…disaster.
This tornado looks very bad, but reports of casualties are just coming in.
Much of the town of Moore has been destroyed, including the hospital. One possible consolation is that, according to Fox (which I’m watching on TV right now), there was a 16-minute warning. People in this area live in tornado alley, and most homes probably have cellars, and residents know the tornado protocol. But still, it looks horrific.
Ya think?
Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to embed this particular video, so here’s the URL where you can watch it.
I wonder; will this get the attention of the MSM? Or is it okay because it happened to a Fox reporter?
Prediction: Obama will either defend this move, or deny knowing about it. Maybe both.
[NOTE: It causes me to recall that the notorious “plumbers” of the Nixon administration and Watergate fame were originally formed (and got their name from) their mission to plug leaks that were considered vital to national security. But aside from the Ellsberg psychiatrist office burglary, they didn’t do a whole lot to further that goal. The Watergate break-in was apparently a side caper, committed for a different reason. The motive, however, remains a mystery to this day.]
[ADDENDUM: More information about the probe into Rosen’s doings here.
It occurs to me that this is the sort of thing the left kept thinking the Bush administration would be doing. But it’s Obama who’s doing it.
It’s typical of the left to project its own tactics onto others. But no one who has studied Obama’s past should be surprised at what his administration has done. The only surprise is that any of this is finally being revealed. WTF took so long?]
[ADDENDUM II: More details here.]
Please read it, and send it out to other people you think should read it. Don’t forget your liberal friends, if they are at all amenable to actually reading something you might send them (I’ve worn out my political welcome with most people).
John Kass also gets it—from bitter experience in Chicago, where it’s long been the way it works. It’s not for nothing that Obama cut his political teeth in Chicago; it’s a place that suited him well.
And one of the comments (from “Joe Phillips”) to the Kass article says it quite well:
This is the government the Founding Fathers warned us about.
This is the government Barack Obama said to ignore the warnings about.
This is the government George Orwell wrote about.
This is the government Hugo Chavez dreamed about.
This is the government Ayn Rand feared.
This is the government that will make your medical decisions.
This is the type of corrupt government that has enslaved and killed their citizens.THIS IS WHAT WE THE PEOPLE HAVE ALLOWED OUR GOVERNMENT TO BECOME!
The biggest question by far is Hillary’s extraordinarily useful one: what difference does it make? If the American people don’t care, the tree will fall in the forest without making much of a sound. Way too many on the liberal/left side will think what the IRS did was perfectly fine, because it was part of the fight against the evil right, and all’s fair in that war.
There are many ways to influence people or an organization, so in investigating the IRS audits of conservative groups, although it would be convincing (and legally determinative) to find a secret tape or a secret email from Obama ordering the policy, that really wasn’t necessary in order to let the IRS know what he wanted. Obama set the tone as a matter of public record, through speeches that were not the least bit subtle:
The president derided “tea baggers*.” Vice President Joe Biden compared them to “terrorists.” In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. “Nobody knows who’s paying for these ads,” he warned. “We don’t know where this money is coming from,” he intoned.
In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: “All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.”
Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets.
Please read the whole thing.
But that’s not all. Today we have an interesting story in the American Spectator describing a possible “smoking gun.” It turns out that the day before the IRS began to aggressively target Tea Party groups, the head of the union to which IRS employees belong (the NTEU, the National Treasury Employees Union), Colleen Kelly, met with Obama, according to White House logs. Of course, the content of that meeting is unknown, and I am certain that both parties will claim clean hands (where is Nixon’s taping system when we need it?). So it seems to be a deniable smoking gun, which is probably no smoking gun at all.
But the article, although long, is well worth reading for another reason. It points out something about public sector unions:
Not to be lost sight of here is the role of the NTEU in raising money for Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles ”” the exact period when the IRS was busy going after the Tea Party and the others to curb any possible influence the groups could have in the elections of 2010 and 2012.
The NTEU, through its political action committee, raised $613,633 in the 2010 cycle, giving 98% of its contributions to anti-Tea Party Democrats. In 2012 the figure was $729,708, with 94% going to anti-Tea Party candidates. One NTEU candidate after another, as discussed last week in this space, campaigned vigorously against the Tea Party.
So the IRS employee union is engaged in political action against the very groups it was targeting. Sweet.
President Obama himself may be able to successfully stonewall and deny, or even mount a “modified limited hangout” and keep the IRS scandal from touching him. But how on earth could one ever trust the even-handedness of the IRS again (assuming, of course, the dubious notion that a person ever trusted them in the first place)?
[*When I read the quote that indicated Obama had used the phrase “tea baggers,” that struck an odd note with me. I couldn’t remember him doing anything quite that egregious. It turns out he had used the term in an interview back in 2010.]
Well, it is a hard song.
And she’s French Canadian.
But still, every performer’s nightmare:
[Hat tip: Ace’s.]
It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it.
This country is in deep, deep trouble. But of course, you already know that.
Because, despite the president’s feigned outrage about what the IRS did, the White House’s message is that the IRS abuses don’t constitute a “real” scandal.
Excuse me—an “actual real scandal”:
“What would be an actual real scandal in Washington would be if the president had been involved or had interfered in an IRS investigation,” Pfeiffer said on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation.’”
So let’s redefine: an actual real scandal would be if we had a recording of Obama, or emails from Obama, directing the IRS to do this or directing his underlings to cover it up. Without that, no biggee.
What difference does it make what the IRS’s politically-motivated audits tell us about the tyranny of the federal government? What difference does it make that Obama publicly set the tone for the targeting of “enemies”? What difference does it make that this was purposely withheld till after the election? And what difference does it make that Obama has failed even now to fire (for real, not just those on the brink of leaving anyway) anyone involved?
Because Obama is responsible for nothing except the killing of Bin Laden and some vapid but golden oratory. The buck not only doesn’t stop at his desk, it doesn’t even pass that way.
Oh, and still another “actual real scandal” would be anything negative that happened during a Republican administration.
Next question.
[NOTE: Love this. It appeared in, of all places, the New Yorker:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)””President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.
“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”
The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”
“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”
Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”
“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.]
Charles Krauthammer on IRS chief Steven Miller’s testimony that the special targeting of conservative groups was not a political action:
You’ve got to be a knave or a fool to say that and you have to be an idiot to believe it.
Touché.
Not a nice guy. Never has been a nice guy. And not a nice guy to Democrats, either.
My latest piece is up at PJ.
Fools! say White House officials, after being guaranteed anonymity:
“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots,” said one Obama administration official who was part of the Benghazi response. “It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”
Egad.
Read the whole thing.
…where there’s a will, there’s a way.
The most heartwarming line in the article: “Stacey Belhumeur, a Tucson, Arizona, zookeeper and species survival plan coordinator for the North American population of giant anteaters, [said], “My guess is they thought they had him separated … We’ve had animals breed through fences.”
Just substitute “anteater” for “muskrat” and you’ve got it:
William A. Jacobsen connects some dots:
The election of 2012 was tainted by All the President’s Concealers.
[ADDENDUM: John Hinderaker at Powerline muses on some related issues. I’m with Hinderaker on this; although we’ll never really know, I don’t think it would have mattered, because—well, what he says:
To an extraordinary degree, the 2012 electorate seemed uninterested in the Obama administration’s failures. If voters didn’t care about the economy or about $16 trillion in debt, why would they have cared about Benghazi or the IRS? But the cumulative effect of multiple, mutually reinforcing scandals is hard to predict. It is easy to understand why, last fall, the Obama administration didn’t want to take any chances. They went into full cover-up mode, and carried off their multiple cover-ups successfully. Without doubt, that effort helped to bring about the president’s re-election.
The analogy to 1972 is obvious. Richard Nixon managed to keep the lid on Watergate long enough to enjoy one of the most sweeping electoral victories in American history. After the election, however, his cover-up unraveled; it consumed, and eventually destroyed, his second term. Whether the same will happen to Obama remains to be seen, but already it is clear that scandal will be a major part of the Obama legacy.
As far as that last sentence goes—whether “scandal will be a major part of the Obama legacy”—it depends who wins. The winners get to write history, don’t they?]
[ADDENDUM II: Andrew McCarthy is on the mark, as usual, in pointing out a part of the Benghazi story that has thus far been ignored. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article by McCarthy that wasn’t well worth reading, and this one is no exception.]