 by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author's program note. I was thinking of the Honorable Barack today and of how chagrined and irritated he must be these days. After all, having enjoyed the good fortune of drawing the hapless and terminally awkward Mitt-ster for his presidential opponent in 2012 and so walzing into a second term, he has been stymied by events, unable to spend quality time on his Most Important Project, the creation of a suitably grand and gaudy (immediately outmoded white elephant) library and museum which presents him to posterity as a figure of cosmic reverence and importance, a bloated evaluation most of his fellow Americans discarded as excessive and even ludicrous months ago. He doesn't care about that very much, of course. A giant foot print in indelible eternity is what he's got in mind. Sadly, he is having oodles of trouble getting it. Three scandals roiling His Excellency's serene self-absorption. It is said that bad news comes in threes, and I imagine Himself would agree about now. First, there's the nasty business of how we let down our envoy and all our embassy personnel and other nationals in Libya, thereby awakening to the sickening photo of Ambassador Stevens, one of the best and the brightest, dead, overcome not just by smoke inhalation but by sloth, inefficiency and breathtaking irresponsibility. This incident makes us indignant; it also makes us ashamed, for we all suspect that we were not ready for the kind of purposeful malice and destructive mayhem our common sense told us was inevitable against our embassies. And herein lies the crux of this matter. Who was responsible? What did they do? And why did it so fail leaving the flower of our diplomatic corps at such naked exposure and deadly risk? Riddle me this, Batperson. You will recall that when the attack on the Bengazi consulate took place, September 11, 2012, the first reaction from the administration was that it was anything other than what it actually was, a calculated act of terrorism to further satanize that date of infamy, September 11. Ambassador Stevens knew it... and his last message, by cell phone, was "We are under attack!" But the president and his top diplomatic team deemed this outrage merely a spontaneous "demonstration" and acted accordingly pooh poohing its significance... taking their own sweet time to act... our people dying because those charged with their protection didn't give it.... then lied to cover up their torpid, lethargic, entirely inadequate response. This is why the Benghazi matter is a scandal... and why the Republicans in Congress smell blood.... and why they'll continue until they get it. And right they are. Yet another email scandal... with many more to come. Let's get something straight from the start. Email by its very nature can never be entirely secure... can never be entirely private... yours to share with and only with the people you wish to share it with. We are just beginning to understand that email can never be just yours, sacrosanct and that, therefore, anything you use email to transmit is, from the moment you hit the send key, an object which others can access for good... or (temptingly) for anything but. Which brings us to the latest email scandal. It goes like this... The Honorable Barack pledges that his will be the most transparent administration in history, that all will be clear and plain, open to the good people of the Great Republic, blah, blah, blah. That was Barack #1. At the same time, Barack #2 was urging his friends, neighbors and political appointees to set up at least two email accounts, one suitable for the front page of The New York Times... the other, far more interesting and revealing, packed with the dynamite that makes Americans even more cynical about the government and its wayward ways and gives commentators like me our bread and butter. Enter two of the most important and potent letters on Earth, AP, the Associated Press. AP is arguably the most important news gathering service in the world, the people who do the hard work, the grunt work, the work that must be done to get the facts, ma'am, just the facts. People like me rely on them as the oxygen for keeping people up-to-date. Thus, when the Obama people decided to end run AP by setting up multiple email accounts they were not merely thwarting AP, they were thwarting you and me. But the folks at AP, the hero of this drama, are as tenacious and focused as they come. And when they got word that Obama appointees were being anything but transparent, they went to work with a will, using the Freedom of Information laws to open the secret accounts and bring accountability to all the poobahs who would only divulge under pressure. For of course when asked to open up, they hunkered down. After all, saying one thing and doing quite another is la specialite' of the (White) House. Why are the Obama people being so difficult, so obdurate? Not because evidence of any wrong doing has yet been found, for it hasn't. Rather, it's the principle of the thing: no one in the capital wants to be above board and honest; whatever they say. They come to win, not to get scout merit badges. Thus they reserve their God-given right to chicanery, skullduggery, and tergiversations great and small, in the process making a point of doing everything in their power to block the AP, the shining sword of a truth that is so often embarrassing to office holders who have very different agendas. That is why the Labor Department quoted AP a price of a cool million to research their records and turn over all email accounts of their senior officials. Stay tuned... there is much more to come in this matter... and as for the bomb shells to come from emails already written, I'm licking my chops for they will be rich and plentiful. You'll never get transparency from this or any other administration, but you can rest assured there will be one delightful email scandal after another, all cheap at a penny a dozen except the one blossoming at the Internal Revenue Service. And that'll set you back $50 million, give or take a buck. "So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999." It must be fun to work at the IRS. At the Cincinnati office, for instance, you get to function like a petty tyrant, determining whether by ineptitude or political point of view, which organizations get crucial 501(c)3 tax-exempt status and which ones (strangely enough mostly conservative, Tea Party related,) don't. Ah, there's nothing like power to enliven even the dullest job. This is part 1 of the hanky-panky currently under investigation by a committee of the House of Representatives. Part 2 are those IRS party animals who between 2010-2012 managed to burn through $50 million at what must have been the best parties on Earth! And for this, we need music. We need party music. We need Prince and his strident, pulsating anthem, "1999". It came out in 1982 and the world was soon dancing to its insistent beat and acid lyrics now so apropos to the current IRS fiasco. "People, let me tell you somethin'/ If you didn't come to party/ Don't bother knockin' on my door." Find it in any search engine. Then let 'er rip to just the right music for this delicious indiscretion. Let's take a look at how well they treated themselves, particularly at one incredible bash held in Anaheim, California in August, 2010. While the Great Recession was hitting hard, these guys were lavishing gilded TLC on themselves, to the tune of $4 million with nothing but the best the order of the day. Here are the facts as exhumed by Representative Darrell Issa's (R-California) committee. Item: The IRS didn't negotiate lower room rates, though that is government policy. But why bother to save? That's so middle class, dear. Item: Some of the 2,600 attendees received benefits, including basketball tickets and stays in presidential suites that normally cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night. Item: 15 outside speakers were paid a total of $135,000 in fees, with one paid $17,000 to talk about "leadership through art". One might well wonder what that was all about. Of course the muckety-mucks that made these decisions are long gone; the current muckety-mucks have pledged "never again". But we the people know better, don't we? We know that the next scandal will be deju vu all over again. "But life is just a party/ And parties weren't made to last." Except, of course, at the IRS. |
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