…Shame if something were to happen to it:
Chris Christie isn’t the only politician whose deputies have been accused of abusing power by threatening those who resist them politically.
President Obama’s former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner threatened Standard & Poor’s in 2011 for downgrading the U.S. government’s credit rating, according to an S&P honcho.
Reuters reports on the testimony of Harold McGraw, chairman of S&P’s parent company:
“He said that ‘you have done an enormous disservice to yourselves and to your country,'” and that S&P’s conduct would be ‘looked at very carefully,'” McGraw said. “Such behavior could not occur, he said, without a response from the government.”
This seems to be a pattern in the age of Barack “we’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends” Obama.
“And that’s Obama’s legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane,” Glenn Reynolds noted this week in USA Today. “The problem with government is that to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy. And the problem with the Obama administration is that, to a greater extent than any since Nixon’s, it is not. Do not be surprised if the result is that people mistrust those in authority, and order their lives accordingly. Such an outcome is bad for America, but bad governance has its consequences.”
Previous examples of the Obama administration and its supporters going all Luigi Vercotti on their enemies rounded up here.
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