It’s Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013…and here’s The Gouge!

First up, a special edition of Tales From the Darkside, aka, the “And If You Believe That I’ve Got A Bridge In Brooklyn” segment, courtesy of the most patently prevaricating, deliberately-divisive President ever to soil the seat in what, in just over four short years, he’s turned into the Offal Office:

“We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices. And I have to say, growing up, I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me [sic] not doing the right thing. But one of the things that all of you have learned over the last four years is there’s no longer any room for excuses.“–Barack Obama, Moorehouse College commencement ceremony, May 19

Really?

Since when?!?  Last we looked, excuses…

…are all this narcissistic nitwit has to offer!  And here we thought America was the President’s “community”, i.e., every American…regardless of the Chief Executive’s individual race, creed, color…or national origin.  Now, imagine the firestorm had George W. Bush made similar remarks about an equally-mythical “white” community…at Bob Jones University; any questions?!?

And since we’re on the subject of the most transparent Administration in history, as the Los Angeles Times reports, courtesy of Bill Meisen…

Top IRS official will invoke 5th Amendment

 

A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the 5th Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups. Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening — or why she didn’t disclose it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor III. Lerner was scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

“She has not committed any crime or made any misrepresentation but under the circumstances she has no choice but to take this course,” said a letter by Taylor to committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Vista). The letter, sent Monday, was obtained Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times. Taylor, a criminal defense attorney from the Washington firm Zuckerman Spaeder, said that the Department of Justice has launched a criminal investigation, and that the House committee has asked Lerner to explain why she provided “false or misleading information” to the committee four times last year.

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.”

Sounds like a legitimate purpose to us, particularly as Mr. Taylor will be charging the lying Lerner by the hour for just sitting there in silence.

Meanwhile, former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller conclusively exposes just one of Lerner’s numerous fables:

We favor a form of the punishment Kevin Costner expounded in The Untouchables: when a government official/bureaucrat is guilty of betraying the public trust, they should have their nose cut off, be sewn in a bag with a wild animal and thrown in the Potomac.

In a related item, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, The American Spectator connects a few more of the dots separating The Obamao and impeachment:

Obama and the IRS: The Smoking Gun?

 

No…the other one!

…In short: the very day after the president of the quite-publicly anti-Tea Party labor union — the union for IRS employees — met with President Obama, the manager of the IRS “Determinations Unit Program agreed” to open a “Sensitive Case report on the Tea party cases.” As stated by the IG report.

The NTEU is the 150,000 member union that represents IRS employees along with 30 other separate government agencies. Kelley herself is a 14-year IRS veteran agent. The union’s PAC endorsed President Obama in both 2008 and 2012, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles to anti-Tea Party candidates.

NTEU president Colleen Kelley; do Liberal women come in any size other than XXXL?!?

Putting IRS employees in the position of actively financing anti-Tea Party candidates themselves, while in their official positions in the IRS blocking, auditing, or intimidating Tea Party and conservative groups around the country.

The IG report contained a timeline prepared by examining internal IRS e-mails. The IG report did not examine White House Visitor Logs, e-mails, or phone records relating to the relationship between the IRS union, the IRS, and the White House…

“Did not” examine any White House records whatsoever; who was running the IG’s investigation…

…Monsieur Guy Gadbois?!?  Hells Bells; the food bills alone should have alerted investigators to Kelley’s visits!

But despite the seriousness of the IRS scandal, as this forward from Randy Jugs and The Washington Times‘ Joe Curl suggests…

Benghazi is the only scandal that matters

 

“What difference, at this point, does it make?”

— Hillary Rodham Clinton, in House testimony on Benghazi

“Well, I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge.”

— Roy Neary, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”

Spoiler alert: The IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal — they go nowhere. In September, we’ll all be looking back thinking, “Huh, that was a big waste of time.” It will be — in fact, it already is. Just when Benghazi has reached critical mass, the Obama administration, which has had only one scandal (Fast and Furious early in term 1, and that fizzled fast and furiously), suddenly has two more scandals? Coincidence, yes?

No. Not at all. They were dropped, on purpose, at a most convenient time, and they’re already played out. Exactly according to plan.

The phone “scandal,” in which the Justice Department secretly subpoenaed call logs from The Associated Press, ended before it started. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., called to the carpet by House investigators, testified last week that he had recused himself entirely from the matter. He didn’t know a thing about the case, he said with a smirk. Not a thing. Done.

So, months from now, maybe they lop off the head of the man who orchestrated the records grab, Deputy Attorney General James Cole. But even that isn’t assured. Justice is now making a case for why the clearly unconstitutional records grab was not unconstitutional; it’ll be months before there’s any closure. Will anyone care in August?

And the IRS “scandal,” in which the federal tax-collecting agency apparently targeted tea party groups, also will fizzle. Already, the president — incensed over the mess, spitting mad! — has canned the acting commissioner, Steven Miller. Well, not really, his term ended June 8 anyway. At least the president demanded the head of the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division. Well, not really. Joseph Grant decided to “retire” June 3. Bring on the government pension and free health care.

Plus, the administration already has pinned the whole debacle on a few “rogue” IRS employees in the Cincinnati branch. You think anyone will find the president’s fingerprints on orders demanding that the agency crack down on political opponents? Please. This is the Chicago mafia: They cover their tracks and they long ago filed off their fingerprints.

What’s more, Lois Lerner, who headed the IRS division in charge of evaluating charitable and other nonprofit organizations, rolled out the scandal herself at a conference of lawyers. The slumbering press corps didn’t unearth the “scandal,” Mrs. Lerner merely called a friend and planted the question concerning an upcoming inspector general’s report. That’s how the story broke.

But who cares: The president’s taking action! Let’s move on, folks, nothing to see here.

The whole ham-handed game play is comical. Just as shocking testimony emerged on the Benghazi scandal, the administration rolls out two scandals, with the targets just coincidentally — the media and right-wing conservatives. Absurd. But fairly brilliant. The self-absorbed media predictably swooned over its plight — this is the biggest scandal ever. And the right-wingers grew indignant, finally able to say “We told you so.” Well played, Obama administration.

Even more: Neither scandal matters, certainly not now. The IRS mess stretches back years — reports say as long ago as 2009 — but Team Obama has already gotten what it wanted: The IRS, most likely at the direction of the White House, slowed down the growth of the tea party, changing the 2012 election immeasurably. The phone fiasco, over a published AP story no one even remembers, does not appear to lead anywhere, least of all back to the White House. So the DOJ guys know somebody at one phone number dialed somebody at another phone number? So what? Who cares?

While both “scandals” are all over but the shouting, the shouting will consume the summer. Into the dog days with both scandals we go. Meanwhile, the president is steadfastly moving on his agenda on guns, amnesty, Obamacare — and far away from Benghazi, dismissed as a political witch hunt.

Need proof? Last week, Mr. Obama took two questions from the press corps — one on the IRS mess, the other on the phone scandal. Success — Benghazi is gone, forgotten.

Meanwhile, no one even knows where the president was the night a U.S. ambassador was murdered, or why the U.S. military sent no help. No one knows who inserted into official talking points a false story that an anti-Islam video led to the massacre. And no one seems to care — least of all the White House.

“I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night, and that’s a largely irrelevant fact,” top Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday.

 Where the hell was B. Hussein Obama?!?

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton angrily spat: “What difference, at this point, does it make?” And the president last week said simply: “There’s no there there.”

But be warned, White House: Bob Woodward, who knows a thing or two about scandals and cover-ups, isn’t falling for the double head fake. “If you read through all these emails,” the Watergate reporter said, “you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’ I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, ‘Oh, let’s not tell this, let’s not show this.’” “I would not dismiss Benghazi.”

Too bad, Bob. Washington’s press corps already has.

Add Dan Pfeiffer to the list of those who deserve to have their nose cut off, be sewn in a bag with a wild animal and thrown in the Potomac…

…along with Bob Schieffer.  And we’d be more than willing to administer the punishment.

As Newt recently noted…

Team Tick-Tock: they lied but once…and that continuously.  But when they’re so anxious to distract the public’s attention from Benghazi, you know we’ve barely scratched the surface; as this next item, courtesy of Bill Meisen and PJ Media‘s Roger Simon theorizes:

Ex-Diplomats Report New Benghazi Whistleblowers with Info Devastating to Clinton and Obama

 

More whistleblowers will emerge shortly in the escalating Benghazi scandal, according to two former U.S. diplomats who spoke with PJ Media Monday afternoon. …According to the diplomats, what these whistleblowers will say will be at least as explosive as what we have already learned about the scandal, including details about what really transpired in Benghazi that are potentially devastating to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The former diplomats inform PJM the new revelations concentrate in two areas — what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi and the pressure put on General Carter Ham, then in command of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and therefore responsible for Libya, not to act to protect jeopardized U.S. personnel.

Stevens’ mission in Benghazi, they will say, was to buy back Stinger missiles from al-Qaeda groups issued to them by the State Department, not by the CIA. Such a mission would usually be a CIA effort, but the intelligence agency had opposed the idea because of the high risk involved in arming “insurgents” with powerful weapons that endanger civilian aircraft.

Hillary Clinton still wanted to proceed because, in part, as one of the diplomats said, she wanted “to overthrow Gaddafi on the cheap.” This left Stevens in the position of having to clean up the scandalous enterprise when it became clear that the “insurgents” actually were al-Qaeda – indeed, in the view of one of the diplomats, the same group that attacked the consulate and ended up killing Stevens.

The former diplomat who spoke with PJ Media regarded the whole enterprise as totally amateurish and likened it to the Mike Nichols film Charlie Wilson’s War about a clueless congressman who supplies Stingers to the Afghan guerrillas. “It’s as if Hillary and the others just watched that movie and said ‘Hey, let’s do that!’” the diplomat said. He added that he and his colleagues think the leaking of General David Petraeus’ affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell was timed to silence the former CIA chief on these matters.

Regarding General Ham, military contacts of the diplomats tell them that AFRICOM had Special Ops “assets in place that could have come to the aid of the Benghazi consulate immediately (not in six hours).” Ham was told by the White House not to send the aid to the trapped men, but Ham decided to disobey and did so anyway, whereupon the White House “called his deputy and had the deputy threaten to relieve Ham of his command.”

The White House motivation in all this is as yet unclear, but it is known that Ham retired quietly in April 2013 as head of AFRICOM. PJ Media recognizes this is largely hearsay, but the two diplomats sounded quite credible. One of them was in a position of responsibility in a dangerous area of Iraq in 2004. We will report more as we learn it.

Please note the author admits this is “largely hearsay”; but it does provide a plausible explanation why not only the White House, but the Woman Who Would Be King dearly want this story to die…

…quicker than Ambassador Stevens.  Here’s the juice: no matter what happens with any one or all of these scandals, nothing will rise to The Obamao’s level, let alone approach grounds for impeachment.  The best we can hope for is an impotent Obamao and, come January 2015, a Republican majority in Congress.  Oh…and the ignominious end of…

…the Heroine of Bosnia.

Next up, writing at The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol describes what he sees as…

The Real Scandal

 

Which is another way of saying what we’ve believed all along:

Then there’s this from Commentary Magazine, as Peter Wehner explains why…

Accepting Responsibility Would Blow Obama’s Circuits

 

Barack Obama, speaking to a crowd in Baltimore on Friday, said, “I know it can seem frustrating sometimes when it seems like Washington’s priorities aren’t the same as your priorities. I know it often seems like folks down there are more concerned with their jobs than with yours.”

Earlier in the week, when speaking about the IRS scandal, Obama said, “I’ve reviewed the Treasury Department watchdog’s report, and the misconduct that it uncovered is inexcusable. It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it. I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives.”

Cleaning up Washington’s various corruptions and insular, out-of-touch ways would make a powerful platform if he was preparing to run for president one day. The problem for Obama is that he is president and has been for four years and four months. In our modern-day system of government, he is first among equals when it comes to having responsibility for “Washington’s priorities.” And he certainly has responsibility for an agency which is part of the executive branch, which he after all oversees.

Mr. Obama has shown himself to be a chronic blame-shifter, whether he’s pointing fingers at his predecessor, ATMs, the Arab Spring, tsunamis and earthquakes, Europe, the GOP, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Super PACs, the Supreme Court, the Chamber of Commerce, and countless other people and organizations. He simply is unable to take responsibility for the problems that have occurred on his watch.

My guess is that the reasons are rooted in cognitive dissonance. Mr. Obama views himself as a transformational, world-historical figure. But as his failures mount one atop the other–from the Affordable Care Act and his stimulus package, to the worst economic recovery on record, to the collapse of his foreign policy, to mounting scandals–the president simply cannot process it. To accept responsibility would blow his circuits. And so he seems to have developed several coping mechanisms–including blaming others and pretending that what is happening in Washington has nothing at all to do with him.

But back here on Planet Earth, it does. Mr. Obama could be at the stage where he is simply unable to accept reality; it may be that the president now disassociates himself from his actions. This condition is not something you want to find in any individual; it’s one that’s particularly alarming to find in a chief executive.

Let alone THE Chief Executive.

And in a Daily Gouge exclusive, we offer this next biting bit of satire from Jim Gleaves, which relates how The Obamao finally saw fit to bring in the Marines for the protection of what he deemed an invaluable asset:

Speaking of the Military, the WSJ featured the following from one Lindsay Rodman, Marine Corps Captain and JAG officer, offering her unofficial opinion on…

The Pentagon’s Bad Math on Sexual Assault

Potential recruits need to know that serving in the military doesn’t turn a woman into a victim.

 

In the days since the Defense Department’s May 7 release of its 2012 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, the media and lawmakers have been abuzz. The report’s estimate that last year 26,000 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact prompted many to conclude, incorrectly, that this reliably estimated the number of victims of sexual assault.

The 2012 estimate was also significantly higher than the last estimate, causing some to proclaim a growing “epidemic” of sexual assault in the military. The truth is that the 26,000 figure is such bad math—derived from an unscientific sample set and extrapolated military-wide—that no conclusions can be drawn from it.

Yet three bills have been introduced in Congress since the report’s release, all intended in various ways as a response to the findings. This week the Senate Appropriations subcommittee, which has power over the Pentagon budget, will hold a hearing where military leaders will be questioned about sexual assault in the armed forces.

…It is disheartening to me, as a female officer in the Marine Corps and a judge advocate devoted to the professional practice of law in the military, to see Defense Department leaders and members of Congress deal with this emotionally charged issue without the benefit of solid, verifiable data.

…The military isn’t averse to changing to assure that all its service members, especially women, are treated justly. But change should come as a result of supportable data.

Yeah, you know; like gun control, Obamascare or immigration reform!

On the Lighter Side…

Then there’s these pearls of wisdom forwarded by Bob McClain:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with another twisted tale ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter, courtesy of Carl Polizzi:

Denver Cops Arrest Italian Shotgun Manufacturer as a Terrorist

 

Just curious; other than another gratuitous slam at a prominent Republican or an attempt to paint the former VP as a rich elitist, what possible bearing does Dick Cheney using a Perazzi shotgun over 7 years ago have on a story detailing another gun-related overreaction by law enforcement?

Magoo