Two weeks ago, an e-mail obtained by the watchdog organization Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act identified the involvement of the White House in the framing of the initial explanation denying the Benghazi terrorist attack of September 11th 2012 as a terrorist attack after a year of denial that there was any initial knowledge of it being a terrorist attack. Last week, e-mails obtained by the watchdog organization Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act detailed an obvious focus by Washington DC Internal Revenue Service hierarchy on tea party groups and “organizations critical of how the country is being run” despite over a year of administration denials that the IRS tea party oversight abuses were anything other than the zealotry of a few rogue agents in Cincinnati. The President of the United States who in 2012 prior to the election bluntly told the nation that he had guaranteed that people could keep their health insurance plans if they desired, informed the American people in 2013 they may not be able to keep their plans if the plans were”sub-standard”.
Fast and Furious denials. Solyndra denials. NSA denials. Accountable Care Act denials. Benghazi denials. IRS denials. The list goes on and on. Has there ever been an American administration that dealt in obfuscation with the brashness and consistency of this one? Actually, is obfuscation too polite a word for the self interested willingness to deceive, otherwise known as lying? The reality is, that one continues to lie when it is obvious that there will be no consequences for their actions. For essentially the entire Obama Presidency an all too willing press has been willing to accept outright falsehoods and delaying tactics as simple political maneuvering on the part of the administration, to protect the president that has come closest to their value system. A very different press was in place 41 years ago, when a President found himself unable to stonewall a progressive investigation into the difference between the administration’s version of events, and the truth.
From the Watergate hotel break-in of June 17th,1972 to the President Nixon’s resignation on August 8th, 1974 – two short years – the relentless hammer of investigative reporting linked to congressional investigation caused the entire pattern of governmental obfuscation to collapse. We are approaching the fifth year of the fast and furious debacle, the fourth year of the IRS targeting of Americans, the third year since the discovery of the use of the NSA to spy on individual Americans without legal justification, the fourth year since the Affordable Care Act was first mis-represented, the second year since the Benghazi distortion may of helped sway an American election, and where are we in terms of the public understanding as to the integrity of their government in these actions?
Maybe the enormous amount of evidence that the administration has been functioning in willful deceit is finally coming to bear, though with no help from an scandal catatonic press corps. The action of organizations such as Judicial Watch, to put in the hard work of information retrieval, is beginning to get the rats to scurry. Given the bias of the press, similar disclosures regarding a Republican administration would be raw meat to the beast. Regardless, the enormous number of people who have to have their stories controlled with so many parallel lie factories is the elephant in the room. The progressive drip of information is beginning to stir the level of congressional oversight that begins to drive the story, and whether the press’s desire is to shield the President, the story may simply get too juicy to ignore.
The elephant in the room is big, growing bigger and progressively will not be able to be ignored very much longer. Certainly, one can already see that some of the participants are distancing themselves from the elephant in hopes of not getting squashed. The slippery and legalistically slimey Hillary Clinton, who skated through any responsibility for the Whitewater scandal, a real estate morass that sent twelve people associated with the venture to jail, excepting only her, and navigated professed outrage regarding the “right wing conspiracy” exposing her husband’s peccadillos into a Senate seat in New York, launching her own career, is smack dab in the elephant’s sights. It will be interesting to see how she attempts to distance herself as the need grows to throw more and more people who served under her under the bus.
Could it reach the President himself, who assumes a veneer of detachment from all responsibility to any events that happen under his watch?
Having lived through the damage that the Watergate debacle placed upon the American psyche, no one should be happy to see the elephant find him.
But, its definitely his elephant.