Obama Does It Again

"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind." — Thomas Jefferson

Yesterday President Obama rewarded the incompetence and radical bias of his political friends by appointing Susan Rice as National Security Advisor and Samantha Power as Ambassador to the United Nations.

Let’s look at Samantha Power first.

The woman charged with the protection of global human rights for the White House for the last four years was promoted Tuesday to represent the United States at the United Nations.

Despite leading an embarrassing policy of inaction — during which 80,000 plus Syrians were killed by violence created by their own government, thousands of Sudanese were ethnically-cleansed in Darfur, and hundreds of thousands were murdered and displaced in the Congo — President Obama announced Tuesday that he has selected Samantha Power, an academic and 2008 Obama presidential campaign aide, as his next nominee to represent the United States as ambassador to the United Nations.

Power, a former Harvard professor known for lecturing U.S. government officials to do more to stop international violence, ran the White House’s Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights until March of 2013. She was also appointed in April 2012 by the president to chair a newly-formed Atrocities Prevention Board. Power’s book “A Problem from Hell, America and the Age of Genocide” even won a Pulitzer Prize.

Power has spent most of her career advocating for increased U.S. government involvement to stop rights abuses around the world.

Her appointment to run the White House office for human rights was loudly trumpeted as a coup for the NGO community: The woman whose career skyrocketed by lecturing President Bush on his inaction in Sudan was now in charge of the U.S. government’s response to future crises.

However, it didn’t take long before Power’s decades of big talk was put to the test.

In a position of power and proximity to the president of the United States, from which she could meaningfully act against any unfolding injustice, Power was largely silent and completely ineffective.

In a position of power and proximity to the president of the United States, from which she could meaningfully act against any unfolding injustice, Power was largely silent and completely ineffective.

The NGO community was left wondering which Samantha Power was getting to speak inside the Oval Office.

Prior to entering government, Power was a loud supporter of the international concept “Responsibility to Protect (R2P)”, a U.N. supported term that pressures those in power to protect the vulnerable during war, crisis and poor governing.

In fact, it’s not an over-statement to say her career was built on the idea that the government should act more and talk less.

But from inside government while sitting comfortably ensconced at the White House’s National Security Council, she was one of the most disappointing leaders to the R2P activists.

Before entering government, Power consistently espoused her strong R2P views.

In August 2004, while happily perched at Harvard, Power wrote a lengthy piece for the New Yorker on the issue of Sudan where she lamented the slowness of the Bush administration to confront the killing of tens of thousands of Sudanese, questioned President Bush’s motives for confronting the killings, and criticized him for not getting other countries to help. Power opined:

“Neither President Bush nor Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, spoke publicly about the killings in Darfur before March of this year, by which time some thirty thousand people had died as a result of ethnic cleansing.”

Even when giving President Bush credit for later dealing with the issue, Power cynically questioned his reasons. She said, “The stage was set: Bush would delight his Christian constituency; U.S. businesses would gain access to Sudan’s oil; and Sudanese civilians would stop dying.”

Yet once Power finally achieved a position of actual authority, she continuously failed to act or even forcefully speak out in favor of U.S. government action.

She espoused little to no support of Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution when Iranian students and others took to the streets to protest the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

She sat silent during the crucial moments when the Syrian crisis first started and has remained absent for two years as 80,000 plus Syrians have been killed.

And despite years of fierce rhetoric against Bush for inaction in Darfur, she has become mute as genocide continues to ravage the region.

An academic with zero real-world diplomatic experience, her biting words ring hollow from inside the White House.

Elizabeth Blackney, an NGO activist on human trafficking said, “For Samantha Power to be promoted is disturbing. She shed her record as an anti-genocide, human rights advocate for political power and affiliation. She became the bystander, the "person sitting in an office" implementing a bad policy that ensured greater suffering."

Sending Power to the United Nations sends the message that President Obama doesn’t care as much about actually helping the world’s vulnerable as he does about loyalty and academic prestige.

Sadly, the U.S. may be represented at the U.N. by someone who has no multilateral diplomatic experience outside of one-hour classroom exercises.

Power’s record at the NSC proves academic success means little in the real world, but all-too-much to the president of the United States.

While not being very effective as a human rights advocate and more of an Obama political operative Power has a history of controversial comments that could haunt her in confirmation — including likening U.S. foreign policies to those of the Nazis.

In a March 2003 New Republic magazine essay, Samantha Power wrote that American foreign policy needs a "historical reckoning" which would entail "opening the files" and "acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia."

She continued: “Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors. When (German Chancellor Willy) Brandt went down on one knee in the Warsaw ghetto, his gesture was gratifying to World War II survivors, but it was also ennobling and cathartic for Germany. Would such an approach be futile for the United States?"

Republicans in the Senate, which must approve Power for the diplomatic post, could press her during her confirmation hearing on a number of other topics, including comments she's made on Libya and Israel. If confirmed, Power would take over for Susan Rice, whom Obama appointed as his new national security adviser. Rice, unlike Power, will not face a confirmation hearing

Power, aside from being a well-known foreign policy expert, is also married to Obama's former regulatory "czar" Cass Sunstein.

Asked Wednesday if the White House is girding for a contentious confirmation, Press Secretary Jay Carney said, “We would not expect one.”

He lauded Power’s “remarkable career” as a journalist and foreign policy adviser, as well as her “passion” for issues like shedding light on genocide.

But others say her views on the Middle East spark concerns about her position on Israel. She once suggested the possibility of military intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

During a 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler, host of Conversations with History, a program produced by the University of California Berkeley Institute of International Studies, Power said America needs “a willingness to actually put something on the line in sort of helping the situation."

“Not of the old, you know, Srebrenica kind or the Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence, because it seems to me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just, you know, major human rights abuses, which we're seeing there. But — is that you have to go in as if you're serious, you have to put something on the line,” she said.

Power, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard Law School graduate and Harvard professor, created a public ripple during the 2008 Democratic primary race when she was quoted in a foreign newspaper calling then-candidate Hillary Clinton names.

"She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything," Power told The Scotsman, which published her comment.

"But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive," she added.

Power resigned from Obama’s campaign following her comments.

Power, a human rights expert and former White House adviser, left the White House earlier this year, though she was considered the president’s likely pick to move to the U.N. She has long been connected to Obama. And if you’ll recall, she has had her fair share of controversy, specifically after she was forced to resign from the president’s 2008 campaign following negative remarks she made about Hillary Clinton.

Power’s comments though didn’t lead to completely severed ties to Obama, as she was soon back in the fold. So, too, was her husband — she is the wife of former regulatory czar Cass Sunstein. As early as 2011, TheBlaze covered expectations that Power could possible secure greater power, specifically if the president was elected to a second term. Her U.N. appointment appears to solidify these expectations.

In the past, Irish Central called her one of the main architects of the Obama administration’s policies in Libya, noting her influence over the White House. And Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said in a 2011 New York Times profile that “She is clearly the foremost voice for human rights within the White House and she has Obama’s ear.”

Bloomberg has more about her Libya involvement as well:

“She played a role, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice and other NSC advisers, in convincing Obama to push for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize a coalition military force to protect Libyan civilians. Other administration figures were concerned about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone and differences within NATO over what Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned would be a “big operation.” [...]

Power, who sought the limelight as a writer and public intellectual, has learned to be a behind-the-scenes policymaker over the past two years, associates say.”

Eventually, she repaired relations with Clinton. That said, she’s still widely seen as a problem by conservatives who oppose her ideals. After all, it wasn’t only her comments about the former Democratic presidential candidate that has caught the ire of critics; her foreign policy, too, is seen by some as problematic.

Power has a complicated history with the Obama camp and has also been accused, in the past, of making disparaging remarks about Israel.

In March 2011, Glenn Beck covered Power on his radio show and a subsequent article on GlennBeck.com recapped the host’s stance:

“For anyone who thinks that Samantha Power is just some low level cog in the Washington machine, the New York Times just did a nice profile on her role in the current administration. It turns out that Mrs. Cass Sunstein is probably the most dangerous woman in America, after all.

“Samantha Power took the podium sounding hoarse and looking uncomfortable. In two hours, President Obama would address the nation on Libya and Miss Power, the fiery human rights crusader‑‑ they shouldn’t use the word crusader in this instance, should they? The human rights crusader who advises Mr. Obama on foreign policy did not want to go out in front of the boss,” Glenn said, adding some of his own commentary to the article he was reading from.

“I’m not going to talk much about Libya, she began, but when it came for her question, she count help herself. Our best judgment, she said, defending the decision to establish a no‑fly zone was the failure to do so would have been extremely chilling, deadly and, indeed, a stain on our collective conscience,” Glenn continued.

“Now from her perch on the national Security Council, she is in a position to make the case for the commander in chief and to watch him translate her ideas into action. She’s clearly the foremost voice for human rights with in the White House, says Kenneth Ross. She has Obama’s ear. The Irish‑born Miss Power, 40, functions as kind of an institutional memory bank on genocide,” he continued.

“So we have Cass Sunstein’s wife advising on the Responsibility to Protect,” Glenn said “If you’re in the circle of George Soros, she was a queen. George Soros immediately funded a group to push the Responsibility to Protect.”

“[UN official Richard Falk] has been pushing for the right to protect or the Responsibility to Protect to be used against Israel and they’ve been trying this now for the last couple of years, and that’s what this is really all about, period. This is about going after Israel,” Glenn said.”

Last year, The Chicago Sun-Times provided information about Power and her involvement in Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board, an effort to prevent future genocide (i.e. the doctrine of a “Responsibility to Protect”) and other horrific occurrences:

“Samantha Power — who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book on genocide and now advises the Obama administration on the subject–will chair President Barack Obama’s new Atrocities Prevention Board, which gets down to work Monday as Obama delivers a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. [...]

The Obama White House efforts to address genocide is headed by Samantha Power, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” and worked briefly for Obama when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois.”

But that has largely been seen as an interventionist policy — something many Republicans and Democrats shy away from.

Considering her past comments about Israel and her perceived stance on the Middle Eastern country, it’s likely that her appointment will be contentious, drawing particular frustration from conservatives and those who believe that her policy stances will be damaging to the current Middle Eastern scenario.

Past comments do little to temper these fears. In her 2002 interview with Harry Kreisler, the director of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley Kreisler asked her the following:

“Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine – Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another starts looking like they might be moving toward genocide?”

Power’s response, in the eyes of those who support Israel, was problematic, as she claimed support for “external intervention” in the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma and said that it’s important to consider the “lesser evils” associated with getting involved in alleviating the issue.

She also, at one point in her commentary, claimed that Middle Eastern leaders — including Israel, it seems — are “destroying the lives of their own people.” Here is a portion of her response:

“What we need is a willingness to actually put something on the line…and putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import. It may more crucially mean…investing literally billions of dollars not in servicing Israeli military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine.

In investing billions of dollars it would probably take also to support, I think, what would to be, I think, a mammoth protection force…a meaningful military presence because it seems to me at this stage — and this is true of actual genocides as well and not just major human rights abuses which we’re seeing there — but is that you have to go in as if you’re serious. You have to put something on the line and unfortunately the position of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful, it’s a terrible thing to do, its fundamentally undemocratic.

But sadly, you know — we don’t just have a democracy here either — we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide, you know, our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. And there, it’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to people who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people, and by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat.” I mean, I do think in that sense, there’s — that both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible, and unfortunately, it does require external intervention which, very much like the Rwanda scenario — that thought experiment, of ‘if we had intervened early’ — any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism, but we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are just becoming ever more pronounced.”

DiscoverTheNetworks.org also makes some fascinating claims about some of Power’s other most recent statements. Here’s just a sampling:

In her 2004 review of Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival, Power agreed with many of Chomsky’s criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and expressed her own concerns about what she called the “sins of our allies in the war on terror,” lumping Israel together with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. She called Chomsky’s work “sobering and instructive.”

In 2005–06, Power worked as a foreign policy fellow in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama. In this role, she helped to spark and inform Obama’s interest in the deadly ethnic and tribal conflict of Darfur, Sudan.

In a 2007 interview, reported in FrontPage Magazine, Power said that America’s relationship with Israel “has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics.” The United States, she explained, had brought terrorist attacks upon itself by aping Israel’s violations of human rights.

Naturally, many will still wonder if her views surrounding Israel and the Middle East will impact how she manages her position at the U.N — and, more specifically — her treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Now for the tarnished Susan Rice.

Much is known about Susan Rice since her disgraceful appearance on five Sunday talk shows immediately following the attract on our consulate in Benghazi where she followed the fictitious party line of blaming a YouTube video for the murder of our Ambassador and three others.

It is worth considering the reason Obama appointed Rice for the position of National Security Advisor — a position not requiring Senate confirmation.

In an op-ed piece on Fox News.com by K.T. McFarland, who served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1985:

“Tuesday morning my reaction was why appoint Susan Rice as national security adviser? She will be a DISASTER.

Here's why: I spent seven years working for the most successful NSC adviser in history, Henry Kissinger.

I watched him conceive new policies, negotiate with foreign leaders, ride herd over the bureaucracy, massage the press and foreign policy intelligentsia and work behind the scenes with congressional leaders.

Susan Rice can’t do any of those things.

She has zero credibility with the media, on Capitol Hill, with the foreign policy community and foreign leaders, and is so badly tarnished by the Benghazi scandal that she walks into the job on Day One weak and wounded.

The most obvious problem is her disastrous performance on the Sunday talk shows peddling the administration’s fairy tale on Benghazi; when she was either complicit in the cover-up or incompetent.

Either she knew what really happened and deliberately lied to the American people or she was a mere actress who read the script she was given and didn’t know enough to question whether the words she spoke were accurate.

Rice might have been able to overcome the Benghazi debacle if she had other strong credentials, for example being a senior military officer like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft, or a respected academic like Henry Kissinger and Zbig Brzezinski. But Susan Rice is none of these.

When the spotlight was on her at the U.N. she was an ineffective ambassador who couldn't get Russia or China on board to deal with Syria or impose strict sanctions against Iran.

Not only did she fail to persuade those key members of the Security Council, she didn't know it until after the votes on sanctions were taken!

Benghazi was supposed to be her audition for the Secretary of State job -- go on all the Sunday talk shows and be the Obama administration’s primary spokesman.

She was so eager for the try out that she didn't stop and ask why they wanted her. The decision to send someone from the administration to appear on all five talk shows is a decision made at the highest levels of the White House.

It should have been the Secretary of State, or maybe Secretary of Defense, or CIA chief, or NSC Adviser or White House Chief of Staff – they were part of the decision process.

Susan Rice was the one senior administration official who knew nothing about events leading up to Benghazi and the attack itself, yet the White House asked her to go on those shows?

Alarm bells should have gone off in her head!

I checked their schedules and most of the other senior officials were in Washington and available that morning. It’s just that they were smarter than Rice and realized it was a poisoned chalice.

So what is Obama thinking with the Rice appointment? He’s doubling down and circling the wagons. He's rewarding Rice for being a loyal (if incompetent) soldier. He is hanging tough on the scandals and claiming that he knew nothing about them until he read about them in the papers.

On the other hand, maybe Obama's appointment of Rice is smarter than it looks on the surface.

By appointing Rice to the NSC job the president can invoke executive privilege and claim she doesn’t have to testify on Capitol Hill. And even if she does talk about Benghazi, at some point, she will certainly be a loyal soldier if she is now sitting just steps from the Oval Office.

But despite what the president might want the Benghazi isn't over, not by a long shot.”

The Obama administration is all about failing. If you have lied to the American people, overseen policies that resulted in the deaths of American citizens, created other policies that have undermined American law and interests, screwed up royally, and covered up your actions, then you are primed for position and promotion in the Obama administration.

The most recent example this is Susan Rice. Rice is, of course, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations who was wheeled out on September 15th of last year on five Sunday morning show to peddle a whopper of a lie. She said that they believed the terror attack in Benghazi (which they all knew at the time was a terror attack committed by forces linked to al Qaeda) was simply a “spontaneous demonstration as a result of what had transpired in Cairo,” and she explicitly blamed an obscure YouTube video. That was a lie, she knew it was a lie, everyone around her knew it was a lie, and she said it anyway.

Now she’s getting rewarded with a big promotion to National Security Adviser. That gig requires no Senate confirmation, so she’s in. Great work if you can get it.

Taking her place at the U.N. will be Samantha Power, the wife of Obama’s radical regulatory czar Cass Sunstein. Power is the one who came up with the basis for our disastrous intervention in Libya — which ultimately led to the Benghazi attack and the deaths of those four brave Americans. Called “Responsibility to Protect,” Power’s doctrine argues that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to intervene anywhere there is a slaughter or the potential of slaughter (whether our strategic interests are involved or not). She successfully argued R2P and Obama led the NATO operation that helped to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi (who had not initiated an assault against his people). Qaddafi fell, was killed, and then we went on a social engineering experiment that led to the outpost in Benghazi and gunrunning out of Libya to Syria.

This brings us to Syria. If Power’s “R2P” were applied consistently, then Obama should have intervened there 2 years ago, when Assad’s slaughter began. There is still no intervention there, 70,000 to 80,000 lives later. I’m not arguing for intervention — in fact, I don’t think we should be injecting ourselves in that Arab civil war. But there is no consistency in policy: intervene in Libya where there was no slaughter, but don’t intervene in Syria where there is an actual slaughter. Whatever exists of an Obama “doctrine” (which is quite a mess and is resulting in the rise of anti-American regimes and forces around the world) is Samantha Power’s worldview. Lord help us, now she’s going to be our U.N. Ambassador. Failing upward!

Not to mention Victoria Nuland, who led the charge in demanding the edits to the Benghazi “talking points” documents that protected “her building’s leadership.” She’s now being promoted to Assistant Secretary of State.

Top IRS officials who oversaw the targeting of conservative and patriot groups remain in their jobs, and those who aren’t still employed by the IRS were scheduled to leave and retire anyway. Lois Lerner, a major villain in this scandal, is on “administrative leave” while still drawing her $177,000 salary. Paid by you. (You may want to work a little harder.)

And don’t forget that several of the officials overseeing Fast and Furious in Arizona — which resulted in the deaths of two brave Americans — were merely shuffled around to different jobs. Not fired, not held accountable, just moved around.

If you suck at your job and are willing to lie through your teeth, I’ve got good news. In this horrendous Obama Economy, you can always get a job among your fellow liars in the Obama administration. You might even get promoted.

On an interesting note it appears that President Obama is prone to surround himself with weak and incompetent women who are devoted to him and his ideology. We have Susan Rice a nobody when it comes for foreign policy and national security. Then there is Samantha Power an Irish political operative, who will be, no doubt, our next Ambassador the United Nations. This is really a dead end job that usually results in a book deal and fairly good speaking fees. Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security has been as dreadful as she was as governor of Arizona. For the life of me I can’t understand why he picked her. She did not deliver Arizona to Obama in 2008. Kathleen Sebelius has been a joke as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Her job was just saved when a federal judge told her to reverse course — a 10-year-old girl dying from cystic fibrosis should be added to the adult lung transplant list. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has been an overbearing greenie now accused using phony e-mail accounts associated with the pseudonym Richard Windsor to take online training programs on subjects including ethics, whistleblowers and records preservation. The EPA is now under investigation for targeting conservative groups. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who submitted her letter of resignation last week, was in the pocket of the unions and brought the action against Boeing for moving to South Carolina. Now Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is being considered as her replacement.

And of course there is his mentor and power behind the throne Valerie Jarrett. President Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden three times before saying yes, because he got cold feet about the possible political harm to himself if the mission failed. Instead of listening to advisors from the U.S. military, Defense, or even State, Obama was acting on the advice of White House politico and close friend Valerie Jarrett.

This account comes from Richard Miniter's upcoming book “Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors who Decide for Him.” Miniter has written six books on the war on terror. He is relying on an unnamed source within the U.S. military Joint Special Operations Command who was directly involved in the operation and planning of the Osama bin Laden kill mission.

Is the story credible? According to Edward Klein, a reporter once asked Obama if he ran every decision by Jarrett. Obama answered, "Yep. Absolutely."

Edward Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor of the New York Times Magazine for many years, describes Jarrett as "ground zero in the Obama operation, the first couple's friend and Consigliere." Klein -- who claims he used a minimum of two sources for each assertion in his book on the Obama presidency, The Amateur -- writes in detail about Jarrett opposing the raid on bin Laden. She told Obama not to take the political risk. Klein thought Obama ignored Jarrett's advice. Miniter tells us he listened to her, three times telling Special Operations not to take the risk to go after bin Laden.

We need to understand the role Valerie Jarrett plays in Obama's private and political life.

"If it wasn't for Valerie Jarrett, there'd be no Barack Obama to complain about," starts Klein's chapter on Jarrett. He quotes Michelle Obama on Jarrett's influence over her husband: "She knows the buttons, the soft spots, the history, the context."

No one outside Michelle has the access or power over Obama's decision-making like Jarrett does. Here's an odd little fact that gives some insight into what kind of president Obama is: Michelle, Michelle's mother, and Valerie, and only a few others in Washington, are allowed to call Barack by his first name. After work, Jarrett joins Obama at night in the Family Quarters, where she dines often with the First Family. She goes on vacation with them.

Jarrett's title is the weird mouthful "Assistant to the President for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs." She is the gatekeeper, but she is also much more than that. She occupies Karl Rove's and Hillary's old office and has an all-access pass to meetings. She shows up at the National Security Council, at meetings on the economy and budget. She stays behind to advise Obama on what to think and do Obama uses her as his left-wing conscience. Klein's sources describe how at each pressing issue, Obama turns to ask her, "What do you think the right thing to do is?" As president, he likes to have her next to him "as the voice of authentic blackness in a White House that is staffed largely by whites."

A longtime friend told Klein that Jarrett is the "eyes, ears and nose" of the Obamas. She tells them whom to trust, who is saying what, whom to see at home and abroad. Michelle wants her there: "I told her it would give me a sense of comfort to know that (Barack) had somebody like her there by his side." As Obama told the New York Times, "Valerie is one of my oldest friends. I trust her completely."

To understand why Obama relies so heavily on Jarrett, we must remember the president's identity crisis as a black man, which is the main subject of his memoir, Dreams from My Father. Valerie Jarrett's adoption of the Obamas as her friends and protégés in Chicago's upper-crust black society was one of the greatest things that ever happened to Obama. Until becoming a community organizer, Obama tells us he felt himself to be an inauthentic American black. Nothing in his life helped him understand or fit into the American black community.

Within a few weeks of Obama's birth, conceived out of wedlock as he was, his mother moved away to a different college, leaving Obama's African birth father behind in Honolulu.  There may have been a shotgun wedding or not — in the memoir, Obama says he is not sure. The only time Barack set eyes on his father was a brief visit when he was ten. Our president lived with his white mother, then with her and her Indonesian husband in Indonesia from age six to ten. He was so unhappy that he chose to leave his mother and live with his white grandparents back in America. Obama's America was the tolerant, wealthy American world of Honolulu's top prep school.

His only black experience was his grandfather's creepy old friend, Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying Communist and self-disclosed pederast, who was Obama's voice of authentic blackness. One result of this lonely and unhappy childhood as a mixed-race child was Barack Obama's envy problem. The key to understanding Jarrett's power over the president is that Obama didn't just envy people with normal parents and loving, successful fathers. He envied American blacks, especially those who grew up in intact black families, knowing who they were, comfortable in their black skin.

Valerie Jarrett reflects Obama in many ways. Like himself, Valerie looks more white than black. Her mother had three white grandparents, and her father was black. Like Obama, she lived in the Muslim world for part of her childhood, when her father practiced medicine in Iran. Like Obama, she is a committed leftist. But there are crucial differences. Her father was not a drunk Kenyan polygamist like Obama's, but a famous pathologist and geneticist. Her mother was not a leftist expatriate like Obama's, but a distinguished psychologist. Valerie married into Chicago's black elite, the top rung of African-American society. She went to Stanford, got a law degree from Michigan, and became Mayor Richard Daley's deputy chief of staff, "the public black face" of his administration.

When Valerie Jarrett hired Michelle to work for Daley and befriended her, the Obamas gained access to the exclusive world of upper-class black Chicago politics. Valerie knew everyone whom it was important to know in black and Jewish money circles. She gave Barack entrée and legitimacy. She financed and promoted his ambitions for national office.

Obama finally belonged. Not that Jarrett's record in Chicago was anything to be proud of. Jarrett was known for her corruption and incompetence. Daley finally had to fire her after a scandal erupted over her role in misuse of public funds in the city's substandard public housing. She went on to become CEO of Habitat Executive Services, pulling down $300,000 in salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation. Again, she managed a housing complex that was seized by government inspectors for slum conditions. The scandal didn't matter to Obama. The sordid corruption was all part of Jarrett's Chicago success story.

Every insider in Chicago told Klein the same thing: Jarrett has no qualifications to be the principal advisor to the president of the United States. She doesn't understand how Washington works, how relations with Congress work, how the federal process works. She doesn't understand how the economy works, how the military works, how national security works. But she understands how Obama works and Chicago politics.

The president turns to Valerie Jarrett for definitive advice on all these issues. She has given him terrible advice over and over, and still he turns to her.

Her true job is to make Obama feel proud of himself. When Obama looks at Jarrett, he sees himself as whole and good and real. He is no longer the fake black, the fatherless kid flailing around in a white world, tortured by the unfairness of it all. She fills the emptiness at the core of his identity. She admires and adores him. Jarrett told New Yorker editor David Remnick that the president is "just too talented to do what ordinary people do." And the icing on the cake —she shares his left-wing politics that project unfairness out onto white America.

Obama relies on Jarrett to create the White House bubble he likes to live in, where his narcissism is stroked and his desire to do the big, left-wing thing is encouraged. Jarrett is the doorman. She runs access to the president. As Klein puts it, she guards him from meeting with "critics and complainers who might deflate his ego." No one gets past Jarrett who has an incompatible point of view.

Jarrett pushed ObamaCare. At the beginning of Obama's presidency, there was pressure on Obama to focus on the economic crisis. Rahm Emanuel advised a small, bipartisan health care reform with popular items such as coverage for young adults — to get it passed quickly and focus on the country's money problems. Jarrett urged the president to be true to his left-wing agenda. She was all for having Reid-Pelosi create the ObamaCare assault on the American health system and ramming it through on a one-party vote, using Chicago-style politics, while Obama crossed the country doing what he does best: make speeches. Obama liked Jarrett's idea. Emanuel is now out of the White House.

Jarrett pushed the Solyndra fiasco. Jarrett promoted Solyndra because one of her richest Chicago connections, billionaire George Kaiser, a top Obama bundler, had a 35% share in Solyndra. Kaiser visited the White House sixteen times.

Larry Summers, the director of the president's National Economic Council, warned Obama that the federal government should not get involved in venture capital of any sort. Summers understood that crony capitalism sabotages economic growth. Huge government funding distorts and destroys whatever market segment it touches, replacing economic decisions with political ones.

A member of Obama's finance committee warned the president that Solyndra was going bankrupt. But it is Obama and Valerie who see eye to eye, and they saw the value to Obama of rewarding his political cronies. It worked fine in Chicago. Larry Summers is now out of the White House.

Jarrett pushed Obama to take on the Catholic Church over contraception, arguing that it would appeal to single women (she was right) and that religious freedom isn't important (she was wrong). Bill Daley, who had replaced Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff, argued against Obama pushing contraception on the Church and invited Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan of New York to meet with a displeased Obama, who didn't appreciate hearing from the Church. Daley is now out of the White House.

Valerie Jarrett is the most powerful woman in Washington. She has guided the president's decisions on health care, the budget, the stimulus, the deficit, foreign affairs.

So when Jarrett told Obama that the mission to kill bin Laden was too politically risky, and to play it safe, it is entirely plausible to believe that the president listened to her. It is consistent with everything we know about Obama's dependence on her. According to Miniter's source in the U.S. Military Joint Special Operations Command, Obama listened to her for four months, dithering and deciding no the first three times the military told him that the time to get bin Laden was now.

The only possible exception to Obama’s proclivity for women would be Hillary Clinton who would stab him in the back when she gets the chance. No doubt her appointment as Secretary of State was a payback to Bill Clinton for supporting him in 2008. But after four years of Obama’s feckless, confused, and misguided foreign policy Ms. Clinton decide to bail out as she needed four years for the public to forget she was associated with Obama. It’s a wonder Ms. Clinton lasted as long as she did with the specter of Valerie Jarrett hanging over her head.

I can’t help but wondering if Obama’s proclivity to surround himself with women is due to his lack of a father figure in his youth and being raised by a domineering, radical left-wing mother along with his marriage to a strong and equally domineering wife along with having two very needful daughters. Daughters who seem to get whatever they desire and their mother wants from a weak and ineffective father. The question to ask is Valerie Jarrett his advisor or his mother?

Don’t Look for a Smoking Gun in the Oval Office

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions”. — Saul Alinsky. Rules for Radicals, Rule No. 12

In January 1942 a group of high ranking Nazi officials held a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The purpose of the conference was to inform administrative leaders of Nazi departments responsible for various policies relating to Jews that Reinhard Heydrich had been appointed as the chief executor of the "Final solution to the Jewish question". In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan for the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe and French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) to German-occupied areas in eastern Europe, and the use of the Jews fit for labor on road-building projects, in the course of which they would eventually die according to the text of the “Wannsee Protocol”, the only extant copy of the minutes of the meeting. Instead, as Soviet and Allied forces gradually pushed back the German lines, most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.

The Wannsee Conference lasted only about ninety minutes, and for most of its participants it was one meeting among many in a busy week. The enormous importance which has been attached to the conference by postwar writers was not evident to most of its participants at the time. Heydrich did not call the meeting to make fundamental new decisions on the Jewish question. Massive killings of Jews in the conquered territories in the Soviet Union and Poland were ongoing and new extermination camps were in preparation at the time of the conference. They knew that in this case the decision had already been made, and that Heydrich was there as Himmler's emissary to tell them about it. Nor did the conference engage in detailed logistical planning. It could hardly do so in the absence of a representative of the Transport Ministry or the German Railways.

German historian Peter Longerich has written that one motive for Heydrich's calling the conference was to ensure that all the leading ministries were accomplices in his plan.

“From Heydrich’s point of view", he writes, "the main purposes of the conference were, firstly, to establish the overall control of the deportation programme by the RSHA over a number of important Reich authorities and thereby, secondly, to make the top representatives of the ministerial bureaucracy into accomplices and accessories to, and co-responsible for, the plan he was pursuing. To reiterate: the plan was to exile all Jews in the present and future areas under German rule to Eastern Europe, where they were to be exposed to extraordinarily harsh living conditions and fatally exhausted or murdered. Heydrich had pursued this deportation plan since the beginning of 1941; in July 1941, Göring had given him the authority to execute it; and with the first deportation of Jews from central Europe in October, the first stage in that pan-European design had been realized. With his first invitation to the conference, Heydrich had waited until the second wave of deportations to Riga, Minsk and Kovno had already begun. He clearly wanted to present the representatives of the supreme Reich authorities with a fait accompli.”

Adolf Eichmann recorded that Heydrich was pleased with the course of the meeting. He "gave expression to his great satisfaction", and allowed himself a glass of cognac, although he rarely drank. He "had expected considerable stumbling blocks and difficulties", Eichmann recalled, but instead he had found "an atmosphere not only of agreement on the part of the participants, but more than that, one could feel an agreement which had assumed a form which had not been expected".

At the conclusion of the meeting Heydrich gave Eichmann firm instructions about what was to appear in the minutes. They were not to be verbatim: Eichmann would "clean them up" so that nothing too explicit appeared in them. He said at his trial: "How shall I put it — certain over-plain talk and jargon expressions had to be rendered into office language by me". As a result, the last twenty minutes of the meeting, in which, as Eichmann recalled, words like "liquidation" and "extermination" were freely used, were summed up in one bland sentence: "In conclusion the different types of possible solutions were discussed". Thus the minutes must be read in conjunction with Eichmann's testimony to get as near as is possible to a full account of what took place.

At no point in these minutes or any other documents from the Third Reich will you find the name of Adolph Hitler mention in conjunction with the final solution of the extermination of Jews, Slavs, or anyone else. The Nazi bureaucracy gave him absolute plausible deniability and the only references to Hitler’s feelings about Jews, Slavs, and other Untermensch is to read Mein Kampf. Even to this day Holocaust deniers claim that the extermination of six million Jews and five million Russians, Poles, and other Slavs never took place. They will claim that since edicts from Hitler were ever found that the so-called Holocaust was nothing more than mere bureaucratic babbling. They claim than in the top-down dictatorial nature of the Third Reich no such program could have ever taken place without Hitler’s knowledge and approval.

What is overlooked is that every Nazi knew Hitler’s feelings on Jews, Race and Lebensraum. It was spelled out clearly in Mein Kampf. They did not have to ask what der Führer wanted to do about the Jews — they knew and Hitler knew they knew.

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:

“If the National Socialist movement really wants to be consecrated by history with a great mission for our nation, it must be permeated by knowledge and filled with pain at our true situation in this world; boldly and conscious of its goal, it must take up the struggle against the aimlessness and incompetence which have hitherto guided our German nation in the line of foreign affairs. Then, without consideration of 'traditions' and prejudices, it must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.”

As the Obama administration descends into a whirlpool of scandals, a race has begun among Congressional committees and news organizations to find the proverbial smoking gun — the document that will link President Obama directly to the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, or to the Justice Department's unprecedented legal actions against the Associated Press and Fox News reporter James Rosen, or to the Pentagon's ghastly failure to launch a rescue mission when our consulate in Benghazi came under attack last September.

Study history, and you will understand why no such document is ever likely to be found: That just isn't how these things work. Very few people are aware of this, but as I stated above there is no document — not one — linking Adolf Hitler to the Holocaust. Why not? Because Hitler didn't need to sign a document ordering the slaughter of six million Jews. All he needed to do was to demonize his enemy in speeches at the Reichstag, on the radio, and from one end of Germany to the other — then hire thugs like Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, and Josef Goebbels. They knew what der Fuhrer wanted, and der Fuhrer knew he could trust his henchman to get the job done — no matter how, no matter what may be the law — and to not bother him with the gory details.

Nowhere in this blog post will I suggest, or even imply, that President Obama plans the mass murder of his opponents the way Hitler murdered his. That's absurd. Iam merely pointing out that President Obama has been going about the business of demonizing his political enemies, and then hiring thugs to destroy them without regard to the law, in precisely the same way that Hitler and his fascists did it in Germany. This isn't an accusation; it's an observation. After it’s the Chicago and Saul Alinsky way — direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.

Look at the record: From the moment he took office in January 2009, President Obama has spoken before Congress, on television, and at countless rallies across the country describing his political opponents in terms we haven't seen before in the United States. Time and again he's insisted that Republicans aren't merely wrong, but evil. Hardly a week goes by without yet another sneering comment about "millionaires and billionaires" — by which he means those men and women who actually built the businesses that created jobs for all the rest of us, not the ones he and the First Lady party with in Hollywood and on Martha's Vineyard.

His rhetoric heated up fast after the Tea Party movement gave the GOP enough oomph to win back the House of Representatives in 2010, and as the president geared up for the 2012 election. He urged Latino voters to help him "punish our enemies and reward our friends." He told his supporters at one rally to think of voting for him as "an act of revenge." Did you see the president at that Georgetown University forum on the future of Medicare when he trashed Paul Ryan's own plan, then went out of his way to publicly insult Ryan, while the Congressman himself was sitting in the front row too stunned — and too decent and respectful of the presidency — to respond in kind? Do you remember that television campaign ad describing Mitt Romney — one of the most capable, financially astute, thoroughly decent men who ever graced public life — as "not one of us"?

And while demonizing his political enemies, what sort of people did the president appoint to key jobs in his administration? His attorney general is Eric Holder, a sleazy Democratic operative who not only called the American people "cowards" for their approach to racial issues — this after the majority of us elected a black president — but who played a crucial role as deputy attorney general in the scandalous and still-uninvestigated pardon of Marc Rich in the Clinton administration's dying hours. The national security advisor is Thomas Donilon, another Democratic Party operative who got rich while serving as executive vice president for law and policy at Fannie Mae. And who was our secretary of state when the consulate in Benghazi came under attack? The same Hillary Clinton who, as the wife of Arkansas' up-and-coming governor, made an overnight $100,000 killing by trading cattle futures — a feat no professional cattle-futures trader has ever been able to explain, or duplicate.

No one who's spent time in our nation's capital comes away with a romantic view of party politics and the people who do this for a living; the Saint-Per-Square-Mile ratio in Washington has always been fairly low. But David Axelrod and David Plouffe? Have you ever come across two Chicago-style, hardball-playing creeps like these clowns? They make Richard Nixon's two White House thugs, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, look like choir boys.

Demonize your political enemies, then hire people like these, and the result is precisely what happened in Germany after 1933 and what's happening now to us: a kind of bureaucratic coup d'etat in which the legitimately elected government overturns the established relationship between the individual and the State and replaces it with something very different; a relationship that no one voted for, saw coming, or imagined could happen so quickly and so quietly.

Obama is great at giving flowering speeches at universities, political rallies, and even high schools. He aims his remarks at the young and impressionable who have very little knowledge of the Constitution or our history. They see him as a glamorous and charismatic figure — a figure that fills their heads with platitudes and failed progressive gobbledygook that would turn Woodrow Wilson’s face red. He has a cadre of zealots who are absolutely loyal to him no matter what the facts say otherwise. He has a Hollywood following that would make Leni Riefenstahl green with envy. Even his first nomination event in Denver at Invesco Field was reminiscent of Triumph des Willens as we were introduced to the anointed one. All that was missing was were the lonely man looking out the window of the Fokker tri-motor as it’s shadow passes over the assembled crowd and the torchlight parades.

He does not have to issue orders or directives to his sycophantic minions to do his bidding. All he has to do is make an Alinsky-like speech and they will march out like robots to do what they believe to be his bidding. Like Hitler in the 30s motivation is his chief weapon.

This is the United States in 2013, not Germany in 1933, and there's no real possibility that President Obama will get away with his attempted coup d'etat. We have something called a Constitution that separates the powers of government — when it works. There are members of Congress in both parties who are appalled by what the president has been doing, and even a few liberal news organizations are starting to wake up. But while the hunt for some document that would be the smoking gun will be entertaining — and while it would be nice to see a special prosecutor appointed who'd throw at least a few members of this administration who've perjured themselves before Congress into prison.

Education is probably more important than prosecution. Right now, the best use of their time and energy would be to expose the Obama administration's wrongdoings; to illuminate for Americans just what's been going on in Washington and to show voters — especially young voters — what sort of country we'd be living in if the president had gotten away with this. Never before have our politicians and our news organizations had a better opportunity to demonstrate just what happens when we vote carelessly, elect a zealot who appoints operatives with no sense of honor or comprehension of right-and-wrong, then parties with rock stars while his coup d'etat unfolds.

Yes, I realize that throughout this essay I've used an analogy that some people will find offensive or even repugnant. But I've done this deliberately, because this is no time to hold back or to mince words. And if the president doesn't like being compared to a Nazi — he should stop acting like one.

Incompetence or Criminality?

“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse." — James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Constitutional Convention, December 2, 1829.

Today the Washington Post reported that Justice Department obtained a portfolio of information about a Fox News correspondent's conversations and visits as part of an investigation into a possible leak in the latest example of the government seizing records of journalists.

The information follows the charge that the department secretly obtained two months of phone records from Associated Press journalists as part of a separate leak probe.

In the case involving Fox News' James Rosen, a government adviser was accused of leaking information after a 2009 story was published online which said North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test.

The Post reported that federal investigators, in pursuing the case, obtained email records from Rosen — but also records of his visits to the State Department headquarters by tracking security-badge information. According to the article, a court affidavit said they used the badge records to log his visits as well as the movements of the adviser, Stephen Jim-Woo Kim.

An FBI agent said in the affidavit that the visits suggested a "face-to-face" meeting.

The documents reportedly show investigators seized two days of Rosen's personal emails, including exchanges with Kim, as well as two months of phone records from Kim's office.

In the documents, FBI agent Reginald Reyes described in detail how Kim and Rosen moved in and out of the State Department headquarters at 2201 C St. NW a few hours before the story was published on June 11, 2009.

“Mr. Kim departed the States Department at or around 12:02 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:03 p.m.,” Reyes wrote. Next, the agent said, “Mr. Kim returned to the State Department at or around 12:26 p.m. followed shortly thereafter by the reporter at or around 12:30 p.m.”

The activity, Reyes wrote in an affidavit, suggested a “face-to-face” meeting between the two men. “Within a few hours after those nearly simultaneous exits and entries at Department of State, the June 2009 article was published on the Internet,” he wrote.

The court documents don’t name Rosen, but his identity was confirmed by several officials, and he is the author of the article at the center of the investigation. Rosen and a spokeswoman for Fox News did not return phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

The Post suggested that unlike the AP, Fox News was the likely target of the investigation.

Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, “at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target....

Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.

[U.S. Attorney Ronald] Machen’s office said in a statement that it is limited in commenting on an open case, but that the government “exhausted all reasonable non-media alternatives for collecting the evidence” before seeking a search warrant.

However, it remains an open question whether it’s ever illegal, given the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so.

The question now is whether other journalists will see Obama's Justice Department spying on Fox News as objectionable as spying on the Associated Press.

AP President Gary Pruitt said on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday that the AP records grab was not only unconstitutional but damaging to the operation of the press.

"It will hurt," he said. "We're already seeing some impact. Officials are saying they're reluctant to talk."

This is just one more layer of the onion that is being revealed as investigations into the incompetence or criminality of the actions of the Obama administration. The Benghazi terrorist attack the killed Ambassador Chris Stevens along with Sean Smith, Tyron Woods, and Glen Doherty; the escalating scandal of the IRS targeting conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax exemption while fast-tracking left-wing organizations like MoveOn.org and Organizing for Action (formerly Organizing for America); and the growing scandal of the Justice Department’s snooping on reporters working for AP and Fox News.

This latest revelation of the Justice Department’s actions against James Rosen does not merely put a chill on the First Amendment — it puts in a deep freeze. History tells that for a tyrant to succeeded they must muzzle a free press. The latest revealed actions of Eric Holder’s Justice Department mirrors the actions of the Argentinian Junta in the 1980s and how the Mexican drug cartels deal with investigative journalists. The message has gone out to the press — don’t mess with the Obama administration. This is pure Nixonian.

Peter Morici writes on Fox News — Obama is Failing as CEO of America, Inc.

“CEOs of large organizations all face the same problem – driving their agendas in organizations too diverse and geographically dispersed to manage directly.

They hire competent managers for their units, set goals and establish clear metrics for evaluating performance. As in politics, competition in business is tough, and CEOs must set ethical boundaries for their managers’ conduct.

In all this, the CEO’s personal conduct is critical.

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama flaunted American constitutional tradition by pushing through major social legislation, ObamaCare, without a bipartisan compromise and consensus. And he relied on a legislative sleight of hand to pass the Senate.

Simply, Mr. Obama’s hard left agenda requires him to treat the Constitution and Congress as mere inconveniences – expediency is his ethical standard.

For example, unable to obtain Congressional ascent, even among moderate Democrats, for limits on CO2 emissions and other environmental goals, the EPA – at his public behest – has written regulations imposing new and onerous requirements on business.

The Obama Credo of Management: We’ll do as we please, stop us if you can.

His failure as a CEO, now with grave political consequences, was to impose no limits on managers’ behavior and implement adequate controls – mechanisms for the CEO to monitor the performance of units and head off emerging threats to the survival of the organization. Regarding the latter, of paramount importance is to insulate the president from any fallout from their actions.

Cabinet secretaries and agency heads took their cues from the boss – at State, Justice and the IRS senior management would have had us believe they were unaware of what was happening in Benghazi, with the Associated Press, or at the Cincinnati Office of the IRS. And the president only learns about many problems when reported in the news?

Mr. Obama simply has been too busy giving speeches, raising money, and trying to turn every event to political advantage to keep tabs on his managers, as any good CEOs would do.”

…

“Prior to his presidency, Americans never observed Mr. Obama running anything, other than a campaign. He had not been a governor or a congressional committee chair. In military terms, we made him a five star general before even serving as a lieutenant.

By his own actions, he is arrogantly ambitions but sadly incompetent. He has corrupted the foundations of our Republic, and for that he gets a failing grade.”

I think Mr. Morici is much too soft on Obama. Like, Nixon in Watergate, the actions of the Obama administration border on criminal — if not being outright a violation of the Constitution they have sworn to defend.

It has yet to be proven that Obama ordered the IRS to discriminate against tea-party, pro-life, or Jewish groups opposed to his agenda (though why anyone should take his word for it is beyond me). And his outrage now — however convenient — is appreciated. But when people he views as his “enemies” complained about a politicized IRS, what did he do? Nothing.

Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review On Line:

“Imagine for a moment if black civil-rights organizations, gay groups, or teachers’ unions loudly complained to members of Congress and the press that the IRS was discriminating against them. How long would it take for the White House to investigate? Answer honestly: Minutes? Hours? Okay, maybe days if there was an attack on one of our embassies that the administration was busy ignoring. Obviously, it would take longer for Obama to actually get to the bottom of the accusations and, if they’re true, punish those responsible. But you can be sure that the moment he heard credible allegations of political persecution of liberal groups — outfits with “progressive” or “civil rights” in their names — he would have moved heaven and earth to make things right.

But when such allegations came from the right, the response from the president — and from a press corps that until recently acted like a king’s guard — ranged from smirks and eye-rolling to flat-out lies and virtual applause.

For 27 months, groups with such terms as “tea party” or “patriot” in their names were singled out for deeply intrusive and expensive scrutiny, while groups flying the “progressive” banner sailed through. Drew Ryun gave up trying to get IRS approval for a free-market organization after 17 months of bureaucratic stonewalling. But when he applied for approval of an organization called “Greenhouse Solutions,” he got the go-ahead in three weeks.”

…

“He’s made it clear that people who disagree with him are fevered, illegitimate, weird, creepy, dangerous, stupid, confused, ignorant, or some other adjective you might assign to a revamped version of the Seven Dwarfs. He’s explained that he doesn’t mind “cleaning up after” Republicans but he doesn’t want to hear “a lot of talking” from them. The time for democratic debate is always behind us with an administration that began with the mission not to let a crisis go to waste, for as Obama said in his second inaugural address, “Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.”

Moreover, President Obama often insists we live in a country where the “government is us,” where there’s no need to fear tyranny “around the corner” because we could never be tyrannical against ourselves.”

…

“In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama lamented that the American people couldn’t function more like the military. Soldiers aren’t “consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach.” Never mind that we have a military to keep us free, not to be a role model. Translation: I wish Americans would fall in line and follow orders.”

Since the beginning of May I have heard nothing but spin from the White House — mainly through Obama’s mouthpiece Jay Carney. Each day’s spin seems to contradict the previous day’s spin as more and more documents are revealed. I keep harkening back to the Watergate hearings of 1973 as the Nixon White House spin was faster than a child’s spinning top. Eventually in one of Nixon’s final press conferences held on November 18, 1973 he declared “I’m no crook.”

In the famous question of Howard Baker of the Watergate Committee — “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

Those simple questions are at the heart of the scandals buffeting the White House, and they were only obscured by White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, appearing on the Sunday talk shows to represent the administration. Asked by Fox News' Chris Wallace where the president was in the aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, Pfeiffer dodged, only saying he was "kept up to date throughout the day." When pressed if he was being briefed in the Situation Room, Pfeiffer responded that it was an "irrelevant fact"—a formulation he used on several other shows to deflect scrutiny. On all the Sunday shows, Pfeiffer's party line on the IRS scandal is that it would be more problematic if the president knew about the agency's problems and interfered, raising the perception of meddling.

That argument is starting to fray, as well. The Wall Street Journal reported today that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was aware of the IRS wrongdoing on the week of April 22—nearly three weeks before the agency acknowledged its mistakes. It's hard to believe Obama's chief counsel was aware of what happened without informing at least the president's senior staff. Adding to the confusion, the White House hasn't allowed Ruemmler to be interviewed to add clarity to the timeline.

At last Thursday's press conference, Obama chose his words about the IRS scandal very carefully. "I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press." Even though he was asked about the overall malfeasance, he specifically said he didn't know about the report. That parsing alone raises questions about the level of candor coming from the White House.

Swamped in controversies, President Obama and his slow-footed team are essentially telling the American public, “We’re not crooked. We’re just incompetent.”

The IRS targeting conservatives, the Justice Department snooping at The Associated Press and Fox News, the State Department injecting politics into Benghazi, the military covering up sexual assaults, and the Department of Veterans Affairs leaving heroes in health care limbo — each of these so-called scandals share two traits.

First, there is some element of “spin," the cynical art of telling just enough of the truth to avoid political embarrassment. Obfuscation and demagogy, the dirty tools of Chicago style political quackery that Obama pledged to purge from Washington, enjoy top-shelf status at his White House.

Second, there is almost comical bungling. While denying involvement in high crimes and misdemeanors, the Obama administration appears to be pleading guilty to lesser crimes of bureaucratic incompetence. But that is an unsustainable position for a president who wants Americans to believe again in the power and grace of good government, particularly as it relates to the implementation of ObamaCare.

• IRS agents targeted conservatives. Their bosses lied about it for months.
• Justice Department investigators violated internal guidelines to secretly spy on The Associated Press and James Rosen of Fox News.
• White House and State Department officials minimizing if not denying their role in shaping initial explanations for the Benghazi attack.
• Military officers assigned to sexual assault prevention units are charged with sexual battery. The Pentagon’s own study finds that 26,000 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2012. It’s not a new problem.
• Despite a 40 percent increase in funding, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs cannot ease a backlog of cases. The typical wounded warrior waits more than 300 days for action on a claim. In major cities, the wait can be 642 days.
• The administration’s role (Vice President Joe Biden) in outing SEAL Team 6 as the unit that got bin Laden contributing to Taliban’s setting a trap from Extortion 17 in Afghanistan

The backdrop to this parade of buffoonery is a decades-long decline in the public’s faith in government, a trend continued under Obama. Restoring the public’s trust in his governance is the only way Obama can survive the controversies with his agenda and legacy intact.

If Obama wants to restore any degree of trust in his administration here are the steps he must take — and soon:

Appoint a bipartisan oversight board to oversee the implementation of ObamaCare. There is no way around the fact that a vast majority of voters will not trust the IRS to implement the greatest piece of social legislation in decades. Before the tempests, ObamaCare is unpopular and largely misunderstood by most Americans. The law’s success hinges on the government recruiting young adults into insurance pools. And polls show young adults are the least likely to trust government.

Layer the White House communication team with experienced crisis managers. Obama needs to realize that the dedicated public servants in the West Wing are not getting the job done. He needs people with integrity, not sycophantic spin doctors like Ben Holder and Jay Carney.

Apologize to the AP and Fox News for the egregious and unconstitutional actions of the Justice Department and announce a new policy for leaks investigations. The White House needs to punish people who leak classified information that endangers national security. But the scope of the snooping at AP combined with Obama's unprecedented zeal for leaks investigations raises doubts about his commitment to transparency and to an unfettered media. He has pursued more such cases than all previous administration combined, according to the Washington Post. It is also advisable to ask for Eric Holder’s resignation. Again, this is a matter of trust in our law enforcement agencies.

Appoint a special prosecutor on the IRS. The last thing the country needs is another subpoena-powered fishing expedition like the Valarie Plame inquiries. But we need a special prosecutor with a defined mission to investigate the actions and motives of IRS agents and their superiors. Is there a better way to restore the agency’s integrity? The administration investigating itself will not lift the cloud from Obama’s White House.

A new story from The American Spectator that has been gaining steam begins with this startling intro:

• Is President Obama directly implicated in the IRS scandal?
• Is the White House Visitors Log the trail to the smoking gun?
• The stunning questions are raised by the following set of new facts.

The story focuses on Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (i.e. the union for IRS employees), and her meeting with President Obama on March 31, 2010 — one day before the IRS started targeting conservative groups.

Reset the narrative and public expectations with a major speech on trust. Obama has spoken eloquently and convincingly about this issue. If his next address included painful solutions such as the ones above, he might restore the public’s audacity to hope.

These are actions Obama can take, but I doubt he will do any of them. It’s just not in his nature. Also, Congress needs to continue to investigate the Benghazi and Justice Department’s actions.

With this latest revelation of the Justice Department’s targeting of Fox News and James Rosen the layers of the opinion are peeling off faster than the Obama administration can sustain the obfuscation and spin. Soon Jay Carney will get very dizzy and fall down.

This is becoming a great time for honest journalists and bloggers. Each day as a new layer of the proverbial onion is revealed they have so much to report and opine on it’s hard for them to keep up. This is a far cry from 2008 when king Obama was anointed by the mainstream media.

In the famous utterance of Henry II when referring to Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Obama is asking the same when it comes to the honest press.