by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/p>\n
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 transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles.<\/p>\n
True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration \u2014 the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, White House press secretary Jay Carney \u2014 all at various times blamed an obscure video maker for the \u201cspontaneous violence\u201d that killed Americans last September.<\/p>\n
The problem is not just that such scapegoating was untrue, but that our officials knew it was untrue when they said it \u2014 given both prior CIA talking-point briefings and phone calls from those on the ground during the attacks.<\/p>\n
One theme ties all the bizarre aspects of the Benghazi scandal \u2014 the doctored talking points, the inexplicable failure to beef up diplomatic security before the attacks and to send in help during the fighting, the jailing of a petty con artist on the false charge that his amateur video had led to attacks on our consulate, and the shabby treatment of nonpartisan State Department whistleblowers \u2014 together.<\/p>\n
There was an overarching preelection desire last year to downplay any notion that al-Qaeda remained a serious danger after the much ballyhooed killing of Osama bin Laden. Likewise, Libya was not supposed to be a radical Islamic mess after the successful \u201clead from behind\u201d removal of Moammar Qaddafi. Facts then had to change to fit a campaign narrative.<\/p>\n
As the congressional hearings on Benghazi were taking place last week, we also learned that the IRS, administered by the Department of the Treasury, has been going after conservative groups in a politicized manner that we have not seen since Richard Nixon\u2019s White House. There was no evidence that any of these conservative associations had taken thousands of dollars in improper tax deductions \u2014 in the manner of former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, the one-time overseer of the IRS.<\/p>\n
Instead, groups with suspiciously American names like \u201cPatriot\u201d or \u201cTea Party\u201d prompted IRS partisans to scrutinize their tax information in a way that they would not have for the tax-exempt MoveOn.org or the Obama-affiliated Organizing for Action.<\/p>\n
On top of that, the Justice Department just announced that it had secretly seized the records of calls from at least 20 work and private phone lines belonging to editors and reporters at the Associated Press in efforts to stop suspected leaks. At about the same time as the Benghazi and IRS disclosures, it was learned that there was a strange relationship between the Obama White House and the very center of the American media \u2014 odd in a way that might explain the unusually favorable media coverage accorded this administration.<\/p>\n
Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications in the Obama administration, is linked to the doctoring of the Benghazi talking points. He also happens to be the brother of CBS News president David Rhodes. CBS recently pressured one of its top reporters, Sharyl Attkisson, for \u201cwading dangerously close to advocacy,\u201d as one report worded it, in her critical reporting of Benghazi.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, such relationships are not rare with this administration. The head of ABC News, Ben Sherwood, has a sister, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, who works for the Obama White House as a special assistant.<\/p>\n
And there is more. The CNN deputy bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Hillary Clinton\u2019s former aide at the State Department, Tom Nides, who is also a former Fannie Mae executive. Carney, Obama\u2019s press secretary, is the husband of Claire Shipman, the senior national correspondent for ABC\u2019s\u00a0Good Morning America<\/em>.<\/p>\n Apparently, in the logic of the Obama White House and the Washington media, there is nothing improper about wives dispassionately reporting to the nation on what their husbands are doing, or brothers adjudicating the news coverage of their own siblings.<\/p>\n Last month, the congressional architect of Obamacare, Senator Max Baucus (D., Mont.) announced his plans to retire \u2014 in part because he feared his legislative child would become \u201ca train wreck.\u201d Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who shepherded the bill toward passage, has echoed that worry.<\/p>\n Democrats are panicking because before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is even fully implemented in the midterm election year 2014, it appears neither affordable nor protective of patients. That reality was long ago foreseeable \u2014 given that Obamacare passed on a strictly partisan vote, with a number of questionable legislative payoffs to skeptical fence-sitting Democrats, and even after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who helped ram the bill through the House, admitted that \u201cwe have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.\u201d<\/p>\n What is the common denominator in all these second-term administration embarrassments? \u201cHope and change\u201d is fast becoming the 1973 Nixon White House.<\/p>\n \u00a0Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book,<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0will appear later this month from Bloomsbury Press. You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0author@victorhanson.com<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a9\u00a02013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “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.<\/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":[145,136],"tags":[161,12,1045,1033,308,1053,357,1044,110],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1xY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8431,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-and-hillary-are-all-too-happy-to-coerce-acceptance-of-their-agendas\/","url_meta":{"origin":5950,"position":0},"title":"Obama and Hillary Are All Too Happy to Coerce Acceptance of Their Agendas","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 22, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online What happens when the public does not wish to live out the utopian dreams of its elite leaders? Usually, the answer for those leaders is to seek more coercion and less liberty to force people to think progressively. Here at home, President\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Hillary Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Hillary Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/public-figures\/hillary-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via NRO","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/pic_giant_033015_SM_Hillary-Clinton-Dark-G-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8293,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-or-bust\/","url_meta":{"origin":5950,"position":1},"title":"Hillary or Bust!","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 17, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"She\u2019s weighed down with negatives, but do the Democrats have a choice? by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Hillary Clinton will not run in 2016 on the slogan of continuing the hope-and-change policies of Barack Obama. 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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":8974,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-many-contradictions-of-hillary\/","url_meta":{"origin":5950,"position":5},"title":"The Many Contradictions of Hillary","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax \"schemes\" in the Caribbean. That is a worthy endeavor, given the loss of billions of dollars in U.S. tax revenue. 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