Top spy on foreign leader phone taps: Oh come on, of course Obama knew

You sort of knew, instinctively, that it was a load of crap when the White House tried to claim Obama had no idea his own spies were tapping Angela Merkel's phones. It's like when they claimed he knew nothing about the ObamaCare web site glitches, or the IRS abuse . . . come on. It's standard political covering up for the boss. Not exactly the model of courageous leadership, but what we've come to expect.

Still, even though you know it's B.S., you don't expect a top intelligence official to sell them out under oath before a House committee just two days later. But that's what James Clapper, Obama's director of national intelligence, did yesterday. The New York Times (!) reports:

The nation’s top spymaster said on Tuesday that the White House had long been aware in general terms of the National Security Agency’s overseas eavesdropping, stoutly defending the agency’s intelligence-gathering methods and suggesting possible divisions within the Obama administration. The official, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that the N.S.A. had kept senior officials in the National Security Council informed of surveillance it was conducting in foreign countries. He did not specifically say whether President Obama was told of these spying efforts, but he appeared to challenge assertions in recent days that the White House had been in the dark about some of the agency’s practices.

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Mr. Clapper and the agency’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, vigorously rejected suggestions that the agency was a rogue institution, trawling for information on ordinary citizens and leaders of America’s closest allies, without the knowledge of its Washington overseers.

I see a dynamic developing here that is potentially very dangerous for Obama. For a guy who has served as president for five years, you'd think he could do better than to simply pull out the political cynic's manual every time he gets in trouble. Bad behavior is exposed? Everyone protects the president and insists he didn't know! The Obama White House resorts to this repeatedly and shamelessly, not so much because they've thought through the question of whether they can keep getting away with it forever, but more because such basic standard procedure is all they know. It's beyond them to consider that if you go to that well too many times, even your staunch allies are going to worry about their reputations if they keep covering for you. And we see now that Obama's usual defenders are starting to waver. Yesterday we told you about NBC's investigative report indicating that Obama has known for three years people would lose their health insurance because of ObamaCare. Now we get testimony disputing Obama's claim of ignorance of the NSA phone taps, and the New York Times leads with it. This is not happening because these left-wing media outlets are suddenly becoming conservative. It's happening because they're recognizing they can only carry Obama's water to the extent they won't irreparably damage their own credibility in the process. They could spew the lie that no one would lose their health insurance - until millions of people started getting cancellation notices. They could run with the B.S. that Obama didn't know about the phone taps, until Obama's own top spy said under oath that this wasn't true. At some point, the guy you're covering for becomes so ridiculous that you have to start proving you can be trusted to acknowledge basic truth when he won't. If the left-wing MSM has decided it can no longer protect Obama and keep its own credibility intact, he's in huge trouble. His presidency would have collapsed long ago if not for the media's willingness to run interference for him. This could be a temporary falling-out in a relationship both sides ultimately believe they need, but if the ObamaCare news keeps getting worse - and it will - the media might conclude it has no choice but to throw Obama under the bus and start looking for ways to raise up the next liberal hero. Uh oh.