Screw Up, Cover Up or Both! The 'Cocooning' of Obama?

A man brings his best buddy home for dinner. His wife screams at him. "My hair & makeup are not done, the house is a mess, the dishes are not done, I'm still in my pajamas and I can't be bothered with cooking tonight! What the heck did you bring him home for?” "Because he's thinking of getting married...."
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Noonan and John Fund weigh in on Obama.

 Hell, even the unwashed masses should be able to smell the odor emanating from the White House. Incompetence has an acrid smell and lying has a putrid one. When mixed together it is worse than what comes from the stacks of a paper mill.

 I would hate to be a Marine on duty there. They may never get the smell out of their beautifully pressed uniforms. I do not see how they can stand next to the president while holding an umbrella without fainting. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)

Apparently the Obama Administration has a philosophy of making sure the president is protected to the point that he does not know what is going on or happening.  While Obama is 'cocooned' the nation is also left in the dark.

If he is still in office when the next war breaks out or our embassy is attacked. etc. one would hope he would be informed even if they have to interrupt his golf game.
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Toameh keeps at it and Obama and Kerry semm they do not or maybe they do not wish to get it. After all it is only Israel that will get it in the 'end' or will they since Obama has their back? (See 2 below.)
--- The arrogance of Obama appointees never seems to stop. This from a Newsletter from Senator Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) (See 3 below.)
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Spill over war due to Obama's feckless policies? (See 4 below.)
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Off again this Thursday to vacation with 18 of immediate family members and to celebrate my 80th. Have a great and safe Memorial Day Weekend.
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 1)This Is No Ordinary Scandal Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
By Peggy Noonan

 We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged.

They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone. Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust.

Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not. The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it.

He read about it in the papers, just like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department. A president sets a mood, a tone.

He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town. The IRS scandal has two parts.

The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups.

The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists. In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook FB +0.46% posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited.

Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.

 All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit. It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.

 Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged.

 Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting. The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number.

 And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate. We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work.

That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business. But that bias does not fit these circumstances.

 What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop.

And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again. And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.


 1a)Three Signs There’s a Cover-Up “Mistakes were made….I don’t recall” and other surefire clues.
 By John Fund

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved.

 Astonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation that it had targeted tea-party groups and other organizations with “patriot” or “9/12” in their names. “Mistakes were made initially,” the official IRS statement on May 10 read, implying that the mistakes ended after a short “initial” period. We now know that the scandal and cover-up unfolded over a three-year period, and the IRS publicly acknowledged them only after the 2012 election was safely past.

Here are some other clues that a Washington cover-up is going on.

 1. No one seems to be able to name the players. Last week, former acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller claimed he had identified “rogue” employees at the IRS’s Cincinnati office who were at the center of the scandal. But an IRS staffer at the Cincinnati office at the center of the scandal told the Washington Post this week: “Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.” Perhaps that’s why on Friday, Miller had this exchange during his House testimony with Representative Kevin Brady (R., Texas) . Brady: “Who is responsible for targeting these individuals?” Miller: “I don’t have names for you.” Later, Representative Dave Reichert (R., Wash.) confronted Miller: “I’m disappointed. I’m hearing, ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t recall. I don’t believe. Who knew?’ You don’t even know who investigated the case, but yet you say it was investigated. . . . You’re not instilling a lot of confidence.” Reichert pressed on, asking whom senior technical adviser Nancy Marks had identified as responsible for the targeting policy. Miller repeated his mantra of the day: 
“I don’t remember.”

 One possible reason for the failure to reveal names is that it takes time for all the players to get their stories straight.

 2. Spinners minimize the scandal by claiming it would have been impossible to detect it.

David Axelrod, President Obama’s strategist in the 2012 election, perfected this ploy last week when he told MSNBC that the scandal was caused by “bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the IRS.” He went on to offer this civics lesson: “Part of being president is there’s so much underneath you because the government is so vast.

You go through these [controversies] all because of this stuff that is impossible to know if you’re the president or working in the White House, and yet you’re responsible for it, and it’s a difficult situation.” Apparently, mistakes can’t even be known.

 3. Critics are discredited. In July 2012, months after he was made aware of the targeting scandal, Miller testified before a House committee and dismissed the complaints about the IRS’s targeting and intrusive questioning as mere “noise.” He said many of the groups applying for tax-exempt status “are very small organizations, and they are not quite sure what the rules are.” In other words, any groups that complained were just too dumb to understand the law. In reality, it was the IRS that was making up the rules as it went along.

 Even many Democrats in Congress are tired of all these evasions. Having been misled by the Obama administration for so long on the IRS scandal, they aren’t likely to go out on a limb defending the cover-up. Representative Joe Crowley of New York, one of top-ranking Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee, is calling for IRS official Lois Lerner to resign. Crowley told MSNBC that Lerner “failed to answer the question” when he asked her at a Ways and Means hearing on May 8 of this year whether the IRS was investigating groups that had applied for tax-exempt status. “She then two days later planted a question at a press event, only to then use that opportunity to apologize for what the IRS had been doing,” Crowley said. He added that when he later confronted her about the contradiction, she denied she’d even been asked about the political targeting at the hearing.

 Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill is going further. A former state auditor, she has had years of experience with dissembling bureaucrats and errant officials. Last Friday, she issued a video statement calling for a full house-cleaning of everyone involved in the scandal: “We should not only fire the head of the IRS, which has occurred, but we’ve got to go down the line and find every single person who had anything to do with this and make sure that they are removed from the IRS and the word goes out that this unacceptable.”

 Good luck with that. Washington’s political culture is completely resistant to such accountability. Recall that no one was fired in the wake of mistakes that led to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We wouldn’t even know the names of many of those who made the mistakes without the work of an independent commission that investigated the attacks, a commission the Bush administration resisted forming.

 In Washington, failure is rarely punished, and at times it’s even rewarded. Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office in charge of tax-exempt organizations from 2009 to 2012. She collected over $100,000 in bonuses as she oversaw the IRS at the time it was targeting White House opponents; she has since been promoted to be director of the IRS’s Obamacare office.

 Yes, the old Washington adage that the cover-up is worse than the crime is true. But as far as the American people are concerned, the general failure to hold government employees accountable for the IRS scandal — and in some cases the refusal even to identify them — is the ultimate insult added to injury.

 1b)We have a President…who is Commander-in- Chief; Chief Executive Officer; Chairman of the Board; Senior Strategic Planning Officer and Pastor of the Bully Pulpit.

An earlier President, Harry Truman used to say…”The buck stops here!” He had a sign in his office saying just that. So what do we have now? What kind of man is President Obama?

 • We have a President who tells us he learned about the criminal actions of the IRS the same way we all did…from a newspaper article
• We have a Commander-in-Chief who tells us our Ambassador to Libya was killed by movie critics who found a movie about Islam offensive.
• We have a Chairman of the Board who tells us the Constitutional violations of the Justice Department in demanding Associated Press reporting source data and telephone taps was “news to him”!
• We have a Strategic Planning Chief who has explained the deaths of 80,000 Syrians, the exodus of one million more Syrians to Turkey and Jordan, the use of poison gas on their own citizenry by the Assad government, the transfer of Russian and Iranian long range missiles to Hezbollah threatening Israel and the entire region… as part of his “collective partner containment strategy”.
• We have a President who could not even muster Democrats or Republicans in his highly touted gun control initiative after the horrific Newtown massacre.
• We have a Commander-in-Chief who abandoned his troops under siege in the field in Benghazi!
• We have a President who speechifies “immigration reform” and can’t get it done
• We have a President who drew a “red line” in Syria on the use of poison gas and then asked for some “white-out”. • We have a President who wouldn’t call the Boston Marathon bombing a terrorist act until the press reaction was so adverse to him that he held a special conference to back-walk that position.
• We have a President who will not articulate a strategic plan for re-building our economy or strengthening our weakened security.
• We have a President who makes speeches but not policy.
• We have a President who not once in almost five years of his Presidency has said…
 • “ it’s my fault!”
• We have a President who is incompetent, inexperienced and intransigent… who offers no leadership, no vision and has no credibility with the US citizenry as well as world citizenry.
 • We have a President who is ineffective, obstructive and divisive.
• We have what we voted for! 
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2)Al-Qaradawi and the New Religious Conflict With Israel
By Khaled Abu Toameh

 As US Secretary of State John Kerry pursues efforts to resume peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the world's leading Islamic scholar of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arrived in the Gaza Strip to express support for Hamas. The Egyptian-born al-Qaradawi, who has in the past justified suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, came to the Gaza Strip at the head of a delegation consisting of some 50 senior Islamic figures from 14 countries. The high-profile visit is seen as a major victory for Hamas and its supporters and a severe blow for Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas and his "moderate" Fatah faction. Al-Qaradawi, who heads the International Union of Muslim Scholars, came to the Gaza Strip to urge Palestinians to continue the struggle against Israel.

 During his visit, al-Qaradawi also urged Palestinians not to give up one inch of land to non-Muslims. He also warned against making any concessions on the "right of return" of millions of Palestinians to their pre-1948 villages and towns inside Israel. "Palestine was never Jewish," the 86-year-old sheikh told Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. "Palestine has always been Arab and Islamic." Although al-Qaradawi did not mention Abbas, his comments were seen as directed against the Palestinian Authority president's readiness to engage in peace talks with Israel.

 When someone as senior and influential as al-Qaradawi tells Palestinians that it is forbidden to make concessions to Israel, he is sending a warning message to Abbas and other Arabs that jihad [holy war], and not negotiations, are the "only way to restore our rights." Although the Palestinian Authority had called on its supporters in the Gaza Strip to boycott al-Qaradawi, thousands of Palestinians turned out to give him a hero's welcome. His anti-Semitic remarks and support for suicide attacks have earned al-Qaradawi the respect and admiration of many Palestinians, especially those who seek to destroy Israel. 

Had the Muslim Brotherhood's al-Qaradawi visited the Gaza Strip to urge Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to exist, he would have been received with shoes and rotten eggs. But al-Qaradawi is a hero in the eyes of many Palestinians and Muslims because he views Jews as the "enemies of Islam and treacherous aggressors." In a January 2009 sermon, al-Qaradawi prayed [according to a translation by MEMRI] that "Allah take this oppressive, Jewish Zionist band of people. Oh Allah, do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one." Al-Qaradawi's visit has further bolstered Hamas's standing, enabling it to tighten its grip over the 1.5 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip.

Moreover, the visit has granted legitimacy to Hamas's rule in the Gaza Strip and turned it, in the Arab and Islamic countries, into an acceptable Islamic party. But more importantly, al-Qaradawi's visit and statements also serve as a reminder that the Israeli-Arab conflict is centered, more than ever, around religion. The sheikh's message to the Palestinians and Muslims is that this is a religious conflict and not a political issue. This is an unequivocal message that stresses that no Muslim is entitled to give up Muslim-owned land to non-Muslims.

As far as al-Qaradawi, Hamas and their followers are concerned, the conflict is not about a settlement or a checkpoint. Rather, it is about Israel's presence -- its right to exist at all -- in the Middle East
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3)This has the makings of a 4th (or future) scandal for the Obama Administration. We'll see. Obamacare In other concerns regarding the implementation of Obamacare, on Tuesday, I joined my colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee in sending a letter demanding details of a fundraising scheme in which Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has solicited funds from the health care companies she regulates to help launch Obamacare.

The Senate Finance Committee has jurisdiction over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Our letter asks for a top-to-bottom review of the Department’s decision to move forward with the fundraising scheme, which has raised numerous legal questions under federal regulations prohibiting the augmentation of congressional appropriations.

 We wrote, “As the Republican Members of the Senate Committee on Finance, one of the key committees of jurisdiction over health care issues, we were troubled by the news reports concerning your interactions with health care industry executives asking for donations of money to assist with funding for enrollment efforts related to the health care insurance exchanges. Our initial reaction is that this appears at best to be an inherent conflict of interest and at worst a potentially illegal augmentation of appropriation.” You can read the full text of the letter on my website.
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4)Muddled Israeli-US policies on Assad set stage for Golan offensive against Israel Four days after a “senior Israeli official” warned Assad through The New York Times of Wednesday, May 15 that he risks forfeiting power if he retaliates for Israeli attacks on weapons supplies to terrorists, “Israeli officials” were telling the London Times of Saturday, May 18 something quite different: “An intact, but weakened, Assad regime would be preferable,” they said. “Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if… extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there.”

 The night before this report, Fox News aired footage appearing to show Israeli commandos inside Syria racing back on foot to Israeli territory. Without going into whether the two sets of “Israeli officials” were one and the same, their utterances are clearly making Israel’s policy-makers and defense leaders look muddled and uncertain – or, worse, unable to think clearly – about how to cope with the menace building up on the Syrian Golan. This could take the form of a Syrian war of attrition and/or a Hizballah offensive against Upper and Western Galilee.

 At all events, the Syrian civil conflict appears poised ready to spill over to one or more of its neighbors, starting with Israel as a result of six factors:

1. President Barack Obama’s inability to make up his mind on whether the US should intervene militarily in Syria – even in a limited way, such as the imposition of no-fly zones or finding a way to supply non-Islamist Syrian rebel groups with sorely needed weapons.
 2. The US president’s refusal to recognize that chemical weapons have already been used in Syria. His reaction to the file put before him in the White House Friday, May 17, by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan - with evidence from physicians treating wounded Syrians - remained dismissive. “The US has seen evidence of chemical weapons being used in Syria,” he said, adding however, “it is important to get more specific details about alleged chemical attacks.”

 This comment was interpreted as the US president’s acceptance of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian war so long as it was on a limited scale. Obama, like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has therefore waved away another red line for military intervention in the Syria conflict, by closing his eyes to the evidence. Former Israeli defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer was more realistic last week when he brusquely brushed aside a radio interviewer’s query by saying: Of course, Assad has used chemical weapons and isn't it obvious that he has already transferred to Hizballah both chemical substances and other advanced weapons? 

3. Following again in American footsteps, Israel failed to prevent Russia sending advanced S-300 anti-air and Yakhont anti-ship missiles to the Assad regime – both improved versions which were outfitted with sophisticated radar to improve their range and precision. When Netanyahu was challenged with failing in this mission in his May 14 trip to buttonhole Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, he said only that he would “travel wherever is needed and talk to whoever is needed to keep Israel safe and secure.”

This was the closest he came to admitting that he had fallen down on his efforts for keeping advanced Russian weaponry out of Syrian hands.

 4. Strategic errors, which may turn out to be irreversible, because they emanated from faulty assessments shared by Israel and the Obama administration of the strengths on the Syrian battlefield. To this day, the US, Israel and Turkey cling to the belief that Assad’s days are numbered and refuse to recognize the steady advances made by the Syrian army in its counter-offensive for dislodging the rebels from land they captured in more than two years of combat.

 5. This misreading of the Syrian ruler’s survivability is part and parcel of the omission by Obama, Netanyahu and Erdogan to appreciate and counter two major strategic changes overtaking the region:

 a) They stood aside as Moscow, Tehran and Hizballah deepened their military commitments to Assad’s fight for survival – starting with the arrival of Russian military personnel in Syria to man the sophisticated missiles supplied by Moscow until Syrian crews were instructed in their use.

They didn’t raise a finger to interfere with the almost daily Russian and Iranian air lifts to Syrian air bases of complete brigades of elite Hizballah fighters and thousands of Iranian Bassij militiamen who now control key war sectors. Washington Jerusalem and even Jordan sat on their hands when 3,000 Iraqi members of the Asai’b al-Haq (League of the Righteous) and Kataib Hizballah poured across the border into Syria to support Assad’s war on the Syrian rebellion.

 b) Because they kept their distance from all these strategic game-changers in and around Syria, the US and Israel lost their chance to break up the Tehran-Damascus-Hizballah alliance. This objective the Obama administration once offered as his priority and the pretext for avoiding military action against a nuclear Iran. What Washington achieved by its hands-off stance on Syria was the very opposite: Instead of weakening the triple alliance, Obama has allowed it to be bolstered by Russian and Iraqi increments.

 It is no wonder, therefore, that Moscow, Tehran, Damascus and Hizballah are behaving like winners and gearing up for the next stage of the Syrian war, which, if Tehran and Hizballah have their way, will evolve into a war of attrition against Israel waged from the Syrian Golan.

 The opening shot was fired Wednesday, May 15 by a Palestinian terrorist front under Syrian, Iranian and Hizballah tutelage, which shelled an Israeli military observation post on Mt. Hermon. This attack drew no direct Israeli response - par for the course. 6. A war of attrition against Israel from the Golan would not be a new experience either for Damascus or Moscow.

In 1974, from March to May, Syrian forces, refusing to accept the defeat of their 1973 offensive against Israel, launched a harsh war of attrition from the same enclave, on the advice of their Soviet patron. In what became know as “the little war,” Syrian forces kept Israeli Golan under heavy shelling barrages and tried repeatedly to capture Mt Hermon. The big secret of that short-lived conflict was the deployment by the Soviet Union of two Cuban armored brigades on the Golan front against Israel, airlifted in from Angola.

All the same, Damascus was forced to accept a ceasefire on Golan which was observed from that day on until the present. This time, the big difference is that Moscow can leave the heavy-lifting for a limited war on Israel to Tehran and Hizballah. Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah in one of his fiery speeches expressed eagerness to make the Golan his new front for war on Israel. And Friday, May 17, it was reported in Tehran that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had entrusted Al Qods Brigades commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani with the task of sending troops to the Golan to embark on hostilities against Israel.

Once they begin, it will be hard to stop the violence from spreading to Israel’s borders with Lebanon, from Syria into Turkey and from Jordan into Syria and Iraq.

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