Senate The 2nd Term of the Obama Administration: Facts, Opinions, and Discussions

Ok, so Romney was actually completely right about Benghazi in the second debate. Candy Crowley was wrong and later "kinda" admitted it. President Obama was being completely disingenuous when he referred to the rose garden speech. I've read the speech--he doesn't say what he claimed in the debate. Morever, for the sake of argument--if he did "mean" what he claimed--he shifted position almost immediately after the speech blaming a spontaneous protest for the attack repeatedly on several shows over the course of a few weeks.

That's reality.

But that doesn't get near the more disturbing fact that he has never explained HIMSELF with regard to the Benghazi incident--he has always avoided questions about what he knew, when he knew it, and what HE did.

Because the facts so far suggest he was informed about the attack and then did pretty much nothing--he went to bed.

But I get the impression that you'd only care about this if he was a Republican.

 

Ok, so this kind of desperate denial isn't what "reality" means. Just repeating a lie over and over again doesn't make it true. Romney was only completely right if you're talking about political leanings. The truth is that he made a false claim, either through ignorance or shameless deception.

Yes, he does. That's why Crowley supported his claim. Unless you intend to argue that he was working her like a puppet through some kind of mind control, you seem unable to explain why that happened in the first place. Maybe she lacks your unique ability to decipher text. Once again, the facts are the facts. You can't get rid of them by stomping your feet. You don't get to have your own facts, your own reality.

I think you need to better familiarize yourself with "completely right"'s claims. He didn't argue that things happened as described in the above quote. He didn't talk about any immediate shift in position. We call this "completely wrong".

 

What world do you live in? Let's review the transcript.

Mitt Romney claimed that Barack Obama never used the phrase "act of terror" before September 25, 2013. He used it on September 12th. Romney was factually incorrect. By 13 days. There's no ambiguity about this. The words "act" "of" and "terror" came out of Barack Obama's mouth. In exactly that order. In reference to Benghazi. On the 12th.

This was never said by anyone in the fashion that you characterize it. Rather, Susan Rice and the President both made repeated claimed that there was a protest about the video ongoing, at which time an extremist group attacked the facility. This same claim is made in the first draft of the CIA's fact sheet/talking points about the attack. The one that was made solely by the CIA, before anyone else had outside comments or access to it. All subsequent drafts retained this claim.So besides not understanding what happened, you are evidently getting mad at the President for repeating what the CIA thought?

What would you have liked him to do, ideally? There were limited resources in Libya for attempted defense or extraction. The event was occurring in real time. A decision had to made in a matter of minutes about whether dispatching additional troops would change the outcome. Do you really think that the best way to make battlefield decisions is to have Presidents a half a world away who heretofore knew nothing about the decision swoop in and over-ride commanders on the ground about moment to moment deployment of forces? Should he be carrying around a headset and tell every single soldier when to shoot and take cover, too?

Finally, how does this scandal element make sense? On September 20th the White House Press Secretary said the President thought it was "self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack." If he was trying to protect his political campaign by denying it was a terrorist attack, why would you officially announce that it was, nine days after the attack? Are you seriously arguing that they wanted to do a huge cover up for one week and two days?

 

Well, it's like what Mr44 is suggesting about "fan worship" of the president. People admiring him enough to cross the line to help him(although not asked by him to do so) and other elected dems. Sounds plausible to me.

I would be very, very surprised if anyone at cabinet-level position knew anything about this(like Geithner).

 

"Fan worship" seems pretty speculative to me.

 

Let's pause for a moment and consider a worst case scenario. To qualify for tax exempt non-profit status, an organization is supposed to be primarily non-political in nature. If you all are saying that IRS employees were so concerned about these groups that they believed interfering with their operations would change the entire outcome of the Presidential election, isn't that an implicit admission that you think said employees were honestly concerned about the level of political activity emanating from these groups? In which case they should have been flagged for further review anyway?

 

It sounds more plausible than them receiving marching orders from 1600 Penn Av.

Jabba-Wocky, who is suggesting this was to influence the outcome of an election? No. What Mr44 was suggesting is that maybe it was just partisanship from bureaucrats to help fellow partisans. Not necessarily tied to an election. That seems like a stretch.

 

I don't see why career bureaucrats would take that risk, not because they have a sense of honor......but a lot of these people could care less who the President is, they will still have a job.

 

Bernstein didn't make the Watergate analogy himself. He's responding to the Republican officials who did. There was never a "cover-up" about the IRS so the comparison was facially stupid. But they were using "Watergate" as a catch-all for the broader revelations criminality in the Nixon Administration and the way he subordinated whole organs of government to this purpose. Bernstein is simply pointing out that contrary to their assertions, we don't have evidence anything like that happened.

 

I really do tire of the whole "gate" this and "gate" that. Can we stop it with the "gates" already and come up with a new term already we will then pound into oblivion?

 

You know, what the IRS has done is despicable, but I doubt this President was dumb enough to have had anything to do with it.

I find the desperate attempts to pin this particular tail on the President's tushy quite interesting, however, although I know how the outraged conservative groups feel.....

.....kinda like women's rights groups did back in the first term of the Bush administration when John Ashcroft demanded several large New York City hospitals turn over the names of all patients in their databases to whom birth control pills had been prescribed. Supposedly, this was to "help defend the partial-birth abortion law", but I was rather skeptical of that claim at the time.

Just like I'm skeptical that there was no deeper meaning to the IRS's actions here. I think the agency needs to be shaken up, badly, but like I said, I don't think this is Obama's scandal. The GOP risks overdoing it here; so many Republicans have been waiting for so long for something like this to come along, I think there are members of the party who just won't be able to help themselves.

Bachmann's already back out on her soapbox. If the GOP is smart, they'll keep a lid on wild, hyperbolic statements, and stick to the facts. History tells me that this is highly unlikely to happen, though.

Peace,

V-03

 

According to no less a source than the New York Times, senior Treasury officials knew of the investigation in June 2012. The decision was made somewhere, to cover up this investigation for eleven months. There were Romney supporters targeted after criticizing Obama.

The harassment is known to have gone back at least as far as June, 2009. And the targeting was very discriminatory, as well. And the execs who ran the division got a combined $145,000 in bonuses. Sarah Hall Ingram got bonuses in 2010, 2011, and 2012 that required approval from the President. She also got promoted to head the Obamacare office. So when she got those bonuses, it was Obama saying yes after the director of the Office of Personnel Management reviewed them.

The decision to cover it up alone was a huge thing as well.
As Lisa Meyers said on MSNBC (transcript via The Weekly Standard):

Who benefited from this IRS misconduct and the eleven-month cover-up? Barack Obama. You can't tell me in a 51-48 election, that three-plus years of IRS harassment of Obama's political opponents did not have an effect on the outcome of the 2012 election in which he got re-elected.

Obama may not have ordered the harassment and/or cover-up, but it i beyond dispute that in the 2012 election, he benefited politically from the effects of the harassment and the decision to cover it up for eleven month. Those ill-gotten political gains will have a price, whether it is fair or not. Because there is a damn good chance that had this IRS misconduct not happened, or if there had been no cover-up, Mitt Romney would be in the White House now.

 

As Wocky noted, there is an almost zero chance that legitimate non political tax exempt non profits would have changed the outcome of the election. Even if the intent of the IRS was to unfairly harass conservative groups, your argument seems to be that the effect of this politically motivated bias was to benefit the democratic process by preventing corrupt illegal political organizations from influencing the election.

 

I'm sorry, but this is a complete fantasy. There is no evidence that these fairly small groups could have had that big of a national impact or that the extra auditing disadvantaged them to such an extent. Anything else is a complete contradiction to the reality of the effect these groups have on the field in a national election. At the absolute very most (and I'm really, really, really stretching their impact on elections here) is that they would have maybe saved a State Senate race or something. And even that's a stretch.

 

Yeah, it is quite pathetic to believe so IMO.

Obama won over 70% of Latinos, these Tea Party groups would not have made a difference in that kind of deficit.

 

Do you ever bother to read your own sources? In June 2012 the Inspector General informed others at the Treasury Department that he was launching an investigation to look into the claims. Everyone said okay, and let him work. This week, when the results of the investigation were ready, news of his findings got wide public airing.

That's not a cover-up. At no point did anyone actually hide anything. The behavior of the IRS employees was openly discussed in their internal policy memos. None of them ever denied doing it or tried pretend they were doing something other than what they were. No one from outside the IRS attempted to interfere with or suppress the Inspector General's report. You're complaint literally boils down to the fact that people waited for the investigation to be complete before they started publishing results.

Apologies to you that they didn't just make up conclusions out of thin air?

 

No Smuggler, you are once again showing that you live in a world of fantasy.

Had Mitt Romney been smart enough not to make stupid comments like the "47%" remark, he may very well have been in the White House. IRS targeting or no, conservative groups spent an historic, unprecedented amount in this election-and the Republican still lost. This had nothing to do with Romney's inability to carry the election.

What did have to do with it, however, was the fact that in addition to running a candidate who redefined the term "flip-flop", Mr. Romney was forced to jump through hoops to please an out-of-the-mainstream, take-no-prisoners conservative base, which in turn sealed his fate in the general election.

If Romney was a victim of anything, it was a primary process that magnifies the voices of the extremes over those of the middle. That's the real story behind his loss, not some wild conspiracy that insists his was a Presidency denied.

I do agree with you, though, that there will be a price to pay, but it won't be what you think. For all the promises to drag this out into 2014, the Republicans still have to deal with this President for three-and-a-half more years, and any momentum they are picking up by raking Obama over the coals (which the country will quickly tire of, by the way) may easily be lost in the upcoming debt ceiling fight.

That's Obama's territory, and I'm willing to bet the scandals will become old news when the prospect of default rears its head once again.

Peace,

V-03

 

That's just a recourse to semantics. In contemporary parlance "terror" essentially conveys "Muslims causing mayhem", so by that definition it was an "act of terror" regardless whether it was spontaneous or a coordinated attack. So, yes, Obama used the word "terror" once; that doesn't exculpate the obfuscation over the cause of the attack over the following weeks.

Regarding the IRS, I don't like committing to a viewpoint either way with these politically-charged events when the story is still developing so rapidly. But I did want to post that the results for the poll at the bottom of this page made me laugh out loud. I mean, I knew that option would be winning, but the margin is hilarious.

 

In what sense did he even obfuscate? A terrorist attack caused by a video is still a terrorist attack. After all, do you know of anyone who argues that Theo Van Gogh's murdered shouldn't be classified as such?

 

Tell that to Romney.

Feel free to disagree with their reasoning ( to avoid tipping off potential targets ), but as it turns out both CIA and State pressed for the removal of references to Al-Qaeda and previous terror activity in Libya. The following document shows CIA deputy director Mike Morell’s pen edits to the talking points:

 

That's my whole point. In the context of the debate over Bengazi, "terrorism" became shorthand for the "coordinated attack" narrative vice the "spontaneous eruption" narrative. Certainly nobody was ever claiming that Obama had ever claimed that nothing happened at the embassy. When Obama made his Rose Garden comments, he was using "terror" in the most generic sense, before it had acquired that later connotation. To claim that the Rose Garden comment completely pre-empts the caginess in the weeks that followed is totally dishonest.

 

True, but at the end of the day, if people died and politicians are going to say "the admin let them die and didn't act fast enough" etc, then you can't just use a fellow politicians rhetoric , even if he is the president, as the "smoking gun" some are claiming it is. It can do damage to his popularoty and image as a leader, sure, but it's not evidence of gun-running, Iran-Contra-esque hidden arms shipments some have claimed.

It's just not.

Could those things come out? I suppose they could. But, that's not the reality now.

The GOP ends up being their own worst enemy with these kinds of situations over the last several years because they approach these things with a predetermined verdict of a democratic president and then latch onto anything and say "see! it's a damn mess! he did this and that wrong!" to fit their predetermined verdict and prejudices(he's a marxist. commie.illegal alien president. you name it). So if they believe that going in of course they will see these things through that filter.

I just want to know what the hell happened. What really happened? The GOP isn't helping matters.

 

I completely agree. The most infuriating thing about following the Benghazi hearings is finding a dispassionate, comprehensive account that isn't laced with outrageously sinister and sweeping insinuations about Obama. But that cuts both ways; claiming that the Rose Garden comment has any relevance whatsoever as to how the Administration and State Department systematically portrayed the attack is just as dishonest as the worst invective being hurled by the Right.

 

What "weeks" are we referring to? The, at best, single week? I'll point you again to the Press Secretary's comment on the 20th.

Regardless, though, this is all fairly simple. Security in Libya was considerably under-resourced. As a result, when a militant group struck, it was impossible to turn the tide. Since the few available troops wouldn't make a difference, they weren't scrambled to the area. As was basically inevitable given the previous two statements, some of those unfortunate enough to be at the besieged facility died. American casualties were minimized.

In the following investigation, the CIA originally took the notion that there was some sort of street protest as a prelude to what happened. So they said that. Leading President Obama and members of his Administration to repeat that. Due to the poor intelligence and considerable uncertainty about what occurred (as evidenced by their confusion about the presence or absence of a preceding protest), people were initially pretty restrained in how they described the event, and always pointed to the need for more investigation. Because, you know, there wasn't a good investigation yet. Eventually, senior intelligence officials became more confident in how the characterize the attacks, and both they and the White House became more definitive in their language.

That's it. It's neither a very complicated chain or events, nor terribly relevant to anything.

 

I get real tired of your dis-ingenuousness, V03. If the IRS scandal would have been irrelevant during the election, then why didn't the Treasury Department just come out in June 2012 and publicly admit what the IRS was doing? Because they knew that the news would have been a game-changer that would have devastated Obama's re-election campaign.

The discriminatory handling alone - Obama's half-brother getting a retroactive tax-exempt status while Tea Parties languish in limbo - and other groups get asked about the "content of their prayers" - would have been shocking. The use of the IRS to target people whose only "crime" was to disagree with Obama... I think he'd have lost had that been public. That doesn't get into numerous cases where conservative groups had confidential info leaked to their political opponents. Back in April 2012, the National Organization for Marriage had concluded that its confidential tax info had been leaked to the Human Rights Campaign by the IRS - and while the Weekly Standard was doing actual journalism, most other networks were up Obama's butt, if not donning Presidential kneepads of their own. And the leaks came about a month after Obama shifted to support same-sex marriage.

And here's what you really ought to worry about: According to one local report from a Cincinnati news station (where the IRS's tax-exempt office is located), at least four employees were involved, and have said they were "following orders."

Try again, V03. Really try, and be honest with yourself and with everyone else out there.