Remember the Saturday Night Massacre in the Nixon Administration? It was October 10, 1973 and the Watergate scandal was going critical.
President Nixon wanted to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, but Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do the dirty deed. Finally Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to do it.
Last week, in the run-up to Mothers Day the troubles of the Obama administration went critical. Let's call it the Mothers Day Meltdown. It was the week that the smoking Benghazi scandal caught fire as the mainstream media finally woke up from their partisan naps to realize that some bad stuff went down on September 11, 2012, when the Obama administration was dithering around wondering what to do about an Al Qaeda attack. How could that be when supposedly Osama bin Laden was dead and Al Qaeda was on the run?
The mainstream media is finally waking up to realize that the Benghazi talking points present its shining Obama administration as a bunch of small-minded dissemblers, telling a tawdry lie to get out of a jam in the weeks before the November election. You read media types saying: "Oh wow! And we thought Benghazi was just a Republican partisan witch-hunt."
Really. And I have a bridge to sell you.
The other side of the Mothers Day Meltdown is the Friday afternoon admission by the IRS that a rogue office in Cincinnati was unfairly harassing the applications of conservative groups for 401(c) status as non-profit organizations. Well, what a surprise!
No doubt in the months ahead we will be asking: "What did the White House know and when did it know it." Don't hold your breath. No doubt the whole business is fully protected with circuit breakers and "deniability."
But really, it doesn't need a conspiracy. It all goes back to Thomas à Becket and the king complaining "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" When four courtiers obliged, and murdered him in the cathedral, the king got all huffy and upset.
Yes, I'm sure that nobody in the White House actually told the black ladies in the IRS Cincinnati office to bear down on any organization with "tea party" or "patriot" in its name.
Heck, they didn't need to. After all, the black ladies had their local Reverend Wright telling them about the racists in white Amerikkka. They had MSNBC railing against evil conservatives. Why shouldn't they do their bit for the First Black President and rid him of his turbulent enemies?
Back in the 2000s conservatives used to rail against President Bush because he didn't fight back against the daily calumnies against his policies and his person. Maybe President Bush knew something that his partisans foolishly didn't. If he'd sicced Karl Rove for a verbal attack on his enemies then some mid-level official in some department somewhere might decide to do his "bit" to help out the president.
Of course, if some bitter clinger in the IRS office in red-neck Texas back then had decided to start targeting groups with "progressive" in their names, the whole media world would have erupted.
It all goes to show that liberals are a lot less smart than they think they are. The reason that you limit government is that all power corrupts. The reason that presidents try not to be too partisan between elections is that it sets American against American. And while it's the nature of politics that in each election you divide the nation into Us and Them, you are well advised not to continue the divisiveness and run a permanent campaign. You might end up dividing the nation into a civil war.
I wrote a week or so ago about the end of the Democrats' decade-long Big Push. The bigger question is whether it is 1942 with Army Group A strung out in the Caucausus and a flank attack developing against the Sixth Army before Stalingrad.
My guess is that the Democrats are in for a disastrous four years. The economy is a mess, Obamacare is coming, inflation will be rearing its ugly head. People will decide it is time for a change. And the Democrats' "emerging majority" will suffer a bad case of the flu and stay home on election day.
But a week is a long time in politics.
President Nixon wanted to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, but Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than do the dirty deed. Finally Solicitor General Robert Bork agreed to do it.
Last week, in the run-up to Mothers Day the troubles of the Obama administration went critical. Let's call it the Mothers Day Meltdown. It was the week that the smoking Benghazi scandal caught fire as the mainstream media finally woke up from their partisan naps to realize that some bad stuff went down on September 11, 2012, when the Obama administration was dithering around wondering what to do about an Al Qaeda attack. How could that be when supposedly Osama bin Laden was dead and Al Qaeda was on the run?
The mainstream media is finally waking up to realize that the Benghazi talking points present its shining Obama administration as a bunch of small-minded dissemblers, telling a tawdry lie to get out of a jam in the weeks before the November election. You read media types saying: "Oh wow! And we thought Benghazi was just a Republican partisan witch-hunt."
Really. And I have a bridge to sell you.
The other side of the Mothers Day Meltdown is the Friday afternoon admission by the IRS that a rogue office in Cincinnati was unfairly harassing the applications of conservative groups for 401(c) status as non-profit organizations. Well, what a surprise!
No doubt in the months ahead we will be asking: "What did the White House know and when did it know it." Don't hold your breath. No doubt the whole business is fully protected with circuit breakers and "deniability."
But really, it doesn't need a conspiracy. It all goes back to Thomas à Becket and the king complaining "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" When four courtiers obliged, and murdered him in the cathedral, the king got all huffy and upset.
Yes, I'm sure that nobody in the White House actually told the black ladies in the IRS Cincinnati office to bear down on any organization with "tea party" or "patriot" in its name.
Heck, they didn't need to. After all, the black ladies had their local Reverend Wright telling them about the racists in white Amerikkka. They had MSNBC railing against evil conservatives. Why shouldn't they do their bit for the First Black President and rid him of his turbulent enemies?
Back in the 2000s conservatives used to rail against President Bush because he didn't fight back against the daily calumnies against his policies and his person. Maybe President Bush knew something that his partisans foolishly didn't. If he'd sicced Karl Rove for a verbal attack on his enemies then some mid-level official in some department somewhere might decide to do his "bit" to help out the president.
Of course, if some bitter clinger in the IRS office in red-neck Texas back then had decided to start targeting groups with "progressive" in their names, the whole media world would have erupted.
It all goes to show that liberals are a lot less smart than they think they are. The reason that you limit government is that all power corrupts. The reason that presidents try not to be too partisan between elections is that it sets American against American. And while it's the nature of politics that in each election you divide the nation into Us and Them, you are well advised not to continue the divisiveness and run a permanent campaign. You might end up dividing the nation into a civil war.
I wrote a week or so ago about the end of the Democrats' decade-long Big Push. The bigger question is whether it is 1942 with Army Group A strung out in the Caucausus and a flank attack developing against the Sixth Army before Stalingrad.
My guess is that the Democrats are in for a disastrous four years. The economy is a mess, Obamacare is coming, inflation will be rearing its ugly head. People will decide it is time for a change. And the Democrats' "emerging majority" will suffer a bad case of the flu and stay home on election day.
But a week is a long time in politics.
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