throw everything they have into the balance of victory without particularly asking why or counting the cost. For them at the moment there is not very much that the people who stay behind can do. They can keep vigil, as the King has asked. They can face anxiety steadfastly. They can accept the losses when they come; but the real effort of gratitude will only be needed later on, when the men come home. They will not have been given victory, they will have toiled and sweated for it, all the way from Alamein to Bizerta, from Sicily to Rome, in the jungles of Burma, on the landing beaches in France. They have been the active agents of every military success. It is their courage and initiative and adaptability and common sense that have completed the historic reversal of the last four years. It will not be enough for their elders to give them “food, work and homes”—the essentials of a decent post-war society. They must be allowed their place in that society, they must be given scope and opportunity and responsibility to run it themselves.