If the Obama administration thought last week was a difficult one in its continued efforts to deny, deflect, and obfuscate to keep the growing scandals involving the IRS, the Department of Justice surveillance of Associated Press reporters phones, the cover-up involving the Benghazi massacre (and soon-to-be gun-running scandal), and HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius shaking down private industry for donations to help implement Obamacare, this week is already starting out to be even worse.
Not that I didn’t tell y’all this would happen.
It’s not that there are – at least for now – new scandals on the horizon, but the broadening and deepening of each of these the scandals is presenting a greater challenge for the administration to contain than I’m betting even they ever thought possible. In just the past 48 hours we’ve learned not only that the IRS has been targeting Christian churches in Wyomning, even asking for lists of church members, something that smacks of Nazism’s deepest and darkest days, but you have the first IRS higher-up going before Congrees to plead the fifth rather than give sworn testimony. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out when people start pleading the fifth, you’re talking cover-up and prosecutions somewhere not too far down the line.
In the terms of the AP scandal, we now find that it wasn’t just AP reporters whose phones were targeted for surveillance by Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (something he claims to know nothing about, of course) it was the phone numbers of Fox News reporter James Rosen and other Fox News phones, even Rosen’s own parents line. Again, it doesn’t take a degree in rocket science to figure out that if the government were doing this to AP reporters and Fox News, the practice was pretty widespread, perhaps including CBS News reporter Sheryl Attkisson, whose reporting has helped keep the Obama administration’s cover-up of the Fast and Furious scandal alive.
The problem for the Obama administration on all these fronts at this point is two-fold: 1) the responses of Attorney General Eric Holder and White House spokesman Jay Carney denying knowledge of anything to do with these scandals in any way has even their most loyal supporters questioning their honesty and potential direct involvement (if not their overwhelming incompetence), and 2) scandals such as these tend to take on a life of their own as as people begin to come forward and spill their guts rather than face prison, and journalists invoke their inner Woodward and Bernstein when they sense blood in the water and great story to help break open. Just as the Nixon administration’s efforts to cover-up the Watergate break-in soon became an all-consuming effort that paralyzed the administration and ultimately led to its downfall, the Obama administration risks finding itself in a similar situation if it can’t find a way to rid itself of the stench surrounding itself so early in its second term.
What’s becoming readily apparent is that this administration, in its zeal to further its aggressive left-wing agenda, sought to stifle dissenting views, suppress the activities of conservative groups, and inhibit the ability of opposition forces to support the elections of Republicans in 2010 and 2012 by employing various agencies of the federal government to threaten, harass, and intimidate. It wasn’t just the actions of rogue low-level operatives, it was systemic and originating out of Washington. Whether or not those directions came directly from the White House is still something that will need to be determined, but if it is – and you can say you heard it here first that it did – as Charles Krauthammer says we could be talking about events that are fatal to this administration in every sense of the word.
What the Obama administration is slowly being shown to have been involved in – almost from its inception – will ultimately be shown to make Richard Nixon look like a brash amateur.
