Moveon.org<\/a>, and Organizing for America don\u2019t seem to be the sorts subject to unusual IRS scrutiny), but he has lost all moral authority to pontificate about restraint in matters of the IRS \u2014 given that based on no evidence whatsoever (other than a supposedly anonymous tip) he serially charged that Mitt Romney had not paid his proper income taxes. Such reckless charges (Reid bragged of himself as \u201ca one-man wrecking crew\u201d) were proven wrong and yet never withdrawn. In the aftermath of these most recent IRS disclosures, it seems legitimate to wonder how administration officials such as Austan Goolsbee were so sure about the nature of the Kochs\u2019 private tax returns, or Reid so adamant about what was supposed to be on Romney\u2019s equally private IRS return.<\/p>\nObama persists in the narrative that confusion and the fog of war made clear knowledge about Benghazi impossible for days after the attack. If this were true, in the immediate aftermath of the attack he would have shrugged his shoulders and pled that we had no idea of the nature of the perpetrators. But that is not what the president, Ambassador Rice, Secretary of State Clinton, and Jay Carney did. Instead for weeks after the attack they were obsessed with Mr. Nakoula, the supposed culprit for the apparently understandably provoked attack by spontaneous demonstrators. Even this January, Ms. Clinton was referencing a spontaneous catalyst, claiming that it made no difference whether the attackers were demonstrators or random guys on the street, as if those two false alternatives exhausted the possible scenarios.<\/p>\n
I think that after the president\u2019s advisers review the text of his press conference, they will conclude that he only made things worse on Benghazi. Channeling Getrude Stein (\u201cno there there) is about as inane as it gets (and probably misinterpreted what Stein was trying to convey).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner Senator Harry Reid may be right that we should wait for the full sordid details before demanding resignations from an increasingly politicized and now apparently confessional IRS (yet the proof of the pudding is that groups such as\u00a0Media Matters, Think Progress,\u00a0Moveon.org, and Organizing for America don\u2019t seem to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[150],"tags":[1045,870,1053,357,1044,110],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1xQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5950,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-second-term-embarrassments-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":5942,"position":0},"title":"Obama’s Second-Term Embarrassments","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 16, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Hope and change\" is looking like the 1973 Nixon White House. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In Barack Obama\u2019s 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mainstream Media"","block_context":{"text":"Mainstream Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/mainstream-media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7556,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/was-benghazi-a-scandal\/","url_meta":{"origin":5942,"position":1},"title":"Was Benghazi a Scandal?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Scandals \u2014 or fundamental transformations? by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review\u00a0Online If the CIA wanted to smuggle guns to Syria or interrogate al-Qaeda suspects in Benghazi, that was its business, not necessarily the administration\u2019s. To the degree Obama was involved in overseeing events in Libya, his involvement was most\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The World"","block_context":{"text":"The World","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"photo by Getty images via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/pic_giant_061014_A_0-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5879,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/it-can-happen-here\/","url_meta":{"origin":5942,"position":2},"title":"It Can Happen Here","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Shortly before the second-term inauguration of Barack Obama this January, I\u00a0wrote\u00a0[1]\u00a0the following of my worries over the Obama way of doing business: But the untruths and hypocrisy hover in the partisan atmosphere and incrementally and insidiously undermine each new assertion that we hear from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5966,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-president-won-sort-of\/","url_meta":{"origin":5942,"position":3},"title":"The President Won–Sort Of","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The administration spent the last six months of the campaign in cover-up mode. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online On September 11, 2012, Barack Obama was 1 point ahead of Mitt Romney in the ABC and\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0polls. He was scheduled to meet Romney in three weeks for the first\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5964,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-second-time-as-farce\/","url_meta":{"origin":5942,"position":4},"title":"The Second Time As Farce","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 20, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner The lengths to which some are going to excuse the IRS corruption (\u201cthe tea-party groups deserved\u00a0extra\u00a0scrutiny\u201d), the AP monitoring (\u201cnational security\u201d), Benghazi (\u201cconfusion\u201d \u2014 or the Republicans did it by cutting back on funding for embassy security), the Sebelius shakedowns (no choice when the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Mainstream Media"","block_context":{"text":"Mainstream Media","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/mainstream-media\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5944,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tainted-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":5942,"position":5},"title":"A Tainted Campaign?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner If it is proven that the IRS\u00a0thwarted some groups from obtaining tax-exempt status in fear that their traditional or\u00a0conservative messages might hurt the 2012 Obama campaign (especially if it did so under pressure from White House-affiliated operatives),\u00a0and if it is\u00a0proven that the Obama administration\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5943,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5942\/revisions\/5943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}