PDA

View Full Version : Obama’s Scandal-Free Delusion



jimnyc
04-23-2018, 08:54 AM
I wonder if this idiot truly thinks he ran a scandal free administration? Does he perhaps think the things listed below were all on the up and up? Perhaps is truly is delusional, and full of himself?

---

Obama’s Scandal-Free Delusion

Upon hearing that former President Barack Obama recently boasted that he had a scandal-free administration, my first thought after regaining my faculties was: How can I possibly cram all the evidence refuting this in a little bitty column?

Then I read that what he actually said was, “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us.” At first blush, that sounds better, right? Because I assume he doesn’t mean he’s incapable of being embarrassed. After a little more thought, though, it occurred to me that this construction just highlights the real reason he has apparently deluded himself into thinking he served eight honorable years: The liberal media had his back the entire time, even when he treated them like dirt.

In fact, Obama was a perpetual power-abusing machine. He was so routinely high-handed and selectively contemptuous of the rule of law that people were beginning to think presidential authoritarianism was the new normal. How ironic that so many of Obama’s enablers are now projecting these sins onto President Trump, who — to this point, at least – hasn’t actually crossed the line into flouting the Constitution. The left believes — and acts on the belief — that the ends justify the means, and so, it naturally assumes we will do the same. Obama was hell-bent on fundamentally transforming America as founded, and he was willing to scratch, bite, kick, steal and flush the rule of law to accomplish it — and he did, like no president before him. In other words, Obama’s lies were OK because lies are sometimes necessary for the greater good.

For your review, let me just give you a list of examples, many of them snatched from my two Obama books, which chronicled his two disgraceful terms. Not all technically qualify as scandals, but enough do.

–Benghazi: In addition to the scandalous betrayal and death of our people, Obama and his cohorts concocted and disseminated the lie that the attack on our consulate was caused by an anti-Muslim video. Later, Judicial Watch obtained a smoking-gun email from top-level Obama aid Ben Rhodes, sent to a dozen members of Obama’s inner circle, that contained talking points to prepare then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for the Sunday talk shows. Three of the four main bullet points Rhodes was advising Rice to convey were patently false, including the lie about the video. They knew, because the CIA made it clear, that the attack was not the result of a spontaneous protest to an anti-Muslim video but preplanned by al-Qaida. The Obama administration manufactured this canard to insulate Obama from criticism two months before the November 2012 election, as he had boasted that he had al-Qaida on the run.

–Obama’s IRS conspired to target conservative and pro-Israel groups for discriminatory treatment in acquiring tax exemptions.

–Obama and then-Attorney general Eric Holder’s Justice Department was never held to account for its actions on the gunrunning scandal known as Operation Fast and Furious, in which an American was murdered with weapons this administration deliberately put into the hands of Mexican cartels.

–This same Justice Department was also under a cloud due to scandals involving its massive culling of Associated Press reporters’ phone records concerning a leak investigation, slandering Fox News reporter James Rosen over classified information, and monitoring Rosen’s phone calls and emails.

–Obama’s lies on Obamacare were legion and scandalous: He knew from the jump we couldn’t keep our plans or our doctors, and that Obamacare would reduce rather than increase people’s access to care. He knew it wouldn’t reduce premiums by $2,500 for the average family of four. He deceived us when he said no federal dollars would be used to fund abortions. He grossly distorted the picture of the true number of uninsured. His goal, proved on videotape, was always single-payer. He used budgetary accounting gimmicks to grease Obamacare by the CBO, including the double counting on Medicare.

–After Obama’s failure to pass cap-and-trade legislation through Congress to purportedly reduce the global temperature by suppressing traditional energy production and consumption, his Environmental Protection Agency unilaterally and unconstitutionally issued a decree to accomplish his goal administratively. Some called this one of the biggest power grabs in American history, as the EPA had positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act — powers never delegated to it by Congress.

— The Obama administration flagrantly defied a federal court order on his moratorium on offshore drilling when his interior secretary, Ken Salazar, said he would just reimpose the moratorium based on information that wasn’t fully developed earlier.

–Obama rigged the playing field to secure for his labor-union friends a bigger stake in his new General Motors than was warranted by their actual ownership interest. He robbed secured creditors of their preferred-creditor status and the value of their investment by using the power of his office to strong-arm a restructuring of the company. When Democratic Party donor and super-lawyer Tom Lauria opposed this plan on behalf of his client, according to Lauria, the White House threatened to destroy his client’s reputation.

–The Obama-Hillary Clinton FISA scandal, the egregiousness of which is being casually dismissed by many, will someday be fully exposed.

–Then, there’s the Iran nuclear deal, Obama’s unprecedented federal land grabs; his dismissal of a voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party that had already been won; his bullying of doctors and insurance companies when it served his purposes; his endless stirring of the racial pot; his bullying and fact-starved attack on BP that culminated in his authoritarian command, “Just plug the damn hole”; his stable of unaccountable “czars”; his war on Fox News, which preceded Trump’s battles with the press that Democrats find so horrifying; the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal; the Solyndra scandal; the deliberate targeting of the coal industry; the shakedown of banks; the massive redistribution scheme disguised as an economic stimulus program; the federal commandeering of the student loan program; his public dressing down of the Supreme Court; his whispered hot-mic pledge to Russia to be more flexible on missile defense; his cavalier treatment of Arizona!
and its immigration laws; and gobs more.

I truly could go on, but I trust you get the picture.

Rest - https://www.davidlimbaugh.com/5519/obamas-scandal-free-delusion/

Black Diamond
04-23-2018, 08:57 AM
Enough people will believe him and promote the facade. His place in history at least at this point remains intact. Interestingly, history changes over the years. And also history may not be done with him.....

jimnyc
04-23-2018, 08:58 AM
This is from Jan 2017.

---

18 Major Scandals in Obama’s ‘Scandal-Free’ Presidency

President Obama and his mouthpieces have embarked on a bizarre scheme to hypnotize America into forgetting the many scandals of his presidency. They seem to think that intoning “this administration hasn’t had a scandal” over and over again will make history disappear. It’s the lamest Jedi Mind Trick ever, and is being pushed on people who know Star Wars is just a movie.
Here’s a short list of the many scandals Team Obama thinks it can make America forget:

The great “stimulus” heist: Obama seems to think nobody will remember he grabbed almost a trillion dollars for “stimulus” spending, created virtually zero private-sector jobs with it, allowed a great deal of the money to vanish into thin air, and spent the rest of his presidency complaining that he needed hundreds of billions more to repair roads and bridges.

Vast sums of taxpayer money were wasted on foolish projects that came close to the Keynesian economic satire of hiring some people to dig holes, and others to fill them in. Obama added insult to injury by appointing Vice President Joe Biden as the “sheriff” who would supposedly find all that missing stimulus loot.

Americans mostly ended up footing the bill for was an army of government jobs, and a lavish network of slush funds for the Democratic Party and its union allies. We’re supposed to forget about all that because years later, Obama’s weak economy finally dragged itself to something like normal “official” employment levels… with the U.S. national debt doubled, and our workforce rate reduced to Carter-era lows. Sorry, Democrats, but that’s more than just failed policy. It’s one of the worst government-spending scandals in our history. Democrats will howl to the moon over far, far smaller abuses of taxpayer money during the Trump administration, should any occur.

Operation Fast and Furious: Obama partisans seem to think any given example of abuse or ineptitude by their man stopped being a “scandal” the moment it seemed clear he wouldn’t be impeached over it. Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration’s insane program to use American gun dealers and straw purchasers to arm Mexican drug lords, is a scandal with a huge body count, prominently including Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jamie Zapata, plus hundreds of Mexican citizens. Agent Terry’s family certainly thinks it qualifies as a scandal.

It is difficult to imagine any Republican administration surviving anything remotely close to Fast and Furious. The media would have dogged a Republican president without respite, especially when it became clear his Attorney General was putting political spin ahead of accountability and the safety of the American people. Remember, AG Eric Holder escaped perjury charges by claiming he didn’t know what his own subordinates were doing – a pioneering, but sadly not unique, example of an Obama official using his or her incompetence as a defense. For years afterward, we would hear some version of “I’m not a crook, I’m just completely inept” everywhere from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

But this was Barack Obama, so the media downplayed Fast and Furious news… to the point where viewers of NBC News learned about the scandal for the first time when Holder was on the verge of being held in contempt by Congress for it.

The relatively benign explanation for the astounding Fast and Furious scandal is that Obama’s Justice Department wanted to release guns into the Mexican wild, like so many radio-tagged antelope on a nature show, and follow them to arrest the big fish of organized crime. (In case you were wondering, no, the guns didn’t actually have radio tags in them – that was tried in the much smaller, and utterly disastrous, Bush-era program Obama’s team used as a model for their vastly larger and more careless program.) This explanation becomes more difficult to believe, the more you know about how careless the program was, and how abruptly it was shut down after Agent Terry’s death.

The more sinister take on Fast and Furious is that the Obama administration wanted to create gun crimes in Mexico so they could complain about lax regulations on American gun sales – “for the purposes of creating a narrative that they could use in America to try and thwart our Second Amendment constitutional rights,” as Andrew Breitbart put it during a 2012 interview.

No matter which interpretation you subscribe to, or how much you think Barack Obama knew about the program when he made scurrilous claims of executive privilege to shut down investigations, it’s an insult to a large number of murder victims to claim it wasn’t a scandal. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives hasn’t learned as much from the OFF debacle as we might have hoped.

Incidentally, the Border Patrol named a station in southern Arizona in Agent Brian Terry’s honor. On New Year’s Eve, persons unknown fired rifle shots at a Border Patrol vehicle near the station.

Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress: This was a result of Operation Fast and Furious, but it merits distinction as a separate scandal in its own right. Holder was the first sitting member of a president’s cabinet in the history of the United States to be held in contempt of Congress.

Of course, Democrats closed ranks behind Holder, the White House protected him, and the media allowed Holder to spin the contempt vote as mere “political theater.” In reality, it was a difficult step that responsible members of Congress didn’t want to take, and it was fully justified by Holder’s disgraceful conduct in the Fast and Furious investigation. No reasonable person could possibly review the way OFF was handled and conclude it was an example of transparency and accountability.

ObamaCare: Everything about ObamaCare is a scandal, from the President’s incessant lies about keeping your old plan if you liked it, to Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s “we need to pass it to find out what’s in it” dereliction of Congressional duty.

ObamaCare is a scam, pure and simple – sold on false pretenses by people who knew it wasn’t going to work the way they promised. It doesn’t feel right to dismiss it as a “failed” scheme when so much of the failure was intentional. The bill was so sloppily crafted that Democrats were basically signing blank sheets of paper when they rushed it through Congress in a foul-smelling cloud of back-room deals. ObamaCare’s designers precipitated a constitutional crisis by forgetting they left in a provision to cut subsidies for states that didn’t set up health-care exchanges – a provision that would have killed the entire program stone-dead two years ago, if it had been enforced as written.

The Supreme Court rewrote ObamaCare on the fly twice to keep it alive, which is a scandal in and of itself. President Obama delayed and rewrote the law so often it was impossible to keep track of the changes, cutting Congress out of the loop completely. (Actually, someone did keep careful track of them, and the tally was up to 70 distinct changes by January 2016.)

That made some of Obama’s rewritten mandates and deadlines blatantly illegal – but then, the Affordable Care Act isn’t really a “law” in the sense American government understood the term. In practice it became something entirely new, an enabling act that gave the executive unlimited power to do whatever it thought necessary to keep the system running. If subverting the American system of government isn’t a scandal, what is?

And let’s not forget the scandal of ObamaCare’s disastrous launch, foisted on the American people even though its designers knew it had severe flaws – the billion-dollar website that cost another billion dollars to fix after it crashed, accompanied by a constellation of state exchanges that blew up like Roman candles of bureaucratic incompetence. Let us not forget the absolute zero accountability for this disaster, mismanaged by everyone from President Obama to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who treated the biggest new government program in several generations as though it were a minor side project that could be handled by subordinates with minimal supervision.

Spying on journalists: Establishment media came about as close to falling out of love with Barack Obama as ever when his administration was caught spying on journalists.

Why, if the reporter subjected to the most egregious surveillance, James Rosen, didn’t work for Fox News, the mainstream media might have started treating Obama like a (shudder) Republican. Rosen was treated so badly that even Attorney General Eric Holder eventually admitted feeling a bit of “remorse” about it. Apparently he felt so much anguish that he suffered temporary amnesia and forgot to tell Congress that he signed off on the request to wiretap Rosen while he was testifying under oath.

The IRS scandal: The selective targeting of conservative groups by a politicized Internal Revenue Service was a scandal grenade Democrats and their media pals somehow managed to smother, even though the story began with the IRS admitting wrongdoing.

Democrats suffocated the scandal by acting like circus clowns during congressional hearings, but at no point were the actual facts of the case truly obscured: yes, pro-life and Tea Party groups were deliberately targeted for extra scrutiny, their tax exemption applications outrageously delayed until after the 2012 election without actually being refused. If anything remotely comparable had been done to, say, environmentalist and minority activist groups by the IRS under a Republican administration, the results would have been apocalyptic.

There’s also no question about the facts of the follow-up scandal, in which IRS officials brazenly lied about having backups of relevant computer data. The American people were expected to believe that multiple state-of-the-art hard drives failed, and were instantly shredded instead of being subjected to data recovery procedures.

Luckily for the politicized IRS, the Justice Department was hyper-politicized under Obama too, so no charges were filed, and scandal kingpin Lois Lerner got to enjoy her taxpayer-funded retirement after taking the Fifth to thwart lawful congressional investigation.

Benghazi: This is the clearest example of Obama and his supporters thinking all of his pre-2012 scandals ceased to exist the moment he won re-election. Benghazi has been investigated extensively, and argued about passionately, since the night of September 11, 2012. Nothing can change the absolute fact that the Obama administration’s story for the first few weeks after the attack was false, and they knew it was false. They spun a phony story to buy themselves a little time during a presidential election campaign, and it worked.

Nothing can change the fact that Libya was a disaster after Obama’s unlawful military operation. Nothing can obscure the truth that Ambassador Christopher Stevens was sent into a known terrorist hot zone without a backup plan to ensure his safety. Everything else from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their defenders is pure political spin. They dragged the story out for years, until they thought it couldn’t hurt them any more. That doesn’t erase its status as a scandal. (And they were evidently incorrect in their belief that it couldn’t hurt them any more!)

Hillary Clinton’s secret server: While we’re on the subject of Hillary Clinton, her secret email server is an Obama scandal, too. She perpetrated her email offenses while working as his Secretary of State, and contrary to Obama’s false assertions, he knew about it.

Plenty of Obama officials other than Clinton played email games, most infamously EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, who created a false identity for herself named “Richard Windsor” to get around government transparency rules.

The Pigford scandal: Named after a landmark lawsuit from the Bill Clinton era, the abuse of a program meant to compensate minority farmers for racial discrimination exploded under Obama. After years of left-wing attacks on Andrew Breitbart for daring to speak up about the scandal, the mainstream media – no less than the New York Times – finally admitted his critique of the program was accurate in 2013.

Once again: if careless mishandling (or deliberate politicized misuse) of huge sums of taxpayer money isn’t a scandal, what is?

NSA spying scandal: Opinions about the nature and intensity of this scandal vary wildly across the political spectrum, but there’s no doubt that Edward Snowden’s pilfering of sensitive National Security Agency data was a debacle that damaged national security. We had the ghastly spectacle of Attorney General Holder thanking Snowden for performing a public service by exposing surveillance programs Holder’s own administration didn’t want to talk about.

President Obama and his administration made many false statements as they tried to contain the political damage. The fallout included significant losses for U.S. companies, and diplomatic problems for the United States. Just about everything Obama did before, during, and after the Snowden saga damaged the relationship between American citizens and their government.

Bowe Bergdahl: Bergdahl’s ultimate fate rests in the hands of a military court (unless Obama pardons him) but no verdict can erase the scandalous way this administration conducted the prisoner swap that freed him from the Taliban and its allies. Many lies were told, the law was flouted, a deal of questionable wisdom was struck with his captors, and outraged Americans demanded recognition for the soldiers who died searching for Bergdahl after he abandoned his post.

Iran nuclear deal and ransom payment: Everything about Obama’s dealings with Iran has been scandalous, beginning with his silence while the Green Revolution was brutally put down by the mullahs in 2009. The Iran nuclear deal was pushed with lies and media manipulation. The infamous pallet of cash that wasn’t a ransom has become symbolic of Obama’s mendacity and penchant for breaking the rules, when he thinks following them is too much trouble.

Polluting the Colorado river: The Environmental Protection Agency managed to turn the Colorado River orange under this greenest of green Presidents. Of course there was a cover-up. Would you expect anything less from this “transparent” administration?

The GSA scandal: The General Services Administration was caught wasting ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money on lavish parties and silly projects. Heroic efforts to resist accountability were made, leaving puzzled observers to ask what it took to get fired from government employment under Barack Obama. (Alas, it was hardly the last time that question would be asked.) Oh, and of course there was a cover-up from the Most Scandal-Free Administration Ever.

The VA death-list scandal: The Department of Veterans Affairs has long been troubled, but the big scandals broke on Obama’s watch, most infamously the secret death lists veterans were put on while executives handed in phony status reports and signed themselves up for big bonuses. Obama was more interested in spinning the news and minimizing his political exposure than addressing problems; in few areas outside ObamaCare has his rhetoric been more hollow, his promises more meaningless.

Solyndra: The marquee green energy scandal wrote “crony capitalism” into the American political lexicon, as corners were cut and protocols ignored to shovel billions of taxpayer dollars at companies with absurdly unrealistic business models. President Obama’s ability to pick bad investments was remarkable. Luckily for him, American taxpayers covered his losses.

Secret Service gone wild: The Obama years saw one scandal after another hit the Secret Service, from agents going wild with hookers in Columbia, to a fence jumper penetrating the White House, and tipsy Secret Service officials driving their car into a security barrier.

Shutdown theater: Obama hit the American people hard during the great government shutdown crisis of 2013, doing everything he could to make American citizens feel maximum pain – from using “Barry-cades” to keep war veterans away from their memorials, to releasing illegal alien criminals from detention centers. It was an infuriating lesson for voters in how every dollar they get from government is a dollar that can be used against them, when they are impudent enough to demand spending restraint.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/02/18-major-scandals-obama-presidency/

Elessar
04-23-2018, 10:02 AM
He made a famous comment that his would be "the most transparent presidency ever".
It was a transparent as a block of lead.

Let's not forget him turning a blind eye to the mayhem of the "Occupy" movement; the
unwillingness to speak out on the riots and damage of the BLM behavior; The ignoring
of the voter intimidation of the New Black Panthers.

For being only 1/3rd of African heritage, he sure played that up to the hilt.
Racist as hell, smug, and deceitful.

High_Plains_Drifter
04-23-2018, 11:34 AM
obama is a consummate LIAR, from claiming he was born in Hawaii on down. He belongs in prison.

https://image.ibb.co/k6hfSS/Daq4_Huk_UQAAQt_Zd.jpg