In “Beyond the Pale,” Charlotte Allen of the Weekly Standard goes beyond the looking glass, into the “Fourteenth Annual White Privilege Conference,” at the DoubleTree Hotel near Seattle’s SeaTac Airport, attended by at least 1500 assorted members of academia who just know that The Man is sticking it to somebody:

The main premise of “The Color of Empire” seemed to be that white people had created the idea of race, “the sole purpose of which is to rationalize the white race,” Hackman said. Hackman, herself distinctly pale of complexion, maintained that her fellow whites some 400 years ago had created a skin-color-based category called “red” even though there are “500 different Native American nations, bands, and tribes.” They had also devised a category called “brown” for “Latinos,” “even though there’s no ‘Latino’ food and no ‘Latino’ language,” Hackman said.

This actually made some sense: If racial classifications are artificial (“socially constructed” was the way Hackman put it), lumping people together under a skin-color label who may have nothing linguistically or culturally in common, why not just get rid of the classifications altogether? Isn’t that exactly why conservatives like me oppose racial preferences and set-asides? But Hackman in fact focused obsessively on race, race, race, and color, color, color. She showed us a Southwest Airlines television commercial in which there apparently weren’t enough “people of color” among the actors playing crew and passengers. She had us divide ourselves into small groups to discuss “how old we were when we discovered what race we were.” (My answer: about age 30, when I realized that with a Hispanic mother, I could make my employers look attractively diverse on their Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports.) She drew a U-shaped tube with a plunger that had something to do with white people hogging all the resources that rightfully belonged to other races. When I asked Hackman about why race seemed to be the prime focus of her workshop even though it supposedly didn’t exist, she told me that I needed to read up on “critical race theory.” She added: “We’re talking about a reclamation of racial categories.” In other words, racial categories are an oppressive white fantasy​—​until they prove to be useful for promoting race-based identity politics.

Ahh Frankfurt School, you’ve poisoned the well so effectively, no one can detect your fingerprints:

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Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokesman Morton Downey Morgan pretends to be shocked that someone from a foreign country is attempting to score points for their political ideology immediately after a grisly murder and shooting incident.  Much needed hilarity in the wake of a truly heinous act of terrorism occurs; Morgan loses last remaining viewer.

But who will teach Morgan how to purchase a tank, now?

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“Liberals Are Now Shocked, Shocked at Obama’s Culture of Intimidation,” Peter Wehner writes at Commentary:

Now that the Obama administration has conducted an unprecedented intrusion into newsgathering activities, it’s dawning on liberals – four years and four months into the Obama presidency – that something is slightly amiss.

For example, the New York Times, Dana Milbank and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post have all expressed concerns about the Obama administration tactics. They have done so, of course, with a fraction of the umbrage they would be showing if this had occurred under a Republican administration. But at least it’s progress.

It’s late in coming, however, And let’s be honest: it would have been helpful if liberals had expressed some alarm years ago when top Obama White House aides like David Axelrod and Anita Dunn were targeting Fox News in an effort to de-legitimize it. Some of us warned at the time that “The White House’s effort to target a news organization like Fox is vaguely Nixonian.” Yet very few members of the elite media shared those concerns. In fact, they seemed to be sympathetic to what the White House was attempting to do.

Of course — having survived the eight years that proceeded from an event that many on the left viewed as traumatic an occurrence as 9/11 — when the election of 2000 was finalized and GWB became president-elect, they believed in January of 2009 that the revolution was at hand, and “We Are All Socialists Now.” Or as John Judis of the New Republic wrote at the time:

A decade ago, I might have been embarrassed to admit that I was raised on Marx and Marxism, but I am convinced that the left is coming back. Friedrich Hayek is going to be out; Friedrich Engels in. Larry Kudlow out; Larry Mishel in. And why is that? Because a severe global recession like this puts in relief the transient, fragile, and corruptible nature of capitalism, and the looming contradiction between what Marx called the forces and relations of production evidenced in unemployed engineers and boarded up factories and growing poverty amidst a potential for abundance. As capitalism itself–or at the least the vaunted miracle of the free market–becomes problematic, the left is poised for an intellectual comeback.

If they had to break a few eggs in the process, well, the resulting omelet would undoubtedly be delicious. And concurrently, they managed to convince themselves that an unknown Chicago machine hack pol was the second coming of Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and God Himself* all rolled into one man inside of a size 40 long bespoke suit with trouser creases passing that keen David Brooks test. (Scroll through the — I think — unintentionally hilarious archives of the blog called Is Barack Obama the Messiah? if you need a refresher course for how zany the 2007-through 2009 period feels for those of us who never drank the Obama Aide.)

In any case, we noticed the Nixonian-like tone of the Obama administration early on, with posts bearing titles such as “Ron Ziegler’s Revenge” and “Ron Ziegler Redux.”

But hey, didn’t those horrible Red Staters have it coming anyhow? How dare they build networks such as talk radio, the Blogosphere and Fox News? It’s like…a counterculture to our obviously far superior liberal overculture! And countercultures must always be tamped down. (The left has experience with this, given that they devoured their earnest mid-century liberal predecessors in the mid to late 1960s.)

Besides, if you view a television network as the equivalent of the Nazi propaganda machine, as Ted Turner said in 1996, then you’re giving yourself maximum leeway in defeating it:

When Fox News started out, it got a generally skeptical and unfriendly reception from the journalistic establishment. Even reporters, who generally view any news media organization as a good thing (not to mention a potential source of employment), were largely disapproving. But no one greeted Fox News with more pure vitriol than CNN founder Ted Turner.

“I look forward to crushing Rupert Murdoch like a bug,” Turner told the press. He compared Murdoch to Hitler, which would make Roger Ailes a reincarnation of Goebbels, and followed up with an explanation, quoted by the Los Angeles Times [in October of 1996]: “The late Führer, the first thing he did, like all dictators, was take over the press and use it to further his agenda. Basically, that is what Rupert Murdoch does with his media.  .  .  .” The Nazi analogy was too much for the Anti-Defamation League, which rebuked Turner for trivializing the Holocaust. Turner apologized, but that didn’t prevent him from likening Murdoch to “the late Führer” a year later; or, in 2005, comparing the success of Fox News to the rise of Hitler.

If you’re looking for a central Rosetta Stone to connect up the scandals, as Jim Geraghty writes, “All of Obama’s Scandals Are Ultimately About Information Control,” but then, all of Obama’s actions since taking office were an attempt to run An enormous and diversified country through the White House, the same dream as FDR in the 1930s and (to a lesser extent) LBJin the 1960s. And it’s doomed to failure. As Milton Friedman illustrated, based on an essay by fellow economist Leonard Reed, no one man can design a pencil, let alone run the largest economy on the planet. Or its media:

The old joke about the repeated failures of Communism is that “This time, it’s sure to work.” The same can now be said about its cousin, the centralized, top-down economy, or to give it another title, Liberal Fascism. But then, David Horowitz’s long-running Front Page Website recently adopted the slogan, “Inside Every Liberal Is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” The left’s inner totalitarian has gotten quite a workout in from 2008 through the present day, not just from the Obama itself, but from those who have heeded their dog whistles. And despite the sclerotic feel of 20th-century-style “Progressivism” the left’s inner totalitarian won’t be volunteering for retirement any time soon.

* Or perhaps, Obama is the Green Lantern. He does have a sort of  Dr. Shelden Cooper vibe going on at times, doesn’t he?  Except that Obama’s case, his Monsters of the Id can easily be summoned up via a phone call or memo.

Related: From Doug Ross: “TREY GOWDY SPRINGS A TRAP: Did former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman commit perjury today?”

As Doug writes, “When the history books are written, Richard Nixon will look like a guy who stole a few boxes of Girl Scout cookies compared to Barack Obama.” But compared to actual accomplishments, “I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon.”

Hey, just ask your average New York Timesman.

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“Two attackers armed with meat cleavers filmed their deadly assault on a man in London, according to [Sky News] sources,” in an article linked to by Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit:

A man reported to be a serving soldier died and two people have been shot in Woolwich, after what Sky sources understand is being treated as a terrorist attack.

Senior Whitehall sources said the two attackers asked passers-by to film them, and they shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great).

In footage that has emerged, one of the attackers wields a bloodied meat cleaver and says: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”

The black man, dressed in a grey hooded jacket and black woolly hat, apologises to members of the public who witnessed the horrific scenes before making a number of political statements.

In the footage, he is heard to say: “We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

“I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe.

“Remove your government, they don’t care about you.”

Witnesses also described seeing the “crazed” Woolwich attackers “hacking” at their victim and posing for pictures before charging at police wielding meat cleavers.

Naturally, most of the details, including the report that it was a beheading(!) was airbrushed out by the BBC, which is in full Orwellian Ministry of Truth mode in an attempt to keep this story on ice.

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Once again, another hurricane or tornado, another member of the left politicizing it. This time around, it’s comedienne Lizz Winstead, the co-creator, back in the 1990s, of Viacom’s The Daily Show, before its current incarnation with Jon Stewart:

She thought she was making a topical political joke, but a co-creator of ‘The Daily Show’ managed to enrage many of her followers after tweeting joke about the Oklahoma tornado’s political motivations.

‘This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives,’ wrote comedian Lizz Winstead, in a tweet, around 3:30 Monday afternoon.

The tweet was an apparent attempt at using the occasion of the May 20 twister to comment on the scandal currently plaguing the IRS and Obama administration.

Winstead, co-creator and former head writer for ‘The Daily Show,’ promptly received a stream of angry responses to her tweet.

User @swashamokc wrote, ‘As an Oklahoman, I don’t think this was something that would result in my continuing to follow you.’

An unrepentant Winstead responded, ‘If its not OK to YOU for me to combine news stories to point out hypocrisy AND Im not making fun of victims u shld Unfollow.’

But then gravity of the tornado’s impact became clear. Winstead’s joke suddenly wasn’t so humorous and the normally funny lady was all red.

Well, all blue, actually, as the far left has a long habit of making some of their nastiest, worst-timed attempts at “humor” as hurricanes and tornadoes are in the midst of wreking havoc:

(Sorry for the interruption in posts. There’s quite a story behind it, which I’ll upload in the next couple of days.)

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Here’s the hard thing Republicans have to do if they don’t want this crisis to go to waste: they have to ignore their id, the temptation of the sugar high of partisan point-scoring. They must willfully set aside Obama’s presence in the fray, leaving the short term personalized attacks on the table, and go after the much bigger prize. Obama isn’t running for office again. Liberalism is. Making this about him is a short term boost to the pleasure center of the conservative brain. Making this about the inherent falsehood of the progressive project will help conservatism win.

– “Republicans and the Long Game,” by Ben Domenech in Real Clear Politics. Read the whole thing.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

– Barack Obama, then still a candidate for the US Senate in Illinois, in his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, July of 2004.

“Congressman: IRS asked pro-life group about ‘the content of their prayers.’”

– Headline, the Washington Examiner, this past Friday.

Robert Ley could not be reached for comment.

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James Taranto explores “Why the Obama IRS scandal may be worse than ‘a cancer on the presidency:’”

No one can deny that Barack Obama is a highly skilled politician, at least by the measure of election outcomes. His record is undefeated, save for an ill-advised 2000 primary challenge to an entrenched incumbent congressman. His 2008 presidential victory, after a fraction of a term in the U.S. Senate, was especially dazzling. It disproved those who said that Hillary Clinton was invincible, that a left-wing Democrat couldn’t win, and that America wasn’t ready for a black president.

No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. The use of the Internal Revenue Service’s coercive power to suppress dissent against Obama is the political equivalent of steroids. The history books should record Obama’s re-election with an asterisk to indicate that it was achieved with the help of illicit means.

Read the whole thing. And then check out Rick Moran at the PJ Tatler, who writes that the “Timeline of Obama Foreknowledge of IRS Scandal Continues to Slip.”  Rick notes that “The list of people who knew months ago of the IRS targeting program and yet somehow forgot to tell their boss, the president of the United States, about it is growing longer. And so is the witness list for House hearings on the matter.”

Of course, you could argue that the time begins in 2009, when Obama first “joked” about siccing the IRS on his enemies. Once Obama flashes the Barack Signal, the underlings know how to take it from there, As Mickey Kaus writes:

We now know, of course, that you don’t need direct White House involvement to politicize the IRS, at least for Democrats.** The underlings know what to do! The idea that they are apolitical professionals was always a myth.*** It’s even more of a myth now, in the era of Daily Kos and Greg Sargent. I wonder if McCurry, now safely through the revolving door, would like to revisit his statement. …

Read the whole thing, and follow the “****” for more on All the President Asterisk’s Men.

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Back in 2011 we had lots of fun with Rachel Maddow of MSNBC cheerfully using one of the biggest pariahs of today’s “Progressive” environmentally-correct — the Hoover Dam — to promote the environmentally-correct “Progressive” channel that employs her. Here’s an amusing following up, found at Jim Geraghty’s Campaign Spot daily email:

Why Kevin Williamson Rocks, Vol. LMXVIII

You probably don’t need any more reasons to purchase Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure,but I just had to share this section yesterday, dismantling Rachel Maddow’s “Lean Forward” ad featuring the Hoover Dam as a symbol of future national infrastructure projects that absolutely must be funded.

Conventional political theory holds that only the state can provide public goods such as parks, sidewalks, roads, and the like. Television commentator Rachel Maddow offered a typically exaggerated expression of this view when she visited the Hoover Dam and remarked, “When you are this close to Hoover Dam, it makes you realize how small a human is in relation to this as a human project. You can’t be the guy who builds this. You can’t even be the state that builds this. You have to be the country that builds this.” (Never mind that Hoover Dam was in fact built by a consortium of private firms headed by Bechtel-Kaiser, under precisely the sort of outsourcing/private contractor arrangement that Maddow has no time for in most other contexts — in fact, she includes a chapter in one of her books denouncing this practice.) In a sense, Maddow is correct — the Hoover Dam is an economically nonviable project from the time of its conception, and the mighty installation, visually impressive as it is, produces significantly less electricity than does a typical small nuclear power plant. Which is to say, it is a majestic boondoggle. Only politics can do that — and stay in business. And, needless to say, a “guy” attempting a project with the environmental impact of Hoover Dam would never get permission from environmental regulators, given that its construction entailed wiping out an entire local ecosystem.

So the only parts Maddow got right were the points she didn’t intend to make.

The concept that Hoover Dam was not actually built by the federal government, but was ultimately built by private companies, seemed so contrary to our usual narratives that I went and looked it up:

The Hoover Dam project was too big for any one company. So W. A. Bechtel helped form a consortium calling itself Six Companies, Inc. W. A. knew the heads of the consortium companies as friends and business associates, having been in partnerships with most of them. There was tall, lean Harry Morrison, head of Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, and the man most directly responsible for bringing the group together; and the white-haired Wattis brothers of Utah Construction Co., the region’s foremost railroad builders. They were joined by the wry Felix Kahn of MacDonald & Kahn, a premier builder of office buildings, industrial plants, and hotels, including the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. Phil Hart ran Pacific Bridge Co., one of the oldest construction firms on the West Coast, and was justly famous for his underwater work — a critical component in dam construction. Charlie Shea, the pugnacious, acid-tongued boss of J. F. Shea Co., was the best tunnel and sewer man west of the Rockies. And finally there was the legendary Henry Kaiser, whom W. A. had long valued for his enthusiasm and vision. W. A. Bechtel served as the second president of Six Companies; his son Steve was a member of the executive committee; and sons Warren and Ken served on the board.

Kevin is also taking no prisoners a critic, helping his local theater enforce their no cell phone rules — in appropriately dramatic style.

For my recent interview with him, click here to listen.

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POTUS deploys Marines for rain in Rose Garden with Turkish PM Erdogan. twitter.com/MajorCBS/statu…

— Major Garrett(@MajorCBS) May 16, 2013

Mr. Obama started off his second term without noticing that Jon Favreau, his misogynistic departing lead speechwriter left him uttering “Peace in our time” on his way out the White House door writing for lesser celebrities in Hollywood. Today Obama channels Neville Chamberlain once again, only this time, he uses American Marines as props to hold umbrellas for himself and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan at a joint press conference. Or as Twitchy quips, “Out: I support the troops. In: The troops support my umbrella.”

But as the scandals continue to hit the ‘Bam, it looks like he’s going to need a bigger umbrella. And who knows — perhaps not even the Marines can save him.

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“Be prepared to love the Eagles’ Evan Mathis, even if you hate the Eagles,” Mary Katharine Ham writes.

I love Mashable.com’s self-lobotomized description of Mathis’ stunt:

Just what precisely Mathis is so pissed off about — other than just like, taxes in general, man — isn’t quite clear.

Yes, what on earth would cause him to do that?

Mashable adds, “But one thing is obvious: He’s not exactly having guilt pangs over the stunt.”

Presumably, the Eagles’ Obama-supporting owner will remind him of the futility of individual expression in a corporatist world.

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Ahh, the changing face of journalism over the decades. In the 1920s, H.L. Mencken, described his vision of journalism as a fundamentally adversarial one, no matter who was in charge. “It is the prime function of a really first-rate newspaper to serve as a sort of permanent opposition in politics.”

At some point, however, that began to change, as this John McCain ad from the summer of 2008 reminds us, back when Barry seemed to totally cool and dreamy:

What wouldn’t you do for a guy like that — even if he gets a bit rough a times. He doesn’t mean it when he flies off the handle, right?

JOE SCARBOROUGH: [Reid] says he doesn’t work for Barack Obama. I think he’s wrong.

TAVIS SMILEY: Harry Reid, put down the crack pipe. You don’t work for Barack Obama? We’re all working for Barack Obama.

SCARBOROUGH: What are your thoughts? You’re going to be on Meet The Press next week, next Sunday before the inauguration. What are your thoughts as we now move closer and closer to Barack Obama being sworn in?

SMILEY: These are exciting times. When I was last year, the day after, November 5th, the day after the election, really I was excited then about what had happened and transpired the night before. As an African-american male I revel in this moment. I revel in his humanity, I revel in this victory. I love all the talk about hope and change. Here’s what I fundamentally believe, and there have been a number of examples since the election, Joe, that underscore this for me. I want Barack Obama to be a great president. I want him to be a great president. I believe that he can be a great president. But only if we help make him a great president. It is not left to his own devices, it’s not going to happen. We have to help make him a great president. And that’s not casting aspersion on him. No president who was ever great wasn’t helped in that process. There is no Abraham Lincoln without Frederick Douglas. And we could do this all day long. Every great president had people pushing them, had people helping them and encouraging them, empowering them to become great presidents. So I believe Obama can be. I want him to be. But we have to help make this guy a great president.

– “Tavis Smiley of PBS: ‘We’re All Working For Barack Obama,’” Newsbusters, January 9, 2009.

Somewhere though, the bloom fell off the romance:

NBC News Senior Investigative Correspondent Lisa Myers appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss the growing AP scandal involving the Dept. of Justice secretly obtaining phone records of reporters with the Associated Press.

Myers maintained that it was unlikely that the president knew about the wire tapping because “from a political standpoint,” it would anger “one of the president’s most important constituencies, the press.” Given that, said Myers, “it’s hard to imagine they would have green-lighted this thing.”

–  “NBC News Reporter: AP Scandal Angers One Of Obama’s ‘Most Important Constituencies – The Press,’” Big Journalism, yesterday.

They are right to be angry, if a bit hypocritical given news organizations’ widespread indifference to civil liberties breaches that don’t affect them so directly. The AP records collection—by most accounts aimed at identifying a leaker inside the government—is an escalation of the administration’s unprecedented war on leaks, a war that has made journalists a secondary but no less real target of surveillance.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results:

President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.

“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians — that means his own cabinet, that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,” Matthews said.

“So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,” Matthews continued. “But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”

On Tuesday’s program, Matthews similarly called Obama “a ship with the engine off.”

– “Chris Matthews sours on Obama,” the Politico, yesterday.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The problem is there are people in this country, I don’t know the number maybe 10 percent, maybe 20 percent on a bad day, who want this president to have an asterisk next to his name in the history books, that he really wasn’t president. You know, like a guy in baseball who used drugs. They want to be able to say you know, he really didn’t have that batting average. He really wasn’t really the first African-American president. He really didn’t do healthcare. He really didn’t kill Bin-Laden. There’s an asterisk. They’ve been fighting like that, people like Donald Trump, since day one, they can’t stand the idea that he is president. And a piece of it is racism. Not that somebody in one racial group doesn’t like somebody in another race or group, so what. It is the sense the white race must rule. That’s what racism is. And they can’t stand the idea that a man who is not white is president. That is real. That sense of racial superiority and rule is in the hearts of some people in this country. Not all conservatives. Not even all right wingers. But it always come through with this birther crap and the other references and somehow trying to erase Obamacare, erase his record in history and a big part of it is bought into by people like John Boehner who is not a bad guy but he knows the only way to talk to the hard right is talk their language.

AL SHARPTON: No doubt about it.

– Chris Matthews, talking to Al Sharpton on their network home, MSNBC, as quoted in “Matthews: White Supremacy Heart of Opposition to Obama,” the Washington Free Beacon, yesterday.

Having committed thoughtcrime, will Matthews be forced to testify against himself as a radical agent of Emmanuel Goldstein? Let the Howard Kurtz-style showtrials begin in Media Oceania!

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“Liberal Impeachment talk? It’s a Trap!,” warns blogger/radio host Peter Ingemi, aka, “DaTechGuy:”

The congress HAS to be perceived as investigating facts.  If the facts continue to go where the evidence seems to be pointing the public will demand action.

A great example of the danger of moving early was Fr. Robert Drinan (D-Mass) who introduced a resolution of impeachment on the last day of July in 1973 over the Bombing of Cambodia.  As [Tip O’Neill wrote in his autobiography] it almost blew the game:

politically , he damn near blew it, for if Drinan’s resolution  had come up for a vote it would have been overwhelming defeated by something like 400-30.  With so many members already on record as having voted once  against impeachment it would have been extremely difficult to get the to change their minds later one.

meanwhile if a vote came up and failed, Republicans, who at the time were not convinced that there was any “there there” would have said when a later resolution came up:

“Why bother?  We’ve already been through this.”

As Drinan refused to withdraw his resolution and all resolutions on impeachment are privileged the leadership O’Neill took extraordinary measures to make sure the resolution was not called up keeping one of the leadership ready  on the floor 24/7 ready to table such a resolution.  Because he didn’t want to give them the idea to move Drinan’s resolution forward.  After a long time of this he finally approached Jerry Ford who told them bluntly the White House had rejected the idea.  As O’Neill wrote:

By not forcing an early vote on impeachment, Nixon’s allies made a tremendous mistake.  In addition to winning the vote, the Republicans could have turned impeachment into a party issue which might have allowed Nixon to remain in office and blame the Democrats for harassing him, But in the summer of 1973 the White House couldn’t imagine that Watergate would end in the downfall of the president.

And that is the trap.

“The White House and their allies will do their best to wave the red flag in the hope we charge, instead we should sit back and let this scandal and the investigation cook,” Ingemi adds. Or as a commenter at the Hot Air link to Ingemi’s post writes in response:

Better yet, develop a narrative in which conservatives/Republicans are, en masse, saying things like: “We know that many, many, many people in the president’s own party are calling for his impeachment, and we certainly understand their concern. This kind of unprecedented corruption is doing real damage to the democrat party. No one trusts them anymore. So of course the president’s own party wants him impeached and tossed out of office as quickly as possible. But we are going to wait and see where these various investigations go. Like these many, many members of the president’s own party, we expect the investigations will lead us straight up to the Obama White House, straight to the Holder Justice Department, and that we’ll learn the scope of this administration’s corruption is truly staggering. But these democrats wanting to shove Obama out of there as fast as they can need to slow down so we can truly know how deep the corruption was. That’s the best way to make sure we never get another administration like this.”

Eric Holder fumbled very badly today when he lost his cool, dropped the mask, and revealed his inner liberal fascist in response to Rep. Darrell Issa, calling him “shameful” and his conduct “unacceptable” — gee Mr. Holder, are you threatening* a Congressman? That’s rather cowardly, isn’t it? And while the inner child of most leftists isn’t far under the surface, fellow Democrat Mel Watt flipped that notion on its head, bringing his tiny grandson to the hearings. The pressure is also getting to lead Obama flack Jay Carney, who brought a goofy photo montage of himself to today’s briefing, that was almost as weirdly narcissistic as his boss’s self-absorbed antics:

JAY CARNEY FOUND! BOLO canceled. Oh, crikey. He’s standing in front of a graphic of all his faces. No laughter. twitter.com/michellemalkin…

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) May 15, 2013

As even left-wing house organ Politico noted yesterday (link safe; goes to Newsbusters), “The most charitable defense offered up on background is that Obama staffers are scandal virgins, unaccustomed to dealing with a rabid press.” See also, the Washington Post-approved JournoList, of which the Politico itself has long been tainted by. Still though, that’s an odd excuse for a group led by a hardened Chicago machine hack.

But the nation should be allowed to see more of this. (Not to mention allowing the GOP to build a “highlight” reel of leftists gone wild in 2014, similar to the Democrat video trainwrecks of 2010.) One of the leitmotifs of a Bill Whittle video last year on how the left wrecked the country was “slowly…slowly…” Despite the urge to pounce as quickly and has hard as the anti-Nixon far left did in the early 1970s, that seems like a good way for House Republicans to ratchet up the pressure on the corrupt left in response:

* “Would You Believe The Administration Got Phone Records of The House Of Representatives?” Why, yes. Yes I would.

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In attempting to explain why “Liberals Should Worry About the IRS Scandal,” Eric Liu, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton according to his bio, seems to have a rather short memory of the past few decades:

Things got this way because from Reagan to Gingrich to Fox News and the Tea Party, right-wingers have systematically and relentlessly adopted the language and iconography of American patriotism. They’ve claimed the flag and the history of the founding of the Republic as their own.

During that time, left-wingers responded too often by walking away from the contest. They laughed off the shameless jingoism of conservatives. They made patriotism ironic, the way Colbert’s giant eagle and giant flag are meant to be ridiculous. When the Tea Party first came on the scene, progressives rolled their eyes at all the tricorner hats and colonial garb. They didn’t ask themselves how they might don the mantle of love of country. In a sense, then, those hapless IRS bureaucrats in Cincinnati were performing their questionable task in an unquestionably rational way: liberals just don’t proclaim patriotism very much any more, so it was plausible to conclude that any organization using such rhetoric while seeking tax-exempt status must be a conservative outfit.

This is trouble. When words of the nation’s creedal origins and civic identity become mere partisan code, it’s bad not only for the party that no longer has access to them; it’s bad for the nation. Anyone who cares about civic education and the integrity of democracy has to be disturbed that in the word association game of contemporary politics, “Defend the Bill of Rights” and “Respect the Constitution” sound Republican.

Yes, how did that happen? It’s not like the liberals at Time photographed themselves a couple of years ago shredding the Constitution and asking if it still matters:

Oh, right. (Err, actually, oh, left). Actually, Time magazine began thinking of conservatives as The Other even before Republican founder Henry Luce permanently left the building in 1967. In 1966, the magazine founded four decades earlier by the son of Christian missionaries killed God; at the end of 1969, it determined that “Middle America” was its collective Man of the Year, writing in utterly baffled tones at how a majority of the nation could have voted for law & order candidate Richard Nixon after witnessing the blue-on-blue horrors of 1968.

Flash-forward to the 21st century, and we find CNN, which is owned by the same conglomerate that owns Time routinely sneered at the Tea Party in 2009 and 2010. Leftwing oikophobia continued as 2012 merged into the current year; Piers Morgan, described by Jeff Zuckerman, the president of CNN (expatriated from similarly left-wing NBC) as one of the network’s “foundation brands,” sneeringly described the Constitution as “your little book,” when handed a copy on-air by Ben Shapiro of Breitbart.com in early 2013. This was only a week or so after  the New York Times ended the year by running an op-ed titled, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution;” CBS would approvingly interview its author the following month.

If it’s true, as Liu writes, that “in the word association game of contemporary politics, ‘Defend the Bill of Rights’ and ‘Respect the Constitution,’ sound Republican,” it’s only because the left ceded those words long ago. The fact that they view their loss as merely “a game” is telling as well.

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“The burglary occurred in 1972, the climax came in 1974, but 40 years ago this week — May 17, 1973 — the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration,” George Will writes in the Washington Post, appropriately enough:

Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities.

This administration aggressively hawked the fiction that the Benghazi attack was just an excessively boisterous movie review. Now we are told that a few wayward souls in Cincinnati, with nary a trace of political purpose, targeted for harassment political groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their titles. The Post has reported that the IRS also targeted groups that “criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution .” Credit the IRS operatives with understanding who and what threatens the current regime. The Post also reports that harassing inquiries have come from other IRS offices, including Washington.

Jay Carney, whose unenviable job is not to explain but to explain away what his employers say, calls the IRS’s behavior “inappropriate.” No, using the salad fork for the entree is inappropriate. Using the Internal Revenue Service for political purposes is a criminal offense.

At his Campaign Spot this week, Jim Geraghty writes, “The Mask Is Ripped Off of ‘Hope and Change,’” an open letter to the MSM:

SCANDAL ONE: Dear Media: Obama’s Indignant Benghazi Response Revealed a Lot Yesterday!

Dear friends in the media.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

You and I know what’s going with the Benghazi thing. Let me share something that I first put into play during the “was Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account hacked” debate, but that comes from watching the Lewinsky scandal, the where-did –Mark-Sanford-go scandal, the why-is-David-Wu-dressed-in-a-tiger-suit scandal, and a wide variety of wrongdoing committed by politicians:

When there is evidence of scandalous or bizarre behavior on the part of a political figure, and no reasonable explanation is revealed within 24 to 48 hours, then the truth is probably as bad as everyone suspects.

Nobody withholds exculpatory information. Nobody who’s been accused of something wrong waits for “just the right moment” to unveil information that proves the charge baseless. Political figures never choose to deliberately let themselves twist in the wind. It’s not the instinctive psychological reaction to being falsely accused, it’s not what any public communications professional would recommend, and to use one of our president’s favorite justifications, it’s just common sense.

So…

You and I both know, in our guts, and based upon everything we’ve seen in Washington since we started our careers, that there’s no innocent explanation for the Obama administration’s actions before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks.

That’s just one of three scandals Jim breaks down in his post.

Regarding another, the Obama Administration tapping the AP’s phone records, Ace of Spades’ co-blogger Drew M writes that it’s the least of the Jokers in the ever-growing Obama scandal deck (to mix playing card references)…

Keep in mind, it doesn’t appear that the AP is the subject of the investigation. What the DoJ knows is someone leaked information to the AP. The number of people who had access to that information may be relatively large but it’s not infinite. By taking the AP’s phone records and matching them to the list of people who called them with the list of people who had access to the information, you can develop a universe of potential suspects.

The AP says it’s a “roadmap” to their reporting operations. I’m more worried about people who leak a “road map” to intelligence operations.

Politically this could be a loser. People tend to not like the press and they do like catching terrorists. When people find out this is about getting to the bottom of who leaked damaging national security information to the press, I think most people we say, “go get the bastards”.

One caveat…we know this administration is power hungry and doesn’t recognize any legal or traditional limits on its powers. Might they have abused the information they gathered? Obviously. So this could turn out to be a bigger deal. But based on what we know now, it’s only a big deal because the press loves to protect themselves and their assumed privileges more than anything. Even more than they love Obama.

….But if it’s the one that p.o.’s the MSM the most, to the point where the scales fall from their eyes — even temporarily — so be it:

One of the more tense and interesting exchanges during Tuesday’s White House briefing occurred when NBC’s Chuck Todd exposed White House spokesman Jay Carney as not exactly being honest regarding a talking point involving a piece of legislation that might have protected the Associated Press from the Department of Justice seizing the phone records of 20 reporters.

Throughout the briefing, Carney kept reminding reporters that, as a United State senator, President Obama had been in favor of this “press protection” legislation, but Republicans had killed it.

Todd, who had obviously done his homework, then dropped a nuke on Carney by revealing that, in 2009 as president, Obama changed his mind and “killed” the legislation, even though at the time it likely would have easily passed through both chambers of Congress, which were then controlled by Democrats.

The video at the link is pretty astonishing to watch, as Todd, smelling blood in the water, continually lays into Carney, considering that Todd worked for the 1992 presidential bid of fellow Democrat Tom Harkin (he of the phony Vietnam combat record), and works for DNC house organs NBC and MSNBC.

But then, Carney’s been having quite a rough patch all around:

Carney insisted, was his claim that there were anti-video demonstrations outside the Benghazi compound on September 11 last year. Besides, he continued, Republicans are wrong to accuse the White House of “playing down an act of terror and an attack on the embassy,” because “the president himself” took to the Rose Garden on September 12 and told the country that the attack was an “act of terror.”

This was quite an astonishing thing for Carney to repeat, not just because the CBS transcript is available to anyone who cares to look it up but also because Carney himself claimed on September 14 that the attack “was a response to a YouTube video.” Worse, five days after that, he told the press:

Our belief based on the information we have is it was the video that caused the unrest in Cairo, and the video and the unrest in Cairo that helped — that precipitated some of the unrest in Benghazi and elsewhere. What other factors were involved is a matter of investigation.

This line was repeated at least once by Hillary Clinton, many times by Susan Rice, and, on September 26, by President Obama in his speech to the United Nations. We are thus supposed to believe that the government was so concerned about “the integrity of the investigation,” to use Carney’s peculiar words, that it removed all the suspects from public discussion while simultaneously blaming the attack on a video.

Among their many claimed sins, Republicans also drew Carney’s ire for “leaking” information “for political reasons.” “That’s their prerogative,” he sniffed. But this disgust at leaks struck a false note, given that the White House had held a secret meeting just a few minutes earlier in which it passed — “for political reasons”? — unattributable information to reporters. Just a few minutes before Carney’s on-air press conference, Politico’s Dylan Byers reported:

The White House held a “deep background” briefing with reporters on Friday afternoon to discuss recent revelations about the Benghazi investigation, sources familiar with the meeting tell POLITICO. . . . I asked [White House spokesman] Earnest to explain the meaning of “deep background,” as defined by the White House, for my readers. He emails: “Deep background means that the info presented by the briefers can be used in reporting but the briefers can’t be quoted.”

And we all know there are serious consequences when this White House is angered:

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Mary Eberstadt is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. In the 1990s, she was the executive editor of National Interest magazine, and in the mid-1980s, she worked with George P. Shultz and Jeane Kirkpatrick in the Reagan administration.

In the introduction to her new book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Eberstadt does not shy away from asking the big questions about life in the west in the first decades of a new millennium. (Say, how are those things reckoned, anyhow?) She writes:

Why was belief in the Christian God and his churchly doings apparently taken for granted by most Europeans, say, six hundred years ago— whereas today merely alluding to the possibility of the existence of that same God is now guaranteed to provoke uneasy dissent in some sophisticated quarters and savage ridicule in others? How much did the Enlightenment and rationalism and scientifi c thinking have to do with this enormous transformation— this sea change from a civilization that widely fears God, to one that now often jeers him? How much did various historical infl uences fi gure into this reshaping of our shared civilization— factors like technology, the world wars, politics, church scandals, the changing social status of women, and more?

These and other large questions will be considered in the pages ahead— including, at the outset, the radical question raised by some scholars, which is whether Western Christianity has even declined in the first place.

It is the contention of this book that just about everyone working on this great puzzle has come up with some piece of the truth— and yet that one particular piece needed to hold the others together still has gone missing. Urbanization, industrialization, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking population: yes, yes, and yes to all those factors statistically and otherwise correlated with secularization. Yet, even taking them all into account, the picture remains incomplete, as chapter 2 goes to show. It is as if the modern mind has lined up all the different pieces on the collective table, only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but still leaves something critical out.

As Eberstadt goes on to write, her new book “is an attempt to supply that missing piece.” Its Amazon page adds:

The conventional wisdom is that the West first experienced religious decline, followed by the decline of the family. Eberstadt turns this standard account on its head. Marshalling an impressive array of research, from fascinating historical data on family decline in pre-Revolutionary France to contemporary popular culture both in the United States and Europe, Eberstadt shows that the reverse has also been true: the undermining of the family has further undermined Christianity itself.

During our interview, Eberstadt will discuss:

• What is the relationship between spiritual decline and demographic decline?
• Is religious belief suppressed in secular Europe and Blue State America?
• How the rise of “New Age” spiritualism beginning in the 1960s impacted and interacted with the decline of religion in the west.
• Some background on the book’s publisher, Templeton Press, founded by pioneering mutual fund manager turned philanthropist Sir John Templeton.
• Could today’s ongoing economic and demographic crises help to strengthen the family?

And much more. Click here to listen:

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(17:23 minutes long; 16MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download this segment to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 3MB lo-fi edition.)

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Transcript of our interview begins on the following page; for our many previous podcasts, start here and keep scrolling.

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“So much scandal is swirling around President Obama that it was hard to spot what must be the biggest strategic error of the week,” the New York Sun opines, “his warning to Prime Minister Cameron that if Britain leaves the European Union it could lose clout in Washington. The story ran in few, if any, places other than the London Financial Times, which featured on page one a picture of Messrs. Cameron and Obama in the Oval Office:

The headline read, “Obama warns Cameron that Britain would lose influence in the US if it pulls out of EU.”

Who in the world came up with that brainstorm? The idea seems to be, as the FT quotes Mr. Obama as articulating it for Mr. Cameron, that Britain’s membership in the EU is “an expression of its influence and its role in the world.” The president advised Mr. Cameron, in public statements yesterday, to try to “fix what’s broken” in the European Union rather than pull out. In context that’s an intervention by Mr. Obama into Britain’s domestic political situation, where a fast-growing political party is challenging Mr. Cameron’s government over the issue of Europe.

The challenger is the United Kingdom Independence Party. It was founded in 1993 in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the European Union and the Euro. For years a marginal group, with a libertarian streak, UKIP has been surging lately. It has helped box Mr. Cameron in to promising a referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Union, and if recent polls are an indication, there’s a fair chance that Britons would decide to exit the socialist satrapy that has been set up in the years since Maastricht.

So when did it become American policy to set itself against the British voters? A British exit — known as “Brexit” in British shorthand — ought to be seen as an opportunity for America. These columns have been making this point for some years, urging the idea that an exit of Britain from the EU would present a chance to forge something substantive out of the “special relationship” that Britain and America are supposed to enjoy. It’s a situation that calls for creative thinking in the White House and the State Department.

As James C. Bennett and Iain Murray noted in the Wall Street Journal in 2o11, a savvier president would have offered England a membership in NAFTA, if it departed from the EU.

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“Not Too Sharp,” quips James Taranto today:

Morgan Whitaker, a producer for NBC newsman Al Sharpton’s show, doesn’t seem to think either the murder of four Americans in Benghazi or the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to target political opponents is any big deal. She weighed in with a blog post yesterday titled “The 7 Other ‘Scandals’ That Didn’t Turn Out to Be Obama’s Watergate”: Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the alleged offer of an administration position to a 2010 Senate candidate, national-security leaks, Obama’s birth certificate, the White House’s links to MediaMutters and Janet Napolitano’s order giving work permits to some illegal aliens.

This was posted at 4:30 p.m. ET yesterday. The AP broke the story of the Justice Department’s surveillance some 20 minutes later. It’s the worst timing since the New York Times’s puff piece on unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, which ran on Sept. 11, 2001.

MSNBC President Phil Griffin told NPR in 2011 that Al Sharpton is “smart. He’s entertaining. He’s experienced. He’s thoughtful. He’s provocative, all the things I think that MSNBC is.” (And how.)

I’m sure Griffin feels that goes double for Sharpton’s producer.

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Dr. Kermit Gosnell, a “Philadelphia abortion doctor convicted of killing three babies born alive at his grimy clinic was spared a possible death sentence Tuesday in a deal with prosecutors,” AP reports today on the ABC News Website:

Dr. Kermit Gosnell gave up his right to appeal and in return will spend life in prison. Gosnell, 72, was found guilty Monday of first-degree murder in a case that became a flashpoint in the nation’s abortion debate.

Former clinic employees testified that Gosnell routinely performed illegal abortions past Pennsylvania’s 24-week limit, that he delivered babies who were still moving, whimpering or breathing, and that he and his assistants dispatched the newborns by “snipping” their spines, as he referred to it.

Prosecutors had sought the death penalty because Gosnell killed more than one person, and his victims were especially vulnerable given their age. But Gosnell’s own advanced age had made it unlikely he would ever be executed before his appeals ran out.

Prosecutors instead agreed to two life sentences without parole, and Gosnell was to face further sentencing Wednesday: in the death of the third baby, an involuntary manslaughter conviction in the death of a patient and hundreds of lesser counts.

Gosnell has said he considered himself a pioneering inner-city doctor who helped desperate women get late-term abortions.

Of course he does. Margaret Sanger could not be reached for comment.

Note that the AP wire report appears on the ABC News Website; it was only yesterday that ABC television viewers first heard about the case:

Fifty six days after the grisly trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell began, ABC broke its self-imposed blackout and finally offered coverage. World News anchor Diane Sawyer belatedly told viewers that Gosnell was convicted on three counts of first degree murder against newborn babies, as well as on a slew of other charges. Terry Moran explained, “For two months, jurors heard often shocking, grisly testimony.” He described the details as a “house of horrors.” A house of horrors that ABC took 56 days to notice.

As the Media Research Center has aggressively documented, ABC went from March 18, 2013 (the trial’s start) through Monday afternoon with no coverage. Yet during the same time, the network devoted a staggering 187 minutes (or 70 segments) to other shocking criminal cases, such as Jodi Arias and Amanda Knox.

Just shameful.

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