Category Archives: Democrats

The Culture of Intimidation

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From Eliana Johnson:

Since his emergence as a national political figure, Barack Obama has managed to deflect accusations of wrongdoing and impropriety with ease. Republicans on Capitol Hill are determined to put that to an end by making him pay for the unfolding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.

“Ultimately responsibility lies with the president. Obama has spent the better part of the last five years doing non-stop campaigning,” says a senior Republican Senate aide who points to the administration’s larger pattern of “using political offices to intimidate and harrass” its opponents. “When bureaucrats see the leader of an organization doing that, it shouldn’t shock us when they start doing the same. That appears to have been what happened here.”

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A Calculated Lie

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From Thomas Sowell:

There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects. But there can also be dishonest differences. Last week’s testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.

What we were told repeatedly last year by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the U.N., was that there was a protest demonstration in Benghazi against an anti-Islamic video produced by an American, and that this protest demonstration simply escalated out of control.

This “spontaneous protest” story did not originate in Libya but in Washington. Neither the Americans on duty in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, nor officials of the Libyan government, said anything about a protest demonstration.

The highest American diplomat on the scene in Libya spoke directly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by phone, and told her that it was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya announced that it was a terrorist attack. The C.I.A. told the Obama administration that it was a terrorist attack.

With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. After the “spontaneous protest” story was discredited, the next claim was that this was the best information available at the time from intelligence sources.

But that claim cannot survive scrutiny, now that the 12 drafts of the Obama administration’s talking points about Benghazi have belatedly come to light. As draft after draft of the talking points were made, e-mails from the State Department pressured the intelligence services to omit from these drafts their clear and unequivocal statement from the outset that this was a terrorist attack.

Attempts to make it seem that Ambassador Susan Rice’s false story about a “spontaneous protest” was the result of her not having accurate information from the intelligence services have now been exposed as a second lie to excuse the first lie.

Despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loudly proclaimed question “What difference, at this point, does it make?” the difference is between an honest mistake and a calculated lie to deceive the American people, in order to win an election.

Barack Obama’s election campaign oratory had proclaimed the death of Osama bin Laden as an accomplishment of his administration, as part of a general defeat of Al-Qaeda and other terrorists. To admit that these terrorists were still in action, and strong enough to kill an American ambassador and three other Americans in a well-coordinated military style attack, would be a politically devastating admission during the election campaign.

Far better, politically, to come up with a story about a protest demonstration that just got out of hand. This could be presented as an isolated, one-time event, rather than part of a continuing pattern of terrorism by groups that were still active, despite President Obama’s spin suggesting that they were not.

The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department’s own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him.

After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars.

The Obama administration’s excuse for not trying to get help to the Americans in Benghazi while they were under attack — namely, that it would take too long — is as shaky as its other statements. A small fighting unit in Tripoli was ready to get on a plane to Benghazi when they were ordered to “stand down.” Other fighting units located outside of Libya are designed precisely for fast deployment — and nobody knew how many hours the attack would last.

But it will take more investigations to determine who gave the order to “stand down,” and why. How many new lies that will generate is another question.

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Truth — what difference at this point does it make?

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From VDH:

Hillary Clinton’s now infamous second question that followed, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d go kill some Americans?”: “What difference at this point does it make?” is rightly quoted as a reflection of the callousness toward finding out the truth about the death of four Americans. But the first question in some ways is even worse. By the time Secretary Clinton posed that either/or question in January, she had known for months from both intelligence reports and from the administration and State Department efforts to massage those reports, and from the efforts of diplomat Gregory Hicks and others to set the story straight, that the murders were preplanned assaults by an al-Qaeda affiliate. She knew that the attack was neither a “protest” nor “guys out for a walk” — but was still peddling scenarios that were simply untrue and designed to mislead.

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Obama’s Court Eunuchs

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From Mark Steyn:

Toward the end of my column on Gregory Hicks’ testimony re Benghazi, I write:

The dying Los Angeles Times reported this story on its homepage (as a sidebar to “Thirteen Great Tacos in Southern California”) under the following headline: “Partisan Politics Dominates House Benghazi Hearing.” In fact, everyone in this story is a Democrat or a career civil servant.

Mr Hicks was there in the latter capacity, and he didn’t come across as a political person. But just for the record:

A key Benghazi whistle-blower who has allegedly been punished for speaking out against the administration is a registered Democrat who voted for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Gregory Hicks, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are all Democrats. The only difference is that for Mr Hicks four dead colleagues trumps party.

That it doesn’t for Obama’s court eunuchs is a comment on them.

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Americanism vs. Leftism

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Americanism:

If you think about the founders, they looked at the government as the enemy of rights; that we secure our rights by limiting the government. And even where you have government, it has to be checked. And so you have separation of power, checks and balances — all techniques to put a rein, a leash on the government. And that’s why when you look at the Bill of Rights, a lot of the phrases begin, “Congress shall make no law.” So how do we protect free speech, Congress shall make no law restricting free speech; how do we protect religion, Congress can’t pass laws about it. So restricting the government is seen as the mechanism to protect rights.

– Dinesh D’Souza, The Dennis Prager Show, January 22, 2013, Hour 2

Leftism:

Government is not inherently bad; government is inherently good. That is why we have a Constitution.

– Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), U.S. Senate Floor, April 23, 2013

Emotional Pornography

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From Charles C. W. Cooke:

Unabated, unabashed, and increasingly unhinged, the sordid parade continues apace. Last week, Barack Obama flew some of the Newtown families to Washington, D.C., for a rally at which he argued for the putting aside of “politics” that disagree with his own, warned against “political stunts” (presumably with the exception of the one he was performing), and declared a monopoly on “common sense.” This weekend, the president ceded the pulpit of his weekly address to Francine Wheeler, a grieving mother, so that, in the name of “doing something” that might have prevented her son’s death, she could urge the passage of a set of policies that the Left has supported for years.

Over the last three months such behavior has been common. In countless appearances, the president has suggested that the interests of “our children” and “the gun lobby” are diametrically opposed,” he has brazenly maligned the intentions of those who have the temerity to disagree with him, and he has made catharsis for the families of the Newtown massacre a national priority. It has been shameless. There is, it appears, no emotional pornography that the administration will refuse to distribute in the pursuit of its agenda.

But the approach betrays a certain desperation. As Kathleen Parker observed bluntly in the Washington Post last week, “nothing proposed in the gun-control debates would have prevented the mass killing of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and everybody knows it.”

Everybody does — which explains the mawkishness. The sole purpose of wheeling in innocent children, of pointing incessantly to the grief of victims of gun violence, and of relating tales of family suicide (as Harry Reid recently did on the Senate floor) is to dare your opponents to be hard-hearted enough to oppose your agenda. Instead of engaging his critics on substance, the president has done his level best to circumvent the debate by transmuting a dispute over the wisdom of new laws into an up or down vote on whether or not one is sad about gun violence.

This is cynical and grotesque, but it is also clever. What better way of deflecting criticism than by encouraging your antagonists to censor themselves? Anyone foolhardy enough to write what I am writing here knows full well that he will be accused of “attacking” grieving families. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the likes of Media Matters, whose fatuous claim that Fox News was “dismissing the voices of the families who suffered in a mass shooting in Newtown, CT by claiming they’re being used and exploited by Democrats” is sadly typical. Or Greg Sargent, who characterized Mitch McConnell as “callously rebuffing” families that wished to meet with him. Or Michael Moore, who argued that if Harry Reid’s kids were shot, he would change his mind on gun control. Moore, Media Matters, and Sargent have the same hope: that their opponents, cowed by emotional blackmail, will stay quiet, allowing the president free rein.

It makes no rational sense whatsoever to privilege the testimony of Newtown’s parents in our deliberations. The children of Sandy Hook were randomly chosen victims of abhorrent and reckless violence. It is reasonable to seek the counsel of victims if you suspect that they can help you prevent future atrocities. But we wouldn’t expect the casualties of bombings to have particular insight into how best to deal with security, nor the victims of a gas leak to shed light on the details of piping infrastructure. Cruel as it might seem to observe, you are not afforded greater insight into the legal and economic questions surrounding gun control because a bullet fired by a madman has hit you or somebody you love.

This, of course, does not mean that the victims of gun violence, or their families, should sit down and “shut up.” Far from it — they can and should say whatever they wish and they should explain the devastating consequences of gun violence. But they should not be treated as expert witnesses.

In March, when the chances of a gun bill looked remote, the president griped that the public was forgetting the scale of its outrage. Perhaps so. But if true, this is healthy. Laws that are passed in haste and designed to assuage raw emotion are almost always disastrous. (New York State’s recent debacle illustrates this perfectly.) The president is a good campaigner, and he is smart enough to know that, if he is to cram something through Congress, he has to keep the outrage levels up and the focus on grief. He thus takes the perverse position that Americans will be able to produce a proper response to what happened in Sandy Hook only if they maintain their raw emotions and keep logic out of it.

The rest of us should take the opposite approach: What America does next will be best considered in the cold light of day, and that will mean looking past “the children” — and their parents, too.

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Nothing Out of the Ordinary

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From the Daily Mail:

Vice President Joe Biden’s costly trip to London and Paris last month just got more expensive.

A newly uncovered receipt from the February trip shows the vice president’s office spent $321,665 to a limousine company in Paris, in addition to the previously reported hotel tabs of $585,000 for one night’s stay in the city and and $459,338 for a night in London.

State department officials say Biden’s staff members, who are not allowed to drive themselves, used the limo company to get around the city. Biden’s limousine was flown in from the U.S.

The limo bill was first reported by CNN after the Weekly Standard discovered the hotel bills online, where federal officials had posted contract filings for the expenses.

During his trip in late February, Biden spent the night at two five-star hotels – one night at the Hyatt Regency London for a total of $459,338.65 and another night at the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand for $585,000.50.

A State Department official told ABC News that the costs are ‘nothing out of the ordinary.’

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