He better have a darn good explanation for why they didn’t talk to either Clinton, Greg Hicks or some of the other important people on the case. He previously said he didn’t interview Clinton because “we knew where responsibility lay”. Huh? Via CBS: The chairman of the House Oversight committee has issued a subpoena
Continued here:
Issa Issues Subpoena To Amb. Thomas Pickering, Co-Chair Of ARB, To Be Questioned About Findings On Benghazi
THE FALL OF 2005 WAS A PERFECT STORM of troubles for the Bush administration and the Republican Congress: overspending, public tiring of the Iraq War, Katrina, Harriet Miers, the indictment of Tom DeLay, the Abramoff scandal, the Valerie Plame affair and its possible threat to Karl Rove, skyrocketing gas prices, and collapsing approval ratings for President Bush and the Republican Congress. Bush’s personal approval rating fell from 50 percent the day he was re-elected in 2004 to 39 percent in November 2005. The public sense of right track/wrong track moved from 44/51 in January 2005 to 33/64 by early December 2005. October 25 saw the
WASHINGTON — How odd! There I was Saturday evening in the Windy City at a fundraising event for the Chicago Rowing Foundation, and who do I encounter but the mayor of Chicago, His Honor Rahm Emanuel? You might recall that back in 2010 I was encouraged by conservative Chicagoans and doubtless by the good government lobby to run against Rahm for mayor, claiming, quite properly, that I had a more legitimate claim to residency in Chicago than did he. What is more, I had a friend on the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and, it being more important in Chicago whom you know than the merits of your case, I am pretty sure the Republican nomination was mine. In the end I took a pass on the race, but now I am not so sure I will pass it up in 2015. Rahm’s problems mount, and I would relish debating him on the issues. He seemed like a likable fellow when he stopped me for a picture and presumably my autograph. Alas, ushers hastened us to our seats. I say the encounter was odd because of all the scandals that are now accumulating in Washington: the cover-ups, the infringements on civil liberties, the government encroachments on the press. The last time the left was using the government to hide the truth, to intimidate, and to criminalize free expression was the Clinton Administration, and Rahm was right there in the White House, serving as the big lovable lug of a president’s senior adviser. On February 26, 1998, the White House sent me an autographed copy of the President’s charmless opuscule, Between Hope and History , with an official White House return of address. I still have it among my mementoes from public service. It was sent anonymously, but I have always thought that Rahm had a hand in it. In fact, I ought to have it fingerprinted. It was like receiving a dead fish in the mail from the Cosa Nostra. The arrival of the book signaled the attacks on The American Spectator in the press and the government investigations, and the dragging of the Spectator ’s employees and friends before a grand jury in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It took a year of expensive and mostly silent persecution — when the government is after you the telephone rarely rings. Still, in the end, we were cleared in a way that the Clintons have never been cleared. Exoneration — a word neither Hillary nor Bill has ever heard! Now we have the Benghazi negligence and cover-up. Anyone who is familiar with Hillary’s career knows that she sweetly conveyed to her aides the same message she conveyed time and again in her long career of abusing power: “Cover it up.” So they did. They created a street protest where there was no protest. They said it was an anti-Islamic video that provoked the violence when it was an organized military operation carried out by allies of al Qaeda. Soon operatives of the White House and the State Department were working full time scrubbing talking points, smearing principled government employees, and, as the implausible White House spokesman Jay Carney said, “the cow jumped over the moon” or words to that effect. Yet the whistleblowers have now told their story of lax security on the ground in Benghazi, a refusal to send in a relief mission, and general imprudence. The negligence and lies are increasingly apparent. It is not just Hillary’s career that is in jeopardy. It is Barack Obama’s presidency. Then there are Friday’s admissions by Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner of harassment of conservative organizations in 2012. Now it appears that Ms. Lerner’s admissions amounted to mere damage control. According to news reports, her organization engaged in targeting conservative organizations as early as 2010, and the IRS engaged in such activity across the nation. That is to say, that the government agency deemed most menacing by ordinary citizens harassed conservatives with inquiries about their employees, board members, and donors. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized, “there is a pattern here. Oppose the Obama Administration or liberal priorities, and you can become an IRS target.” Finally there is the Administration’s third scandal of the past week, the Justice Department’s seizure of telephone records from the Associated Press. The news accounts claim the press is really irate. Will the press remain irate at President Obama, at Hillary, at this entire mendacious Administration? We shall see. Yet one thing I am certain of. Rahm Emanuel is very glad to be back in Chicago. Even if he has some strange run-ins there, it is a lot safer than life in our nation’s capital. What if he were still our President’s chief of staff?
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My Rahm Reunion
As Kaylin noted , Attorney General Eric Holder lost his cool with Congressman Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee today. Holder called Issa’s conduct as a Congressman “shameful.” Now there’s no love lost between Holder and Issa given their history over Fast & Furious. But Holder is the last person who is in any position to be calling anyone’s conduct shameful. Whether we’re talking about Holder’s role in the Marc Rich pardon during the last days of the Clinton Administration, calling his fellow countrymen “a nation of cowards,” dropping the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia, “glancing” at the Arizona immigration law and playing the race card when he was criticized for his role in Fast & Furious, Holder could teach a graduate level seminar in shameful conduct.
“Our right hand doesn’t know what our far right hand is doing,” Ronald Reagan once joked of his administration. Obama lacks the humor, grace, or knowledge of Biblical allusions, to make a similar joke about his White House. Plus, it wouldn’t be true: his left hand does know what his far left hand is doing. Only when the fingers on it poke people too obviously in the eye, as in the case of this new IRS scandal, does Obama apologize. Otherwise, he likes its extension. It was the White House’s far left hand that doctored up Susan Rice’s preposterous presentation on Benghazi. Indifferent to the problem of radical Islam, desperate to win an election on the claim that Obama had routed terrorists, and eager to throw a critic of their favorite religion into jail for a YouTube video they deemed hate speech, his aides spun what happened in Libya according to these biases. Hillary Clinton was stomping around, raging about how that video had hurt the feelings of Muslims and how its creator deserved jail time. For two weeks, Obama treated a national humiliation at the hands of Islamic terrorists as an occasion to muse about the need for greater “civility” in the world. Obama is still struggling to line up his lies. If he knew, as he now claims, that it was premeditated terrorism from the beginning, why did he spend two weeks on that ludicrous “civility” tour, bouncing from show to show and speech to speech to denounce a video? Gregory Hicks, America’s number two man in Libya, called the YouTube protests a “non-event” there. Yet Obama was happy to leave the impression that Western provocation lay at its root, as that absolved him of responsibility and fit with his far-left ideology of a peaceful Islam that poses no threat to America as long as odious people aren’t antagonizing it. It is rich that journalists who didn’t mind seeing the creator of the YouTube video thrown into jail (on conveniently “unrelated” charges to his alleged abuse of artistic freedom) now discover their own First Amendment freedom violated. The Obama administration has been snooping on the phone records of reporters. Now that the far left hand of the White House is wiretapping them, it is suddenly okay to talk about tyranny. This is only shocking to those who haven’t been paying attention. This is perfectly consistent behavior for an administration that deems itself an authority on what constitutes acceptable speech or even what constitutes a news organization. Recall that former White House communications director Anita Dunn, when not sharing with high school students self-help tips from Chairman Mao, decreed that Obama officials boycott Fox News, as it wasn’t a real “news network the way CNN is.” The far left hand of the White House also pushed propaganda that cast constitutional conservatives as “extremists.” The repeated refrain was that these hopelessly irrational Americans posed a danger to the common good. The Department of Homeland Security even wrote up a report about them. Is it any wonder that IRS officials, operating under this rhetoric, gave heightened scrutiny to conservative groups with Tea Party, patriot, and other terms deemed subversive by this administration in their names? What annoys Obama about the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups is not that the agents did it but that they got caught. He wants his revolution advanced more subtly. These clumsy disciples interpreted his frequent denunciations of the Tea Party too zealously. This isn’t the first time that his disciples have listened to his words too attentively. Last summer , for example, they tried to delete any mention of God in the Democratic Party platform, thinking that that comported with his secularism. To mollify public opinion, Obama made a show of rebuking these DNC delegates. But once the bad publicity passes after a moment of liberal excess the revolution begins anew. The FDA’s recent authorization of over-the-counter abortifacients for 15-year-olds provides a recent example of how that works: when that was first proposed in 2011, Obama opposed it, distancing himself from the FDA; now he is “comfortable” with the FDA’s decision. What changed? Nothing, except the political climate. He has more “flexibility” in his second term. So it might go with the IRS: what he calls “unacceptable” today may pass muster in the future under another Democratic president. For Obama, who likes to turn the temperature up on the frogs gradually so that they don’t jump out of the pot, whether he approves or apologizes for a moment of liberal excess depends upon public reaction and media feeling. Joe Biden got out “ahead of his skis” on gay marriage, Obama said in 2012, but that was okay because Obama concluded that that wouldn’t hurt him politically and he had the media on his side. The IRS and wiretapping scandals are a different matter. He knows that the media is upset, so he will have to fake up an appropriate level of anger. On Benghazi, he still has enough of the media to gut that out and is confident that he can continue to snow the public by calling it a “sideshow” and old news. Obama is the revolutionary who leads from behind, who orders liberals “forward” and then feigns anger when they hear him too clearly and sprint ahead. Photo: UPI
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Obama’s Far Left Hand
