"A Guide to the Obama Administration’s Five Major Scandals for Mainstream Media Dummies"

 "A Guide to the Obama Administration’s Five Major Scandals for Mainstream Media Dummies"

by
BRYAN PRESTON

A month to go before President Barack Obama faces re-election finds the president dealing with five major scandals. Any one of these scandals would sink a mere mortal, but Barack Obama as we all know is no mere mortal. He is a lightworker, author of hope and change, the man whose election should have been the moment that our ailing planet itself was healed. So none of these scandals are much of a threat to him. In political terms Barack Obama is a god, immortal and untouchable.

Barack Obama is politically immortal because our mainstream media is hopelessly immoral. Also, corrupt down to its miserable, rotten core. But should there be one member of the mainstream media who still cares about truth, should there be a single member of the mainstream media who actually cares about reporting these things called “facts,” should there be Woodward or Bernstein out there who just wants to make a name for themselves, I have put a little guide together outlining the five scandals that ought to sink Barack Obama’s political career.

Scandal 1: Fast and Furious. You might have heard of this one. It involved allowing thousands of guns to “walk” across the US border into Mexico during 2009 and 2010, not coincidentally the height of that country’s drug war so far. One of those guns turned up in the hands of a Mexican drug cartel operator, at the murder scene of US Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Another has been linked to the murder of US Customs Agent Jaime Zapata. So this scandal has an American body count: 2. Fast and Furious also has a Mexican body count that may get up into the hundreds. While the shills in the mainstream media ran shady poll after shadier poll to tell America that the presidential race is over, Univision scooped them, discovering that Fast and Furious operated well beyond Arizona and that some of its guns turned up in all kinds of heinous crimes, including massacres of Mexicans.

Beyond the body count, there lingers the question: Just what did the administration hope to accomplish by letting guns get into the hands of drug cartel operators without tracking those guns adequately. The intrepid reporter can surely run down all kinds of angles and avenues just by seriously asking that single question. Instead of asking that question, though, the mainstream media has picked up its shovels and helped Obama and Eric Holder bury all those Fast and Furious casualties in a hole quite a bit deeper than six feet, known as the Memory Hole.

Scandal 2: Kathleen Sebelius breaks federal law, keeps her job. In February 2012, Secretary of Health and Human Services (that’s a federal position, just in case you’re not up on your civics) Kathleen Sebelius openly electioneered on government time in her official capacity during a visit to North Carolina. The Hatch Act, a federal law, expressly forbids such activity. The department she heads decided to cover her actions up by re-badging her appearance as a personal one, and had her pay some money to cover expenses. All of that constitutes an active cover-up. An investigation found that Sebelius has indeed violated the Hatch Act, which as I already mentioned, is not a mere suggestion or guideline — it’s a federal law. Federal officials who are found in violation of the Hatch Act tend to get fired quickly. But Kathleen Sebelius not only has not been fired, President Obama has already appeared with her on the campaign trail since she was found to have violated the law.

The Hatch Act is very serious law. It was written so that government officials could not abuse their power over subordinates for political reasons. By keeping Sebelius on the job, Obama has effectively gutted the Hatch Act and declared open season by higher ranking government officials on lower ranking ones.

Scandal 3. Obama administration leaks sensitive national security information for political purposes. In a series of stories that were published in the New York Times, and in a movie production that was set to make a two-hour pre-election infomercial for President Obama, a person or persons within the administration leaked all kinds of sensitive national security information to the media. These persons leaked the names of active Navy SEAL special operators to Hollywood producers, they leaked details of ongoing cyber operations against Iran, and they leaked details about how the president decides when and where to kill terrorists. None of this information should have leaked. All of it hurt our nation’s security in one way or another. All of it, if leaked by someone not in the president’s inner circle, would get the leaker jailed and charged with serious crimes. No one has been fired, no one has been jailed. Presumably the leaker or leakers still have access to sensitive information and can still leak it whenever they choose. Or are ordered to.

Scandal 4. Obama administration tells defense contractors to violate federal law. Bonus: Obama administration says it will use taxpayer dollars to pay any government fines incurred. This scandal is still ongoing, and it could be a big one. The Obama administration entered into a spending deal with Congress, by which automatic budget cuts will start slicing away unless the politicians act to stop them and find other places to cut or raise revenue. Some of the biggest cuts will hit defense contractors. Those contractors are required by federal law to inform their workers if layoffs may be close at hand. Thanks to sequestration, layoffs are close at hand unless the politicians hammer out a deal, which they haven’t done. So Lockheed was set to send out the pink slips, but on Friday and then against Monday the Obama administration told them not to. That command is in violation of federal law. The Obama administration doubled down on that illegal command, by telling the contractors that the government, which would collect any penalties resulting from the failure to give out the layoff notices, will pay the fines. Wrap that around your head for a second — the government is commanding contractors to break the law, which in ordinary circumstances would trigger monetary penalties and might render that contractor ineligible for future government contracts. And on top of that, the government says it will use taxpayer dollars to pay the penalties, which would go to the government — in other words, itself.

How is this scandal not both a late night comic’s dream and a fertile patch for an intrepid reporter to cultivate?

Scandal 5: Libya. The short version of the Libya scandal goes like this. President Barack Obama has been skipping more than half of his Presidential Daily Briefings. His State Department sent an ambassador to war torn Libya, but did no threat assessment before handing him a consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Benghazi isn’t exactly a tourist destination. In the post-Gaddafhi Libya that Obama helped create via a war of dubious legality, Benghazi is a lawless hotbed of al Qaeda and related terrorist activity. The consulate in Benghazi was given no Marine protection and in fact did not have the standard security arrangements at all. It was protected by local militias for hire. Such arrangements tend to find cheap local fighters of highly questionable loyalty.

On Sept 8, 2012, the US government starts to get warnings thatterrorists intend to strike in Cairo, Egypt and in Libya. Threats in Libya against the US ambassador there had been ramping up formonths. On Sept 11, 2012, the terrorists strike and in Libya, they sack the largely unprotected US consulate, and murder the ambassador along with three other Americans.

On that evening the US embassy in Cairo denounces a YouTube video as the inspiration for the attacks. The Obama administration in Washington is silent, though it learned of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi within 90 minutes of its beginning. The president himself learned that Ambassador Chris Stevens was missing as a result of the attack, yet went to bed and learned of Stevens’ death the following morning. The day after the attacks, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton suggested that the attack was both an act of terror and a response to the YouTube film, which had been produced by an obscure figure who may be a con man in the United States (and then Obama jetted off to Vegas for a fundraiser). In the ensuing days, the Obama administration would tell America that the attack in Benghazi was “spontaneous,” not pre-planned, though the US intelligence community viewed that attack as a terrorist strike within the first 24 hours.

That same week, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, called an obscure anti-Islamist preacher in Florida to urge him not to support the obscure YouTube film lest more riots and violence occur. At the end of that week, the Obama Justice Department had tracked the obscure filmmaker down in California, publicly identified him, and rousted him at midnight for “questioning” and a media perp walk. That filmmaker is now in jail on probation violations. As of yet, the word “scapegoat” has not been used by anyone in the mainstream media to describe what has been done here. So for any intrepid reporters out there reading this, that term is yours for the taking and the shaping. No need to credit me.

The Obama administration’s false version of events culminated on Sunday, Sept 16, 2012, when the administration sent US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice on five nationally televised political talk shows to describe the Benghazi attack as “spontaneous.” Rice said that, according to the intelligence she had received, the attack was not pre-planned and was a response to the YouTube movie. That has turned out not to be true, at all.

Despite the fact that administration officials including the president’s own spokesman have publicly described Benghazi as a terrorist attack, President Obama used his recent address to the United Nations to blame the film, again.

Possible motives for this ongoing cover-up before our eyes include but are not limited to any of the following:

1. President Obama had been skipping his intel briefings in favor of campaigning, and attacks on US soil occurred on his watch on an anniversary that he and his team really ought to have planned better for.
2. Clinton’s State Department failed to predict and plan for the chaos that it helped author in Libya, resulting in the first field killing of a US ambassador since 1979. Clinton still has a political future to think about.
3. The Obama administration has argued that since the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda is on the ropes and on the road to defeat. But if al Qaeda coordinated attacks against the US in two of the so-called “Arab Spring” states, is the administration’s line accurate, or is it a fantasy?
4. President Obama really did believe that his inauguration would help usher in peace with the terrorists. Terrorist attacks on US soil, on the anniversary of 9-11, leave him baffled and confused.
5. The Obama-Clinton-Rice-Jarrett policy of helping push the Arab Spring has resulted in rising Islamist power across the Middle East. The administration believes that, rather than acknowledge the reality that it has helped spread chaos that might trigger a massive regional or even world war, it’s preferable to curb American free speech rights and use the might of the state to intimidate obscure preachers and turn hack movie makers into political prisoners.

So there you go. Five big scandals to chew on, any one of which have the potential to bring down a president. A couple of them are easily bigger and juicier than Watergate. A couple even have body counts. A couple could be linked together to show a pattern of lawless behavior.

Get to work, intrepid reporter. You don’t need Deep Throat, and you don’t need to be Woodward or Bernstein. You just need to follow up on any one of these five massive scandals and report them fully in the mainstream media.

I should advise you, you won’t win any Pulitzers and you’ll probably get fired. But you just might save your country.

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