I’d say that when you’ve engaged in conjugal relations with the pooch to the depth that Detroit has, you can’t afford either impressionists or public-employee unions.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Libertarians
Five myths about them.
Nancy Pelosi’s Broken Irony Meter
Only she could say this with a straight face: “…the president is one of the most practically non-partisan presidents I have seen in the White House.”
Amazing. Comedy gold.
The IRS Cover Up
The IRS scandal is growing, not shrinking. Perhaps that’s one reason the Obama administration is changing its tune. The White House has come a long way since Obama’s May statement that he wanted “to make sure we find out exactly what happened on this.”
Since then, Obama’s loyal troops in Congress have gone out of their way not to uncover the truth but to attack the integrity and competence of IRS Inspector General George. Obama’s admonition last month that we ignore the “phony scandals” has been picked up by many of his elite media supporters. As any journalist who has followed the trajectory of most Washington scandals knows, such behavior is a clue that those looking into the IRS scandal might be getting warm.
Plus, why Lois Lerner pled the Fifth:
If the Treasury Department inspector general’s report published in mid May is to be believed, Lerner’s communications with the House Oversight Committee have been willfully dishonest. And providing the United States government with false or misleading information carries criminal liability.
Better to plead and be thought a liar than to talk and confirm it.
[Mid-afternoon update]
The broader AIP case is, in fact, beyond improper. It’s fishy. The Obama campaign takes its vendetta against a political opponent to the FEC. The FEC staff, as part of an extraordinary campaign to bring down AIP and other 501(c)(4) groups, reaches out to Lois Lerner, the woman overseeing IRS targeting. Mr. McGahn has also noted that FEC staff has in recent years had an improperly tight relationship with the Justice Department—to which the Obama campaign also complained about AIP.
Democrats are increasingly desperate to suggest that the IRS scandal was the work of a few rogue agents. With the stink spreading to new parts of the federal government, that’s getting harder to do.
But they’ll keep trying.
An ObamaCare Waiver
Congress gets one of its own.
Of course it does. Laws are for the little people. Like Bryan Preston’s, my thoughts are unprintable.
It’s Not Selma Any More
No, Trayvon Martin was no Emmett Till.
But some people just can’t let go of their race-baiting. I for one (well, OK, for at least two) hereby officially refuse to engage in any more one-sided “conversations” about race.
[Link to the second page of the Barone piece at IBD seems to be broken — I’ve emailed him about it.]
[Update a while later]
The cheapening of civil-rights history. They should be ashamed, but they’re shameless.
The Fake Benghazi Scandal
The witnesses are being forced into a witness-protection program.
I don’t think they’re the ones being protected, though.
[Update a while later]
Will David Ubben blow the roof off the “phony” scandal?
Ubben was stuck on that rooftop for 20 hours before help finally arrived. He can tell us and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “what difference does it make”that help was not sent — at least two American lives. Ubben sustained injuries at Benghazi so severe he’s still being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Rep. Darrel Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has tried to interview Ubben as part of its Benghazi scandal investigation, but the State Department has not allowed the meeting, according to Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.
“While initially they said they would be helpful, pretty quickly they turned that off,” Chaffetz reported. “And I had a meeting scheduled to go visit this … young man and then I was denied.” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki denies Chaffetz’s claim, saying State has been fully cooperative.
Yeah, right.
[Update a while later]
“The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year.”
Of course they have. Can’t let the truth get out. Might turn a “phony” scandal into a real one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Gee, maybe this is worth investigating after all.
To be clear, it isn’t at all certain that the CIA was secretly funneling Libyan weapons to Syria, long before Congress “lifted its hurdles” on arming Syrian rebels. But if CNN’s report is correct, the CIA is at minimum trying to hide something huge from Congress, something that CIA agents might otherwise want to reveal — itself a reason for Congress to press hard for information. And if speculation about moving weapons is grounded in anything substantive, that would be an additional reason to investigate what the CIA is doing in Libya. Dozens of CIA agents were apparently on the ground in Benghazi, Libya last September.
And yes, it would be nice to know why, and what they were doing.
Obama’s Creeping Authoritarianism
Thoughts from Dan Henninger:
The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama’s expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.
Gee, someone should write a book
Press-Release Science
Some extensive thoughts, from Charlie Martin.
Sorry, but disagreeing with the media is not a “war on science.”
Detroit
Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.
This is why the Founders gave us a republic, not a democracy.