I do not know enough American history to say definitely that this is the worst government they have ever had but I will hazard a guess that it is far and away the most dangerous. Slowly but surely the web of deceit which the Obama apparat threw over the murder of four US public servants in Benghazi is being torn apart. Steven Hayes in The Weekly Standard helped the process along with a forensic examination of how Susan Rice, the ambassador to the UN, was provided with a brief full of out-and-out lies with which she was ordered to trot round five different TV studios on a Sunday morning in order to give the American people a completely false picture of what had occurred and why. Hayes' investigation finally prompted a normally complacent Dem-supporting news agency, ABC, to dig a little deeper and they came up with the fact that the original briefing paper supplied by the CIA after the attack had been changed in twelve important respects after sundry government apparatchiks had insisted that anything that contradicted their version of events must be deleted. This hand-grenade from a normally docile member of the press was startling and when combined with the Congressional hearings in which the man on the spot in Tripoli who took over as amabassador after the murders said that when he heard Ms. Rice's version of events "My chin dropped!" because it was a travesty of what he had reported back to Washington, the collateral damage is beginning to look ugly.
The ABC report was like the first slight shiftings before an avalanche begins. More and more of the formerly supine members of the press began to dig and obviously they were reaching places of intense discomfort to the White House because yesterday, Jay Carney, the professional 'liar-in-chief' for Obama was forced to delay his standard press briefing whilst he privately briefed a select number of reporters. This, naturally, caused immense irritation from all the other reporters who were not privileged with private briefings and Carney was savaged during the subsequent press conference.
Suddenly, whilst Carney's charade was going on, yet another hand-grenade went off, this one from an entirely unexpected direction - the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), their equivalent of Her Maj's Revenue & Customs. There had been mutterings last year ahead of the presidential election that various Right-wing groups, particularly the so-called 'Tea Party', had been subjected to sudden investigation by the IRS. It is important for Brit readers to understand that an investigation by the IRS is no small thing, it involves immense amounts of work and time to answer all their detailed questions and, given their huge legal powers, it is also very frightening. Anyway, yesterday the IRS suddenly 'fessed up' and admitted that it had, prior to the election, mounted a specific campaign of what was, in effect, harrassment and bullying aimed at Republican support organisations.
Like some of the commentators on Fox News, I, too, am puzzled as to why this confession and grovelling apology was made at all, and also why it was made yesterday. The cynical might suspect that it was by way of a distraction to gain the media's attention and keep them away from the Benghazi story. If so, it is a highly dangerous stunt because the implications of the IRS behaving in a blatantly partisan manner in order to effect the outcome of a presidential election is enormous. Potentially, I would suggest, there is jail time awaiting some senior IRS officials and if they acted under political pressure they will sing like canaries! Anyway, watch this space for further developments.
In the meantime, ponder on the stench arising from the midden that is the government of the United States of America, the Land of the Free (to be fooled)!
