Obama’s Excuse Machine

The VA scandal “poses an acute threat to the Obama administration because of how much its problems resemble the criticisms of Obamacare itself,” Jonah Goldberg writes at the Corner, in a post titled “The VA and the Limits of Liberalism.” Beyond Obamacare, as Jonah notes, even if Obama hadn’t waded into the box canyon of socialized medicine, “The lessons of the VA would still be a problem for Obama and for liberals generally:”

Why? Because the Democratic party simply is the party of government. It is the party that insists on the nobility, efficacy and intellectual superiority of government. The VA is at the intersection of all the things liberals insist are wise and good and just about government. It is government-run healthcare. It is the tangible fulfillment of a sacred obligation the government has with those who’ve sacrificed most for our nation. It is also the one institution and/or constituency that enjoys huge bipartisan support. The VA, rhetorically and politically, is more sacrosanct and less controversial than Medicare, Social Security, road building, the NIH, or public schools. We are constantly told that we could get so many wonderful, super-fantastic things done if only both sides would lay down their ideological blah blah blah blah and work together for yada yada yada. Well, welcome to the VA. How’s that working out for you?

In addition to exposing the limits of leftism, the VA scandal has also exposed the limits of the Obama spin machine. “This White House handles every failure as a lab project for a juco crisis communications class,” Jon Gabriel writes at Ricochet. “Never thinking to actually fix the underlying problem, they passively hope the press doesn’t report on it. On the rare occasions the mainstream media does dig into the scandal of the week, the administration drops the issue into Obama’s excuse machine:”

What follows is a day-by-day list of how the Obama White House plans its week, starting with “Relevant Cabinet secretary vaguely admits that ‘mistakes were made,’ though no blame is shouldered or assigned,” on Monday, until Jay Carney insists the crisis is “old news” and Barry “blames America’s problems on a recalcitrant GOP obsessed with ‘phony scandals,'” at a fundraiser.

Rinse and repeat until January 2017.

At Reason, Ed Krayewski explores “The Anatomy of an Obama Scandal,” with a similar, if slightly longer written version of the same timetable.

In-between defending his network’s Flight #370 obsession, CNN hack Drew Griffin pretends to be stunned by how the president is approaching the VA scandal:

I was a little caught off guard by what apparently is a disconnect between what’s happening out here in the country and what the president is talking about.  I hate to be curt, but this problem is real; it exists; it really doesn’t have to be studied.  To say that you are gonna now wait for yet again more studies to come back and more fact-finding to come back? I would think that the vets I’ve been talking to wanted much more direct action.  I was a little confused by the president’s remarks today.  At the same time he was saying that he’s known about this problem for years and years and years and it goes back decades, far past into other people’s presidencies, and yet we’re five years into his presidency and the problem seems to be certainly not better, and perhaps even worse.

Even former O-Bot Ron Fournier has dubbed Obama “the Superhero of Excuses,” particularly since a recurring leitmotif of the president is to declare that he first found out about a scandal from the media(!) and declare, Howard Beale-style that he’s mad as hell!!!!! about it — mad enough to say that he’s mad as hell, and then ignore it and hit the links and the fundraising circuit once again:

[jwplayer player=”1″ mediaid=”73558″]

After James O’Keefe and the late (and sorely missed) Andrew Breitbart teamed up to blow up ACORN like the Death Star, Andrew laid out how he timed O’Keefe’s video to circumvent the MSM’s newscycle and turn the MSM’s kill the messenger instincts against itself, based on knowing the leftwing media far better than its knows itself, accumulated over years of being Matt Drudge’s lieutenant at the Drudge Report.

It’s now blatantly obvious how the Obama Excuse Machine approaches every scandal. Since the Obama White House has become the equivalent of an ancient 8-Track tape stuck in a loop until it wears itself out, why can’t the GOP, and a la Andrew, Acorn, and the MSM turn the Obama spin machine cycle against itself?

Update: Joseph Curl of the Washington Times on “Obama, the Unaccountable President.” The Will Rogers quote atop the piece is absolutely perfect.

Oh, and don’t miss your “Tweet of the Day, @Politifact Just Has Too Much of A Democratic Bias edition.”