School for Scandal

Posted on by


How many Talibans can you find in this picture?*

Making a comprehensive list of Obama administration scandals is difficult task. It’s not that there is a lack of material, but rather that it’s difficult to distinguish the major scandals from the innumerable minor ones.

And also: what constitutes a scandal? As opposed, that is, to what is simply venal, tacky, gauche, and inappropriate behavior. Like golf. Or $45 million Obama family vacations. Or the “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon” affair.

Thinking about what would be considered the real scandals of the Obama administrations since January 21, 2009, Dymphna and I put our heads together — giving us a combined 40 watts of brainpower — and came up with the following list:

  • The Benghazi affair
  • Using the IRS to target political enemies
  • The ATF’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation
  • The Justice Department’s gathering of AP reporters’ phone records
  • The Solyndra bankruptcy
  • Various incidents of malfeasance and corruption by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during the ObamaCare rollout
  • The DOJ’s refusal to investigate voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers in Philadelphia

That’s just a selection. It turns out the White House Dossier has seventeen more.

So “scandal-plagued” doesn’t even begin to cover this administration. If a Republican president had been in charge when just one or two of those occurred, he would have been impeached long ago, and might now be making license plates at a federal vocational institution. But the rules are different for a Democrat, and especially for a Magic Negro.

And now comes the Bowe Bergdahl affair. Based on the headlines over the past week, the swap of Taliban terrorists for Sgt. Bergdahl looks to become the biggest Obama scandal so far, eclipsing even the Benghazi fiasco.

I’m not going to cover the content of the scandal here; see the links at the bottom of this post for various analyses of what happened, what probably happened, and what did not happen. Bowe Bergdahl went missing in 2009, and was captured by the Taliban. Soldiers got killed looking for him. President Obama swapped five top Taliban mujahideen for him. The administration used the occasion as a political boost for the president, including the lovely photo-op of Mr. Obama with his arms around Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents.

Those are the bare-bones facts of the case. There is virtually no doubt that there are massively scandalous aspects to the incident, but that is not the point of this post. For us, the important questions are: Why did the Obama administration to decide to make this prisoner swap? And: Why now?

Some writers have suggested that Mr. Obama timed the swap to distract attention from the Benghazi scandal, while raising his poll numbers at the same time. If that was his purpose, it certainly worked: there’s scarcely a peep about Benghazi in the MSM now.

But what if the real purpose was to distract everyone from something else, something the State Socialists in the Executive consider much more crucial than whether Congress holds hearings about Benghazi?

I refer, of course, to the proposed new regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency on carbon emissions, which were announced on Monday.

What? You’ve never heard of those? Well, neither have most Americans — that’s a sign of how well the Bergdahl head-fake is working.

The new regulations will require yet more reduction of carbon emissions by the energy industry. In particular, the EPA directs coal plants cut their emissions by 30% relative to 2005 levels. The full plan will be in place by next year, but will be implemented at different rates in different states, like so many actions by the Executive Branch under President Obama. One presumes that the states with the highest level of support for the Democrats will get the easiest ride. Tough luck, Wyoming!

If the new EPA regulations are implemented and remain in place — and Congress has shown no sign of rolling back the “phone and pen” actions of President Obama — it will have a catastrophically destructive effect on the American economy. Coming on the heels of ObamaCare, it will put the last nail in our financial coffin — which, if the Marxists running the White House subscribe to the Cloward-Piven strategy, is exactly what is intended. Collapse the economy and then assert full control over everything during the resulting emergency. Never let a crisis go to waste, especially one deliberately induced to justify constructing the Socialist State.

Dymphna and I agree that the Bergdahl caper was designed to mask the EPA announcement and relegate it to the inside pages and the business dailies. The only remaining question is: how much controversy did the administration expect to generate through their Taliban-for-POW swap?

The two of us disagree on the answer to that question. I think the current administration has demonstrated repeatedly that it is massively incompetent, particularly when foreign policy and the military are involved. The still-growing firestorm that has been raging for the past week is a sign that events are spinning out of control. This is an election year, after all, and if enough Democrats in Congress start feeling the heat, a bipartisan majority may suddenly emerge, one that is willing to roll back some of Obama’s most egregious statist directives.

Dymphna, however, thinks that the administration was aware of what was likely to happen, and simply didn’t care. Their strategy is to break the American cultural and political system so thoroughly that it can never be repaired, and to enrich all the major players in the process at the same time. She says it doesn’t matter to them how much uproar and scandal emerge, and how many Democrats go down in flames in November, as long as they destroy the system and get theirs.

She can probably explain her point of view better than I can, so look for her elaborations in the comments. Needless to say, I expect that readers will have their own idiosyncratic take on these matters.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

News sources:

Links about the new EPA regulations:

Links about the Bergdahl affair culled from the news feed:

Links about the Bergdahl affair borrowed from Drudge:

(Hat tips: C. Cantoni, Charlie Marteau, Fjordman, Jerry Gordon, and JP)

*   Most sources list six soldiers who were killed looking for PFC Bergdahl, and some go as high as fourteen. But Michelle Malkin cites sources to produce a total of eight:

  • Staff Sgt Clayton Bowen
  • 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews
  • PFC Morris Walker
  • Staff Sgt Kurt Curtiss
  • PFC Aaron Fairbairn
  • Staff Sgt Michael Murphrey
  • PFC Matthew Martinek
  • PFC Justin Casillas

PFC Aaron Fairbairn and PFC Justin Casillas are missing from the photo collage at the top of this post.
 

8 thoughts on “School for Scandal”

  1. I agree with Dymphna. No incompetence but rather calculated destruction of our economy leading to things rather too grim to write about.

    Think about it: The left’s reason for being is to crush the West, capitalism, and God.

  2. Self enrichment…didn’t the firm which Holder came from represent some of the five released GITMO prisoners? Breitbart had a report with Oliver North suggesting a multi-million dollar ransom was also part of the deal.

  3. A small point on the New Black Panthers’ blatant voter intimidation: It was investigated and prosecuted, and convictions were duly obtained. Then Holder & Co. got in place and threw out the convictions. Holder has explained that civil-rights laws are not (in his view) meant to protect white people from harm done by “my [his] people.”

  4. If you look at Imam Obama’s chain of decisions and dealings with Islam, we will find that every decision taken had a greater benefit for Islam. To cover that he appears on TV presenting that episode in a way to convince the people that he is serving the people who elected him. Just like the above picture the Imam flanked by the soldier and the lady, which tells the American people about his care and compassion, well but not to the soldier and his family, but to Islam. You have to understand these things and subtle sentiments on your own. No one, no anchor, no reporter, not the media will go to the extent of explaining events as they really mean with their undesirable consequences. Consequences that are not immediately apparent to the public. You have to conceive what the consequences will be. For example: It has been said that Qatar will take custody of the five taliban murderers. But I say they will stay one week in Qatar then they will fly to Pakistan, then to Afghanistan: Business as usual. Imam will say later: it was a fair deal but it went sour. As CIA said: ye Osama was our freedom fighter but went bad. Do you remember that? The west helped Khumeini the soul of Ahhal to power, he also went bad? No one learns any lessons? Does a certificate in international politics or domestic compensate for his lack of knowledge of human nature. Children politicians.

  5. I go with Dymphna wholeheartedly. Nothing happened by chance, everything had been planned long time ago. It was a matter of time when the right person for the job would had been fully trained and made ready for the task. Come 2016 we’ll see the consolidation.
    I love the line about the “making of license plates in a federal vocational institution”. I am still laughing as I write this.

  6. Report: Bergdahl Declared Himself Warrior for Islam in Captivity
    Imam Obama thought this would be an easy road to repair the bruised, tattered prestige and blinding the public to his endless scandals (e.g. Benghazi). But it is useless as long as he does not cost him, or lose anything. The purpose of the deal was to free the mujahideen not to care for the citizens. That conclusion comes from Imam’s attitudes towards Islam. ( We will never be at war with Islam.) Is Islam at war with us). Look around and see which statement is accurate?

  7. I heard about the EPA stuff because I had NPR on for 5 minutes. Since I’m trying to systematically avoid the futile-rage lifestyle, I turned it off. Nothing like that surprises me anymore.

Comments are closed.