Tag Archives: political parties

Leak Hypocrisy

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Recall the zeal with which President Barack Obama’s DoJ is attacking leakers, to the point of a broad-band raid on AP reporters’ and editors’ (with its collateral raid on Congressmen) telephone records and an accusation of a specific reporter having criminal culpability in order to get a search warrant to obtain his personal emails (with its collateral raid on the reporter’s parents’ email).

A (draft) Defense Inspector General report on ex-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s leaks had some interesting things to say.

The first instance [of a leak] was a July 15, 2011, interview of the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, Michael Vickers, by the [Osama bin Laden raid] film’s director, Kathryn Bigelow, and screenwriter Mark Boal.  In that session Vickers gave them the name of a special operations planner whose identity was supposed to be protected from public release.

And

The second instance was a June 24, 2011, awards ceremony at CIA headquarters in which Panetta identified the ground commander of the SEALs raid, with Boal in attendance.  The report did not say whether Panetta knew Boal was present.

Of course Panetta knew, though.  Such gatherings at such a level in the government hierarchy are highly prestigious, if nothing else; additionally, the permissions/invites to attend are tightly controlled.  And what was a Hollywood screenwriter doing in a classified gathering, as this one had to be, with classified information like SEAL team identities being bandied about?

The IG report said the ground commander’s name was supposed to be protected from public release, under federal law.

Panetta then gave up the Pakistani doctor’s identity in a January ’12 60 Minutes interview:

[Afridi] was an individual, in fact that helped provide intelligence, that was very helpful in regards to this operation….

As a result of this report, Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission concluded that the doctor was acting as an American agent.

Many of the SEAL team members have since been killed, and the Pakistani doctor is now in a Pakistani jail.

Where’s the administration’s hue and cry over these leaks?  Or is it that when the SecDef does it, it’s not illegal?

Deficit and Revenue

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[S]enior White House officials now say they haven’t found a sufficient number of Republican partners willing to accept the revenue increases Democrats say must be part of any compromise.

In other words, Progressives’ “compromise” is for the opposition to go along with their demands for more revenue.  Never mind that revenue questions are no part of the deficit or of the resulting debt.

The shrinking of the deficit, although still too large and at any size contributory to our debt, results from already increasing revenue to the government.  The increased revenue, though, comes not from tax increases (the payroll tax holiday expiration goes to the Social Security System, not to the general Treasury, and the tax increase on those making over $400,000 totals to chump change compared to any year’s deficit) but from the slowly improving economy.  Thus, Progressives’ increased tax rates aren’t necessary to increase revenues to the government.

Spending cuts are what are needed to eliminate the deficit and so to start paying down the debt.  This graph, from The Wall Street Journal, illustrates the matter:

Revenue is up, even in Obama’s hindered recovery, but spending is up more in the projection.  The economy is producing the revenue needed (eliding the question of needing even that much); government needs to do its part and cut spending.  Drastically.

IRS Targeting

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The IRS’ targeting of groups and individuals who disagree with government increased sharply with President Barack Obama’s accession to office.  Reminds me of how he won his first election in Illinois.

As a community organizer, [Obama] had helped register thousands of voters.  But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot.  It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

“That was Chicago politics,” said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist.  “Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right?  It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today.  He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters.  But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.”

What he did then was hardball politics, might even have been dirty politics, but at least it was, strictly speaking, legal.  His actions today through the IRS—which not only targeted conservative political groups, it targeted groups and individual Americans opposed to abortion and those openly supportive of Israel—took his “destroy your enemy” mindset to a new level, a criminal one.

And now it’s coming out, from some of those “rogue agents” in Cincinnati whom he tossed under the bus, that the orders to do so came from…higher up.

Interviews with a regional IRS agent involved in the agency targeting Tea Party groups for additional vetting appear to contradict the White House assertion that rogue agents, not the administration, were behind the effort, according to partial transcripts released Sunday by the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee.

The agent in the Cincinnati office…told congressional investigators that he or she was told in March 2010 by a supervisor to search for Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status and that “Washington, DC, wanted some cases.

When asked by congressional investigators about allegations and press reports about two agents in Cincinnati essentially being responsible for the targeting, the agent responded: “It’s impossible.  As an agent we are controlled by many, many people.  We have to submit many, many reports.  So the chance of two agents being rogue and doing things like that could never happen.

Hmm….

A Longer View

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Some of what Ben Domenech had to say at Real Clear Politics:

The sudden deluge of scandal which dominates the discussion around President Obama’s administration at the moment has handed a golden opportunity to Republicans.  Yet if they aren’t careful, they’ll squander this opening completely by allowing their intense dislike of the president to cloud their judgment, missing the broader political lessons for the sake of personal point scoring.

And

Here’s the hard thing Republicans have to do if they don’t want this crisis to go to waste: they have to ignore their id….  They must willfully set aside Obama’s presence in the fray…and go after the much bigger prize.  Obama isn’t running for office again.  Liberalism is….  Making this about the inherent falsehood of the progressive project will help conservatism win.   …these scandals cut at the core conceit of Obama’s ideology: the healthy and enduring confidence of big government to be good government.

Given Republicans’ demonstrated skills these last several decades, most recently with the fiscal cliff “negotiations,” though, I’m not sanguine that they can set aside their id, much less glimpse the long view.

This is Amazing

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What a breathtaking failure to communicate.  Regarding the IRS failure to perform, The Wall Street Journal reported this tidbit over the weekend.

The Internal Revenue Service’s watchdog told top Treasury officials around June 2012 he was investigating allegations the tax agency had targeted conservative groups….

The disclosure to the Treasury general counsel and the deputy secretary was a cursory one, according to J Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.  He said he didn’t reveal conclusions of the probe, which was in its early stages….

Thus we now see confirmed what was hinted at during Friday’s House of Representatives hearing concerning the IRS’ misbehavior vis-à-vis its targeting of government-disfavored groups and individuals, and IRS officials’ subsequent dissembling about that targeting.  Senior officials in the Obama administration knew of these misdeeds—or at least the allegations of those misdeeds and the investigation into those allegations—for nearly a year, and for months prior to the campaign season Party Conventions.

Then,

Treasury…said Neal Wolin, the deputy secretary, didn’t notify anyone outside of Treasury….

Then,

White House officials say they learned about the targeting of conservative groups from the [IG] report, and not before.

And yet “White House officials” seem to be lying:

The White House’s chief lawyer learned weeks ago that an audit of the Internal Revenue Service likely would show that agency employees inappropriately targeted conservative groups, a senior White House official said Sunday.

Somebody told Kathryn Ruemmler, that chief lawyer. Then Ruemmler told Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and others members of Obama’s senior cotery.  She told them further, according to Obama (through Jay Carney), that

this is not a matter she should convey to the president.  Her opinion that this is not the kind of thing that requires notification to the president.

This says amazing things about the judgment and competence of the men and women that President Barack Obama has brought into his Executive Branch: they didn’t think it necessary to inform anyone up the chain–that would be the President–that such politically, not to say legally, explosive doings were afoot.

I have no reason to believe that Ruemmler–or McDonough or that cotery–did, in fact, sit on that bomb.

Update: via The Wall Street Journal [emphasis added]:

The Internal Revenue Service briefed the Treasury Department extensively last month about a looming inspector general’s report that would find the agency had inappropriately targeted for extra scrutiny applications from conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, a new timeline of events shows.

The IRS consulted Treasury in late April about its plans to pre-emptively apologize for its actions….

Two people kept out of the loop, according to administration officials, were President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. Neither was consulted, administration officials said, because their staff wanted to ensure that it didn’t appear they had interfered in any way in the process.

Yeah.  I still have that beachfront property north of Santa Fe, too.