Benghazi. Forced IRS audits. Associated Press phone-record seizures. Watergate. What do these four topics have in common? In our opinion, and we believe we’ll see this in the end, absolutely nothing. Then President Richard M. Nixon, the great paranoid one, was booted from the most powerful office in the world because of a bungled burglary at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, so badly mishandled, in fact, that his departure was a slam dunk; tack on obstruction of justice for good measure.
As to what President Barack Obama’s administration faces with an ever-intensifying focus on the tragic situation in Libya, the IRS audits of the conservative Tea Party and the stockpiling of phone records from the home and office numbers of AP reporters and editors, by last week it had boiled down to a siege mentality in the White House. Tensions high? You bet. But the president, appropriately, issued a vehement tongue-lashing, especially about the IRS audits. He said the right things, because he had to say the right things.
Some wonder whether his administration is crumbling, now more under the gun than ever. We don’t believe it is. The offenders probably will pay the price, there will be a public display, and then life will go on for the next three-plus years. These politicians, which are supposed to be “classified” and referred to as public servants, are so darned savvy at handling flare-ups like these that it makes Nixon seem almost amateurish. Which, in the end, is exactly what he was. A fearful, hateful amateur.
See whether any of that shows itself at 1600 Pennsylvania. It won’t. There is too much polish. There is too much liberal, look-the-other-way media getting downright indignant for an instant and then looking for more distracting news. Is there a pattern here? This is a man, who, in his first term, banned an American news network, Fox, from a White House event. As we like to say around this office, “You can’t make this stuff up!”