Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Scandals, or fundamental transformations of the United States government?

Victor Davis Hanson asks the question: was Benghazi a scandal?
Obama had gone to bed early the night of Benghazi and washed his hands of the inconvenience, and for the last two years the military, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the media have been blame-gaming one another.

On another front, a majority of Americans are furious about the partisan corruption of the IRS, and the fact that Lois Lerner took the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about why her department focused inordinately on conservative groups. In the initial, but transitory, media furor, Barack Obama called the corruption of the IRS “outrageous.” After the buzz quieted, Lerner et al. rated from the president the assertion that there was not “a smidgen of corruption.”

So was the IRS abuse a scandal or an act of fundamentally transforming America?

In other words, the IRS mess successfully sent out a signal that progressive politicians will alert the IRS to monitor their opponents, their opponents will be monitored, and, if the agency is caught, not much will happen to it. Like it or not, the Obama administration has created a sort of deterrence by fundamentally transforming the IRS into an agency of progressive change. The result is to discourage high-profile donors from giving to conservative causes — or, conversely, to buy exemption by giving generously to liberal causes.

Was the Bowe Bergdahl mess a scandal? Ostensibly, no president in his right mind would trade five high-profile Taliban operatives, with ties to al-Qaeda, for an American deserter. What president would ignore the judgment of the intelligence community and the military, mock the law mandating consultation with Congress about such releases, and then conduct the most bizarre PR stunt in recent political history by wheeling out Sergeant Bergdahl’s father, in Taliban-like beard, no less, reciting Islamic prayers in native tongues?

But was the Bergdahl scandal also an effort at fundamental transformation? The administration had ordered the military to “salute” and to get on board with the Bergdahl party line. Susan Rice, as is her wont, misled the country by claiming the deserter had served with “honor and distinction.”

The Bergdahl swap was just part and parcel of negotiations to get out of Afghanistan without fanfare before the Taliban retake Kabul.

If the virtual destruction of the VA system is a scandal that has come and gone in less than a week, was it a scandal at all? Or a transformation in the way we envision the VA?

How about all the non-enforcement of immigration laws? The surges across the borders of illegal aliens in anticipation of a border rendered irrelevant? The sort of executive-order amnesties that Obama warned before he was reelected that he simply had no legal authority to issue? The dumping of hundreds of immigrants in Arizona to punish the recalcitrant governor?

New influxes of illegal aliens represent a fundamental transformation of America. Many of them look to government for help; they will in time become proper Democratic households; and they are a club to hit conservatives with, as being insensitive to Latino needs.

Was the Associated Press monitoring a scandal or a warning of what Obama is willing to do to get the media to cool it? Were the lies that helped sell Obamacare a scandal or also the necessary means to reach the desired ends? What will history remember, Obama wonders: that the president of the United States lied about keeping your doctor and your insurance plan under Obamacare, or that the Affordable Care Act was finally enacted?

For the nobly progressive, the desired equality of result at home and greater fairness toward nations abroad require a sort of deconstruction of “settled law.” Liberal elites may be forced to emasculate their enemies, if need be, by politicizing the IRS, or by ignoring the law through executive orders, or by sending out officials to peddle untruths, or by doing almost anything necessary to enact social justice here and abroad. Some call it scandalous, but others see it as empowering and long overdue.

The more such scandals occur in the next two years, the more they will not be seen as scandals, but as mere bothersome hurdles to fundamentally changing America. In the age of Obama, you win the race not by playing by the fossilized rules of jumping over the track’s hurdles — but instead by running right through them to reach the finish line first.

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