Obama’s Credibility Gap

By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his “credibility gap” — the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam.

“Modified limited hangout” and “inoperative” were infamous euphemisms that Nixon-administration officials used to mask lies about the Watergate scandal. After a while, few believed any of the initial Reagan-administration disavowals that it was not trading “arms for hostages” in the Iran–Contra scandal.

George H. W. Bush thundered during his campaign that voters should “read my lips: no new taxes,” only to agree later to raise them. Bill Clinton’s infamous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” was followed by proof that he did just that with Monica Lewinsky.

The George W. Bush administration warned the nation about stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and never quite recovered its credibility after the WMD were not found. No one believed Bush when he told incompetent FEMA deputy director Michael Brown that in the midst of the Katrina mess he was doing a “heck of a job.”

 Yet the distortions and lack of credibility of the Obama administration have matched and now trumped those of its predecessors. The public may have long ago forgotten that Obama did not close down Guantanamo as promised, or cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, or stop the revolving door of lobbyists coming in and out of the executive branch.

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Obama’s Rule by Decree

 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

 

 Barack Obama has never been clear on the distinction between sovereign and servant, between the American people and those, including himself, elected to do the people’s business. We saw that yet again this week with the president’s unilateral rewrite of the Bataan Death March known as the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare. For this president, laws are not binding expressions of the popular will, but trifling recommendations to be ignored when expedient.

The collapse of law — not just Obamacare but law in general — is the Obama administration’s most egregious scandal. With the IRS here, Benghazi there, and Eric Holder’s institutionalized malevolence crowding the middle, it gets little direct attention. Perhaps it is so ubiquitous, so quotidian, that we’ve become inured to it.

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Issa Looks to Call Lerner Back to Capitol Hill

Commitee chairman Darrell Issa suggested he is poised to call Lois Lerner back to Capitol Hill in the wake of a House Oversight Commitee vote on Friday that found she waived her Fifth Amendment right not to testify about the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups. “The Committee remains focused on hearing Ms. Lerner’s full and truthful testimony,” the Republican congressman said in a statement.

Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, professed innocence before the committee in May before pleading the Fifth, setting off a debate about whether she had waived her rights.

Issa said at the commencement of Friday’s proceedings that he believed Lerner had done so. But it was South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy who went after the former IRS administrator the most aggressively. “That’s not how the Fifth Amendment works,” Gowdy said. “You’re not allowed to just say your side of the story. . . . She could have sat there and said nothing.”

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Lies Subvert Democracy

By Victor Davis Hanson

 

 Truth is the lifeblood of democracy. Without honesty, the foundations of consensual government crumble.
If the Internal Revenue Service acts unlawfully, our system of citizens’ computing their own taxes implodes.
Yet Lois Lerner, one of the IRS’s top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency’s conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment. Any taxpayer who tried that with an IRS auditor would end up fined, if not in jail.

 Almost everything that IRS officials have reported about the agency’s unlawful targeting of conservative groups has proven false. IRS malfeasance was not limited only to the Cincinnati office, as alleged, but followed directives sent from higher-ups in Washington. Lois Lerner confessed to the scandal only through a rigged public query by a planted questioner, designed to preempt an upcoming critical inspector general’s report. There is legitimate dispute over both the number and the purpose of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s visits to the White House and nearby executive office buildings, but he did his credibility no good by snidely remarking to Congress that at least one of those visits was to take his kids to the White House Easter Egg Roll.

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Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book, The Savior Generals, is just out from Bloomsbury Press.




 

The Man Obama Fears the Most

Who is the man Barack Obama fears most? 

If the White House’s actions toward Fox News are any clue, it’s Roger Ailes.

Ailes is the creator and chairman of America’s No. 1-rated cable news channel, Fox News. A just-released biography — “Roger Ailes: Off Camera” by Zev Chafets — gives the first and most revealing account of the battle between Fox News and President Obama. 

Rush Limbaugh says it’s the best book ever written about Ailes and Fox News, disclosing stories never before told. 

Among these stories is the dramatic struggle that has been taking place between Fox News and Barack Obama. 

To say that Obama hates Fox News may be an understatement. Early in his first term, Obama actually sought to ban Fox News from the White House press corps, ripping away its press credential.  Even liberal media were aghast at the president’s authoritarian move. The Obama administration backed down and Fox kept its White House seat. 

But no love has been lost between the two sides. Ailes tells Chafets what he really thinks of Obama. 

 

He doesn’t mince words, saying the president lied to him at their first meeting, which took place in 2008 at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel with News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch in the room. Ailes also called the president “lazy,” based on the president’s own evaluation of himself with Barbara Walters. 

Chafets recounts the private meeting between Ailes, Obama, and Murdoch. The author gives a blow-by-blow account of the tense confrontation that ensued.

As Chafets recounts, when Ailes confronted Obama about his plans for unilateral arms cuts, Obama denied he ever made such a statement. 

Ailes described Obama’s response this way: “He said this looking me right in the eyes. He never dropped his gaze, which is the usual tell. It was as good a lie as anyone ever told me.” Obama became icy and his press secretary jumped up to end the meeting. 

Chafets’ book is drawing high praise not only for its penetrating look at the man credited with building Fox News into the top-rated cable news channel, but also for the significant revelations it offers about Ailes, the fight with Obama, and other fascinating vignettes. 

The book also carries credibility. Chafets is not a conservative — a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and a former columnist for the New York Daily News, he was given unprecedented access to Ailes and others at Fox News with no strings attached. 

Some of Chafets’ many surprising revelations include:

• Obama’s obsession with Sean Hannity for “battering” him on radio and TV shows
• How Glenn Beck’s exposé on Van Jones led to the White House efforts to ban Fox News.
• Obama’s surprising remark at a White House Christmas party, telling Ailes that he was “the most powerful man in the world”
• The truth about the Soros-backed efforts to torpedo the “two Great Satans” — Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh
• Why Glenn Beck really left Fox News to start his own network
• Fox and Hollywood: the funny account by Ailes of the time he went to dinner with Al Pacino and Shirley MacLaine
• White House days: Ailes’ time as a media adviser to Richard Nixon and why chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and Nixon’s inner circle kept him on the outside
• 1984: Ailes’ role in saving Reagan after his disastrous debate performance against Walter Mondale
• Nancy and the Gipper behind the curtain: a side most people never saw before
• The Rush Limbaugh television show and the advice Ailes gave to Rush when dealing with the liberal media — Rush has never forgotten it
• O’Reilly wars: the inside story of how Fox dealt with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and why to this day, Bill O’Reilly hates his liberal critics at NBC
• Backfire: O’Reilly’s push to sue Al Franken for his book criticizing Fox and how it helped Franken gain best-seller status
• Kennedy clan: Ailes’ surprising relationship with the Kennedy family that goes back more than four decades

Chafets talked with hundreds of Ailes’ friends and enemies, and constructs an intimate portrait of the man who has been called “the most powerful in news.”

He offers revealing insights into Ailes’ relationship with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and Fox stars such as O’Reilly, Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Megyn Kelly, Brit Hume, Shep Smith, Bret Baier and others. 

Ailes gave Chafets his candid take on many of his closest friends, including Rush Limbaugh, and Chafets chronicles Ailes’ relationships with U.S. presidents Nixon, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. 

And there is Ailes’ candid take on some of his critics: He called Vice President Joe Biden “dumb as an ashtray.” 

Chafets notes that Ailes, who served as a media consultant to three Republican presidents, “used his populism, his showbiz savvy and his political strategist’s canny understanding of creating narratives to build Fox News into a huge profit machine for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., while helping to steer the country’s conversation to the right,” The New York Times observed in a review of the book. 

Rush Limbaugh said Chafets’ Ailes biography is “great because Ailes opened up to Zev like he hasn’t opened up to anybody else.” 

Limbaugh has encouraged his listeners to “get ‘Roger Ailes: Off Camera’ and you find out who this Roger Ailes guy is.” 

Veteran political analyst Dick Morris also has touted the book, saying in a recent column: “Most of the time when a biography of a famous man mired in current controversy comes out, the reader asks an odd question: Is it favorable or not? Chafets’ is neither. It is accurate. 

“Chafets’ book shows Ailes’ full dimensions — how the combination of a remarkable personality, creative genius and business acumen have helped him make Fox News.” 

Morris adds: “Every Fox News fan should read this book.” The Media Research Center said the bio is “required reading for anyone looking to gain insight into the mind of the man who created the number-one cable news channel in America.”

Use this link to order a copy of this book from Amazon 

Is US Aid to Egypt a Sharia Tribute?

The U.S. government’s aid to Egypt’s government has been a matter of some controversy of late, and this probably won’t help help: According to Egyptian cleric Dr. Khaled, our payments to Egypt constitute a payment of jizya, the tax laid upon non-Muslims living under sharia in return for dhimmi status (whereby they can be left alone, albeit as second-class citizens). He explained: “If the revolution declares a framework for dealing with the West and America — they will accept it, kiss our hands, and double the aid they give us. We consider this aid to be jizya, not regular aid. . . . They pay it for the right of passage through our airspace and territorial waters. . . . They pay so that we will let them be.”