Presidential Scandals

Are Obama’s Advisers Unhinged?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online Surely reports that President Obama is going down to Texas at the height of the Katrina-like border debacle to raise money at the home of the popular but often polarizing filmmaker and Quentin Tarantino–collaborator Robert Rodriguez are the stuff of right-wing mythology? No one could be so politically […]

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Following the Trail Nixon Blazed

Obama shows the same Orwellian disregard for the Constitution. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  What would a president do if he were furious over criticism, or felt that his noble aims justified most means of attaining them? Answer that by comparing the behavior of Richard Nixon to that of an increasingly similar Barack

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When Failure Is Success

For Obama’s supporters, what matters is not what he does, but what he says and represents. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  Losing a job is freedom from job lock. A budget deficit larger than in any previous administration is austerity. A mean right-wing video caused the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. Al-Qaeda

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Governing by Pen and Phone

Obama used to sigh that he was not a dictator who could act unilaterally. No more. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  Lately a weakened President Obama has fashioned a new attitude about consensual government: “We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the

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‘Duty,’ and the Taint of the Tell-All

Robert Gates’s insider memoir is the latest in a dishonorable genre. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  For all the hysteria over former defense secretary Robert Gates’s new insider memoir of his tenure during the Bush and Obama administrations, the disclosures are more breaches of trust than earth-shattering revelations. Much of Duty: Memoirs of a

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What Is It about Hubris Politicians Don’t Get?

by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner  Have any of them taken two hours to read one Sophoclean play? A reelected and proudly iconoclastic Christie in recent months relished in his swagger, braggadocio, media celebrity, and often picked fights, apparently assuming that his first-persona laced speeches and gestures were immune from the sort of nemesis

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2017 and the End of Ethics

Will the Obama-era hypocrisy continue with the next president takes office? by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  Will there be a scandal if the new political appointees at the IRS sic their auditors on Moveon.org? What will the Washington Post say should the new president keep Guantanamo Bay open for five more years, quadruple the number

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How Presidents Lie

It’s nothing new for a president to lie to us, but Obama’s style is unique. by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online  In the past there have been all sorts of presidential fibbing. Some chief executives make promises that they know they probably cannot or will not keep. Before his reelection for his third term

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Obama and the Suspension of Disbelief

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media  Adding straws of scandal — Fast and Furious, the Associated Press monitoring, the IRS fiasco, and the NSA spying — on any presidential back except Barack Obama’s would have long ago broken it. Watergate ruined Richard Nixon. Iran-Contra earned a special prosecutor and nearly destroyed the Reagan second term.

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