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Townhall...
The Year in Obama
Scandals -- and Scandal Deniers
by Michelle Malkin
Dec 28, 2011
With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an
early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at
the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama’s
snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no
scandal.
Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May -- while
Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill --
that “one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency
has been the lack of scandals.” Conveniently, he defines scandal as a
“widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.”
So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something
to be a scandal -- never mind the actual suffering endured by the
family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at
the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun
walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder’s
watch -- there is no scandal!
Self-serving much?
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: “Obama’s presidency has
so far been almost completely free of scandal.”
This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying
eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she
infamously bullied auto execs to “put nothing in writing, ever.” The
previous fall, the White House’s own oil spill panel had singled out
Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the
administration’s Draconian drilling moratorium and “contributing to the
perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they
actually were.”
The Interior Department inspector general and federal judges likewise
blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken
Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to
doctor the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific
objections to the job-killing edict.
In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the
Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its
fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called
out the administration’s culture of contempt and “determined disregard”
for the law.
This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare
waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some
2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal
mandates -- including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy
Pelosi’s San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid’s Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big
Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and
Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last
month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such
as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.
But it wasn’t just Republicans objecting to the president’s arbitrary
Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the
monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment
Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel -- freed from normal
public notice, public comment and public review rules -- would have
unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding
jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.
Obama’s health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced
separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising
document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In
October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court
proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion
racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that
Kansas health officials “shredded documents related to felony charges
the abortion giant faces” and failed to disclose it for six years.
That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: “There
is zero evidence ... of corruption. Where is it?”
Alter’s declaration of the “Obama Miracle” came just weeks after the
politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus “investment”
went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and
congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House
bundler and visitor George Kaiser.
As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams
erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle -- a federal broadband
boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors
Philip Falcone and George Soros. In September, two high-ranking
witnesses -- William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air
Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based
Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo -- exposed
how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional
testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared’s interference
threat to military communications.
The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about
the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of a special waiver
for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that
the company’s “signals caused harmful interference to the majority of
... general purpose GPS receivers.”
The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire
McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million
no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies --
controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman. Then there was the small
matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official
resigned amid allegations that “dozens, if not hundreds,” of signatures
were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while
Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and
Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in
contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor -- scandal-plagued
pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of
MF Global.
All this -- and so much more -- yet erstwhile “conservative” journalist
Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, “Where are all the
scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?”
There’s none so blind as those who will not see.
Read this and other columns at Townhall
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