Partisan Politics

It's been almost 4 months since my last post. Careful readers might remember that I've been hard at work building a small—now marginally successful—manufacturing company. In the process we've been able to create jobs (well above the minimum wage) for a young female Cuban immigrant, a young man from Haiti, a senior citizen,and a Latino couple. A diverse crew that was created not because of political correctness or some ridiculous government mandate, but because they were the right people for the job, showed enthusiasm for the work and showed up -- every day.

In addition, we've provided tens of thousands of dollars in contract work for a variety of local vendors (and a few in other states), who have hired more folks to support our requests. And above all, we've kept all of our work inside the USA. Why do I mention any of this -- because despite what Barack Obama and his supporters on the left might have you believe, our experience is a microcosm of how an economy grows. It's how jobs and wealth are created. It is the antithesis of the big government delusion in which the government transfers other peoples money around until things improve—even though they never seem to improve when that approach is tried.

I've been kind of busy, and that's why I haven't posted.

But the world keeps spinning and a two events beg comment. It's those events that lead me to recall a comment that someone (I think it may have been David Gelertner of Yale University) stated somewhat acerbically, "Barack Obama has the ethics of Richard Nixon and the competence of Jimmy Carter."

How prescient, considering the unfolding Bengazhi scandal (in which bald-faced lies, witness intimidation, and stonewalling have occurred in the tradition of Watergate) and the recent admission by the IRS that it had inappropriately targeted opponents of President Obama (for those old enough, the same thing occurred during the Nixon administration).

And yet, the legacy media seems determined to minimize each of these scandals.

With respect to Benghazi (for my real-time reaction to the event, read Scandal and Benghazigate), the legacy media's operative mantra is "Benghazi Isn't Watergate," and is really nothing more that the meany GOP applying "partisan politics" to a blameless Obama and his then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Imagine for just a moment that the Benghazi and IRS scandals occurred during the Bush administration. I'm sure that the legacy media would have shown a bit more curiosity when the events occurred in September. Now they have begun to cover the stories, but they seem uncomfortable, qualifying events in a way that puts a corrupt administration in the best possible light.

Mark Steyn (no friend of Obama) comments:

The dying Los Angeles Times reported this story on its homepage (as a sidebar to “Thirteen Great Tacos in Southern California”) under the following headline: “Partisan Politics Dominates House Benghazi Hearing.” In fact, everyone in this story is a Democrat or a career civil servant. Chris Stevens was the poster boy for Obama’s view of the Arab Spring; he agreed with the president on everything that mattered. The only difference is that he wasn’t in Vegas [Obama did a campaign event the day after 4 Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi and clung to the lie that the murders were the result of an objectionable anti-Muslim movie for almost 10 days] but out there on the front line, where Obama’s delusions meet reality. Stevens believed in those illusions enough to die for them. One cannot say the same about the hollow men and women in Washington who sent him out there unprotected, declined to lift a finger when he came under attack, and in the final indignity subordinated his sacrifice to their political needs by lying over his corpse. Where’s the “partisan politics”? Obama, Clinton, Panetta, Clapper, Rice, and the rest did this to one of their own. And fawning court eunuchs, like the ranking Democrat at the hearings, Elijah Cummings, must surely know that, if they needed, they’d do it to them, too. If you believe in politics über alles, it’s impressive, in the same way that Hillary’s cocksure dismissal — “What difference, at this point, does it make?” — is impressive.

And when Left-leaning media outlets suggest that Benghazi isn't Watergate—they're absolutely correct. It's much worse, because unlike a third-rate break-in at a Democratic campaign office, people died in Benghazi, and worse, it appears that there was no effort mounted to save them when they were under attack. In fact, it appears that military assets that wanted to try were ordered to stand down. Who was the Washington, DC originator of the order? Hillary Clinton? Leon Panetta? Where was the President during those critical hours? Did he make any decisions? If not, why? If he did, what were they?

Again, Mark Steyn comments:

What was Secretary Clinton doing that was more important? What was the president doing? Aside, that is, from resting up for his big Vegas campaign event. A real government would be scrambling furiously to see what it could do to rescue its people. It’s easy, afterwards, to say that nothing would have made any difference. But, at the time Deputy Chief Hicks was calling 9-1-1 and getting executive-branch voicemail, nobody in Washington knew how long it would last. A terrorist attack isn’t like a soccer game, over in 90 minutes. If it is a sport, it’s more like a tennis match: Whether it’s all over in three sets or goes to five depends on how hard the other guy pushes back. The government of the United States took the extremely strange decision to lose in straight sets. Not only did they not deploy out-of-area assets, they ordered even those in Libya to stand down. Lieutenant Colonel Gibson had a small team in Tripoli that twice readied to go to Benghazi to assist and twice was denied authority to do so, the latter when they were already at the airport. There weren’t many of them, not compared to the estimated 150 men assailing the compound. But they were special forces, not bozo jihadists. Back in Benghazi, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty held off numerically superior forces for hours before dying on a rooftop waiting for back-up from a government that had switched the answering machine on and gone to Vegas.

Today, the legacy media has begun (grudgingly, it seems) to nibble around the edges of this scandal. Barack Obama better hope that that partisan political decisions that occurred during and after the terrorist attack in Benghazi are probed by the media in a cursory manner. If a full investigation unfolds, it will not be pretty for our President.

Update:

On the unfolding IRS scandal, the generally Left-leaning Washington Post comments:

A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.

So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation.