By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, January 17, 2017
The Obama administration was full of scandal, though we
have a lazy and partisan news media that is determined to see no scandal in it.
The lame-duck columns have been nearly unanimous on the
point: Barack Obama is remarkable among recent presidents for having been
utterly untouched by scandal, personal or political.
The personal can be conceded: There is no serious
allegation that President Obama suffered from the liberated appetites of a Bill
Clinton, and the White House interns have by all accounts gone unmolested. But
this is hardly remarkable: There were no such allegations about George W. Bush,
either, or about George H. W. Bush, or about Ronald Reagan, or Jimmy Carter.
Richard Nixon’s name is a byword for scandal, but not scandal of that sort.
Nixon’s shocking personal perversion was his taste for cottage cheese with
ketchup.
So, three cheers for Barack Obama’s manful efforts to
live up to the standard of Gerald Ford. Well done.
The political issue is a different question entirely.
Not only was the Obama administration marked by scandal
of the most serious sort — perverting the machinery of the state for political
ends — it was on that front, which is the most important one, the most
scandal-scarred administration in modern presidential history.
For your consideration:
Under the Obama administration’s watch, the Internal
Revenue Service and other federal agencies from the BATF to the NLRB were
illegally used to target and harass the president’s political enemies. The IRS
targeting scandal was the most high-profile of these, but others are just as
worrisome. Federal investigations and congressional oversight were obstructed,
and investigators were lied to outright — a serious crime. The administration
protected the wrongdoers and saw to it that they retired with generous federal
pensions rather than serving federal sentences for their crimes.
The Obama administration oversaw the illegal sale of arms
to Mexican traffickers for purposes that to this date have not been adequately
explained, and those guns have been used to murder American law-enforcement
officers.
President Obama’s secretary of state was involved in a
high-profile case in which she improperly set up a private e-mail system to
evade ordinary governmental oversight; she and her associates routinely misled
investigators, obstructed investigations, and hid or destroyed evidence. These
are all serious crimes.
The Obama administration made ransom payments to the
Iranian government and lied about having done so.
Under the Obama administration, the Secret Service has
been a one-agency scandal factory, from drunk agents driving their cars into
White House barriers to getting mixed up with hookers in Cartagena.
Under the guise of developing “green” energy projects,
the Obama administration shunted money to politically connected cronys at
Solyndra and elsewhere.
Obama’s men at the Veterans Administration oversaw a
system in which our servicemen lost their lives to bureaucratic incompetence
and medical neglect, and then falsified records to cover it up.
Under the flimsiest of national-security pretexts, the
Obama administration used the Department of Justice to spy
on Fox News reporter James Rosen. It also spied on the Associated Press.
The Obama administration’s attorney general, Eric Holder,
left office while being held in contempt of Congress for inhibiting the
investigation of other Obama administration scandals.
But, no: No embarrassing stain on a blue dress.
Without minimizing the authentic personal degeneracy of
Bill Clinton, sexual scandals are minor concerns. They become large public
scandals because the numbskulls understand sex and can relate to sexual
infidelity. If you’ve ever tried explaining to someone how futures trading
works and watched his expression turn to that of a taxidermied mule deer, then
you know why it is Bill Clinton, and not Hillary Clinton, who is the face of
scandal.
It is one thing to have a degenerate president. It is
something else — something far worse — to have a degenerate government. Barack
Obama may have spent the past eight years as sober as a Sunday morning (his
main vice, we are told, is sneaking cigarettes) and straight as a No. 2 pencil,
but he leaves behind a government that is perverted.
A liberal society with decent government requires that
the pursuit of political power be
insulated from the exercise of
political power. That is why we have a Hatch Act and why the various dreams of
the would-be campaign-finance police — who would have congressmen and
presidents write the rules under which congressmen and presidents may be
criticized and challenged — are in reality nightmares. (Here, let us say a word
of thanks for the First Amendment and Citizens
United.) Having an IRS that sorts nonprofits by their political stances in
order to facilitate the harassment of political rivals is in real terms far
worse than anything Bill Clinton got up to with Monica Lewinsky, and far worse
than the shenanigans that Gordon Liddy and the rest of the Nixon henchmen got
up to in the Watergate. The BATF harassment of True the Vote and other
Obama-administration enemies is the stuff of which banana republics are made.
Using the machinery of the state to seek political power and to aggrandize the
political power one holds is the most destructive form of political corruption
there is. A sane society would prosecute it the way we prosecute murder or
armed robbery. It is a scandal and more than that: It is an assault on the
foundations of a free society.
The fact that the same people at CNN who were colluding
with the Clinton campaign cannot see a scandal in the Obama administration does
not mean that no scandal was there.
For the Democrats and their media partisans, scandals —
like homelessness and war casualties — are something that happens to other
people.
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