President Obama recently premiered (yet another) theme of excuses to explain his failure to achieve anything of substance in the first six months of an adrift second term. Embarking on (yet another) campaign swing, the President now blames “Washington.”
It’s as though he himself were not living in a big white house smack in the middle of DC:
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.”
The President’s excusifying is interesting. Heaven forbid that there would be “political posturing” in the nation’s political capital! Even Obama cannot be so naïve to believe his rhetoric.
To the contrary, a “parade of distractions” and “political posturing” are the essence of Obama’s leadership. It was long ago apparent that Obama has no genuine interest in lowering himself to work with those he terms his “enemies” in the other party (and even in his own) to forge meaningful compromise.
And, it is unclear exactly what “ball” Washington should be eyeing. Obama offered no second term agenda when he campaigned in 2012. Instead, he divided the country and talked about anything but his record. It should be unsurprising that, having run with no positive proposals, he now has no positive achievement. “Lame duck” is not usually so fitting, so early.
But the thing about Obama’s latest buck-shifting that really left me shaking my head is his dismissal of the scandals plaguing his regime as “phony.” Really?
In the wise eloquence of Joe Biden, that’s baloney.
Let’s review. In Benghazi, we still have no explanation for why our ambassador and other American personnel died in Libya during a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11. We have no idea what the President was doing that night, other than resting for his Vegas campaign rally the next day.
Instead of accountability and answers, we now hear reports that dozens of CIA operatives were on the ground in Libya, and the CIA agents are now under tremendous pressure, including monthly lie detector tests, not to talk to Congress about why. Recall that State Department personnel, under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were also punished for talking. Sound phony?
As for IRS targeting of conservatives, it is more obvious by the week that the Administration has repeatedly lied about the whole fiasco. Instead of being limited to “rogue agents” in Cincinnati, those agents were under orders from DC, and the trail currently leads to the office of the IRS Chief Counsel, an Obama political appointee. Sound phony?
Then there are the revelations that the Department of Justice, under the flimsiest of pretenses, snooped through phone records of AP news reporters and a Fox News journalist. Add to that the massive data mining the government is conducting on millions of everyday Americans’ phone calls, emails, and internet activity, all in the name of catching terrorists (like the Boston marathon bombers, whom authorities did not catch, despite being warned by the Russians, who have now granted asylum to the 29-year old college dropout who leaked the secret surveillance).
There may be national security justification for much of this. But does national security justify the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence lying to Congress about the snooping? Sound phony?
Now, to be fair to the President, there is plenty about Washington that is phony. He just won’t cite these examples.
Remember the “war on women”? That was certainly phony, pretty much like all the Obama 2012 campaign.
Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives (Solyndra, among others) also qualify as phony, except the billions of wasted tax dollars were all too real.
Speaking of energy, the Administration’s refusal to approve the Keystone XL pipeline is pretty flimsy. Frittering away both economic growth and true energy independence while saying the opposite is phony, too.
Foreign policy? This is where Obama blends “phony” with “dangerous.” After five years of Obama’s Russian “reset,” leading from behind in the Middle East, and dissing our Allies, one gets the sense that the larger world sees Obama as phony, too.
Then there is the Obama economic “recovery.” A trillion dollars in stimulus spending gained us the weakest recovery since the Great Depression. Fifty million Americans on food stamps; more than 20 million Americans still out of work. Most of the jobs being created are part-time with lower pay, to replace vanished full time jobs that paid better. Phony, indeed.
But, to paraphrase our President, “make no mistake.” Those phony scandals, not the baloney coming from the White House, are the real obstacle to progress.
Cory T. Wilson is a Madison attorney with Heidelberg Steinberger Colmer & Burrow, P.A. Follow Cory on Twitter, @CoryWilsonMS, or email cory@corywilson.ms.
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