In his defense of President Obama, Press Secretary Jay Carney is beginning to sound a lot like Ronald Zeigler, Richard Nixon’s spokesman. Carney only has to use the word “inoperative,” as Ziegler did when incriminating evidence surfaced that proved his previous statements untrue.
Following what appears to be a cover-up in the Benghazi attack, the Washington Post has obtained documents from an audit conducted by the IRS’s inspector general that indicate the agency targeted for special scrutiny conservative groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names, as well as “nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution.”
IRS official Lois Lerner described the targeting efforts as “absolutely inappropriate,” but said IRS actions were not driven by partisanship. How, then, would she explain why no groups with “progressive” in their titles were similarly targeted? Carney labeled Lerner an “appointee from the previous administration.” In other words: Bush’s mistake, not Obama’s.
The Post’s editorial board writes, “A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose.” The board called for a full accounting. I doubt we’ll get it. Take Benghazi.
ABC News first reported that the now famous Benghazi “talking points” used by U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on five Sunday morning news shows were revised 12 times, deleting references to “the al-Qaida-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia (and) CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.”
Carney said Ambassador Rice’s initial claim — that the attack grew out of protests over a video that insulted Islam — was based on what was known to U.S. intelligence at the time. But as last week’s testimony by three whistleblowers before the House Oversight Committee revealed, much more was known at the time.
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