No matter who is the target, that is the essential question in any scandal. What did the head of the IRS know, and when did he know it? What did the Attorney General know, and when did he know it? And of course the biggest question of all is inevitably: What did the President of the United States know, and when did he know it?
Answers to this last question are always the toughest find.
Sometimes those who have not been indoctrinated in our union-dominated, Democratic Party-affiliated, nearly useless public school system see glimmers of history repeating itself. These current scandals in Washington are forcing echoes of those history lessons to come bubbling up out of the subconscious and play themselves out against the backdrop of current events.
And before you draw the conclusion that means comparing Benghazi, or the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups or the seizure of telephone records from the Associated Press to Watergate, you’re not going back far enough in history.
Are you now thinking of the Teapot Dome scandal? Still not far back enough.
The year was 1170. December 29, 1170 to be exact. Four men, four knights in fact, Reginald FitzUrse, William de Tracey, Hugh de Morville and Richard le Breton, entered Canterbury Cathedral, and killed Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canturbury.
Thomas Becket was a close personal friend of King Henry II, and when his predecessor as Archbishop of Canturbury died, Henry convinced the Pope to appoint Thomas Becket as his successor. Quite a plum in terms of patronage, not just in that day, but today as well. Then Henry named Thomas, after his ascension to the bishopric, as Chancellor of England. That would be similar to Barack Obama appointing Valerie Jarrett as a special White House Senior Advisor to the President. Lots of power. Power nearly equal to the King himself when the King was out of town campaigning. (Of course back then campaigning had an entirely different meaning. Back then, the King was going to war.)
Once appointed as Archbishop of Canturbury, the relationship between the two men changed. Thomas Becket resisted any attempts of the King to dominate the Church, and similar to the President, Henry II didn’t take the word “No” too graciously.
At the height of his frustration with Becket, the King reportedly shouted at a dinner with some of his knights “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest!”
And so four of his knights thought they would just do something that would really, REALLY, make the boss happy. So they, to use the Chicago phrase, “rubbed him out”.
Now, back to the present.
Is it possible that Barack Obama actually relayed instructions to the IRS to target Tea Party groups, or those groups encouraging the study of the constitution? Is it possible that Barack Obama told Eric Holder to cast a wide net in his search for a leaker in his administration? Is it possible that Barack Obama personally told those who were ready to leave to try to help those trapped in the Benghazi nightmare to “stand down”?
Anything is possible, but really, do you think any one of those three is likely?
What is more likely is that Obama’s subordinates just wanted to make the boss really, REALLY, happy and make an irritant just go away. That way their boss, Barack Obama, could skate on the technicality that he, personally, never actually gave any such order.
What could encourage people to act in such a way? Could it be the tone set by the President? Could it be the management tone of “they bring a knife, we bring a gun” that emanates from the West Wing? Could it be President Obama’s “joke” when he was told that he would not be given an honorary doctorate at a commencement ceremony at Arizona State in 2009 he reportedly said that “President Crow and the Board of Regents will soon learn about being audited by the IRS.”
Or, to follow the pattern of Henry II eight hundred years earlier, could he have shouted in frustration “Isn’t there any way to get these Tea Partiers to shut up!”
Setting the tone of an administration is as important as, or even more important than, the actual directives that are generated by the president. If the tone is one of compliance with the law and the Constitution, no matter what momentary irritation the President might express (and let’s be fair, it is an all too human reaction sometimes), his subordinates would know that he wants the law followed and the Constitution respected.
Our current President, however, sets a tone with an endless stream of Executive Orders that are the result of believing that the law is supposed to be written by the Congress. The tone is set when the President announces that he will not enforce certain laws that he, or some powerful (and usually generous) part of his base, disagrees with. The tone is set when he tries to exclude Fox News from the press pool, and even the main stream media is aghast.
The real problem with this President’s administration is, to be blunt, the President himself
The real problem with this President’s administration is, to be blunt, the President himself. He sets the tone, he outlines the results he wants, and he communicates through every action he takes that he doesn’t care how those results are achieved.
So the real culprit in each and every one of the scandals is Barack Obama himself. He was the moving force behind all this criminality, not by explicit directive, but by creating an environment where there is the mentality that anything that is done for him is perfectly alright, regardless of the collateral damage done to a few little things like the ordinary citizen or the nation.
Only one question then remains: “Will no one rid us of this troublesome President?
