It’s Friday, June 20th, 2014…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times via AEI, Jonah Goldberg asks of…
“Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy.” That’s the opening sentence of the Associated Press’ story on the IRS’ claim that it lost an unknown number of emails over two years relating to the agency’s alleged targeting of political groups hostile to the president.
But note how the AP casts the story: The investigators — Republican lawmakers — are outraged.
Is it really so hard to imagine that if this were a Republican administration, the story wouldn’t be the frustration of partisan critics of the president? It would be all about that administration’s behavior. With the exception of National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who called for a special prosecutor to bypass the White House’s “stonewalling,” and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, it’s hard to find a non-conservative journalist who thinks this is a big deal.
And if any Republican Administration would have been up to their collective hindquarters in hot water with the MSM before, this little tidbit would have brought the Fourth Estate’s pot to a full, roiling boil:
The top Republican on one of the House committees investigating the IRS targeting scandal reacted furiously late Wednesday to a report that ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s hard drive had been recycled, making it likely that many emails sent to and from Lerner prior to the summer of 2011 will never be recovered.
The Politico report cited two anonymous sources, as well as Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who confirmed that the Senate Finance Committee had been told that the hard drive had been discarded.
“If the IRS truly got rid of evidence in a way that violated the Federal Records Act and ensured the FBI never got a crack at recovering files from an official claiming a Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, this is proof their whole line about ‘losing’ e-mails in the targeting scandal was just one more attempted deception,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement. “Official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don’t just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention.”
Can Issa be serious?!? Tell us he didn’t really need the supposed “recycling” of Lerner’s hard drive to conclude the Administration’s “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse rang as hollow as Clinton claiming not to have sexual relations with “that woman”. And “deception”? How about part of an on-going criminal conspiracy?!?
Time to call a spade a spade, boys; and a liar…
…exactly what he is!
So how does the MSM cover an incredibly important development in a burgeoning political scandal of far greater significance to the health of the Republic than Watergate?
In her blog, Peggy Noonan correctly terms the all-too-predictable hypocrisy of the Press…
Forty-one years ago, during a small and largely ignored government scandal, a great mystery occurred. A group of determined congressional investigators, who had learned the president of the United States was running a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, pressed to get their hands on the tapes. The courts ruled in their favor. The White House had to hand over a number of tapes. But it turned out one of them, which was understood by the timeline to potentially be the key one, the one that might reveal exactly how the scandal began, turned out to have an 18½-minute gap.
It came to pass that the longtime personal secretary of the president, Rose Mary Woods, who had been transcribing the tapes in preparation for turning them over, said she had made “a terrible mistake.” She had been listening to the tape when the phone rang; she turned, picked it up, meant to hit the stop button on the tape recorder but hit the record button instead, spoke on the phone for five minutes and when the conversation was over found that five minutes of the tape had been recorded over. Later, and doubly mysterious, it turned out that a total of 18½ minutes of the tape had been erased. No one knows to this day how that happened. The president’s chief of staff, Alexander Haig, once mused it might have been the work of some “sinister force.”
A few members of Congress went mad with fury, but nobody else really noticed or cared. It was a time of such drama—Vietnam, student demonstrations, a cascade of other scandals to distract the attention of the press. So everyone ignored what happened with the tape, and the Watergate scandal, as it was called, did not end in the impeachment of a president. It just went away, in time became “old news.” Well, the president had said there was “not even a smidgen” of corruption in the story, so there you are.
Ha, wait, that’s not what happened.
Thank goodness the dimmest bulb in the House is on top of the problem:
In the words of the immortal Jules Winnfield:
But despite the cast of Morning Joe finding humor in the situation…
…there is absolutely nothing funny about a President who deems himself and his entire Administration above the law.
Since we’re on the subject of on-going criminal conspiracies, writing at AEI, Scott Gottlieb details the latest on the greatest con ever perpetrated on the body politic:
The money drawn off the newly proposed user fees (tax) would be used to finance the risk corridors. This scheme is largely aimed at shifting money between insurers that lost excessive amounts of money, and those that were profitable.
Problem is, almost everyone lost money. Few if any Obamacare plans had excess profits this year, owing to the rocky rollout. So there isn’t any money to shift around — absent, of course, some new cash infusion. That’s where the user fee comes into play.
Since Obamacare health plans were prevented from pricing products to reflect true risk, they were always going to have atypically high cost, and in turn, losses. The red ink was inevitable. Now all of us will be forced to pay for it, whether we have an Obamacare plan or not. That new tax will be passed onto everyone in the form of higher premiums.
Which just goes to prove what anyone with a clue said long before The Unaffordable Care Act was even passed, let alone enacted:
But if you thought The Obamao was bad, as presented by PJ Media, and as we’ve long maintained, Hillary may well be worse:
The Quote that Should End Hillary Clinton’s Political Career
Presumed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton held a staged townhall meeting on CNN today. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour made sure that CNN lived up to the “Clinton News Network” nickname that the network earned during Bill Clinton’s two terms in the presidency, tossing softball questions to Mrs. Clinton and cheerleading for yet another Clinton presidency.
The subject turned to the Second Amendment, gun rights and the National Rifle Association. Clinton offered a quote in which she directly assaulted the First and Second Amendments simultaneously:
Americans have the right, given to us not by government but by our Creator, to hold points of view whether the majority agrees with us or not. That right is protected from government by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Hillary’s statement brings up a terrifying question: What steps would President Hillary Clinton take to prevent Americans from holding a “viewpoint?”
“Should”. Then again, if these three incredible boners weren’t enough to sink Hillary’s political prospects…
…why would statements in direct contravention to the Constitution take her down?
Oh,…speaking of crafting her statements, did you know Hilly never really thought Benghazi was about a video?
Yeah…
On the Lighter Side…
And last, but certainly not least, we present James Patrick Crilley:
…the Early Years!
Magoo
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