I watched some of the House hearing on Friday when outgoing IRS commissioner Steven Miller was being questioned. First impressions can be wrong at times, but my first impression of Miller was confirmed as the hearing progressed. What I saw was a man who seemed to think it somehow beneath him to be forced to appear before these congressmen. I sensed an air of superiority in Miller, combined with a thinly veiled disdain for the entire proceedings.

His testimony, such as it was, only furthered the theme of the entire Obama administration as these scandals unfold. Yes, mistakes were made, but nothing, absolutely nothing, was carried out from a political motive. It was just a coincidence, I guess, that groups with Tea Party, patriot, 9/12, or constitutional in their names were singled out for extra scrutiny, while progressive organizations flew through the process with nary a second thought. Miller never admitted any real wrongdoing; he even said he didn’t consider it illegal to set up a different standard for targeted groups. Actually, he refused even to acknowledge the word “targeted” because he said it was too pejorative a term. How dare we judge the motives of our civil servants.

This is insulting to the intelligence of the American people. I just hope enough of them feel sufficiently insulted to respond by resisting the numerous attempts to run roughshod over them. In the person of Steven Miller we see the ultimate bureaucratic character: unresponsive, haughty, more-intelligent-than-thou. We also see, in a microcosm, the heart of the problem with any government agency, but particularly one with the power of the IRS.

One of the highlights of the hearing was the articulate lecture offered to Miller by a congressman from Pennsylvania, Mike Kelly. He aimed directly at the IRS’s power over people and the intimidation factor. His mini-lesson was, to use a word overused by the younger generation, awesome. It was greeted with a standing ovation from the spectators in the room. That, in itself, should be a message to this administration.

Yet they still don’t get it. In the middle of all the muddle, the president found time to attend another one of his unending celebrity fundraisers. At the event, he blamed all his problems on Rush Limbaugh. And when Jay Carney appeared on Piers Morgan’s program on CNN, he said there were no scandals. He called Benghazi a “total concoction by Republicans” and even boasted that the released e-mails showed “Republicans are wrong.” So, in his mind, everything is fine.

Who recalls Baghdad Bob, the media hack for Saddam Hussein, who went on what was left of Iraqi TV at the time of the invasion, to assure everyone that there was no real invasion? That kind of disconnection with reality is cropping up in our current circumstances. Perhaps Carney needs a change of clothes so he can play the part more effectively:

There’s an aura of unreality about all of this. How long can blatant, public lies continue to carry their contrived message?

The “I didn’t know anything” theme is getting kind of old, too:

Well, maybe someday they’ll find who’s really responsible for all these misdeeds:

Is that really out of the question? Who knows to what depths they will sink.

What could possibly be wrong with the concept of equality? C. S. Lewis shows us that it has its boundaries, and he also reveals its darker underside. Here are his thoughts, taken from two separate essays:

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. . . .

The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. . . .

Equality . . . is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men.

Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours. Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death.

My goal today is to attempt a summary of the three controversies swirling around the presidency right now. I can’t promise to include everything that ought to be included, but I do hope to make sense of it all. If you’ve been too busy to follow all the details, perhaps this can help pull it together. In the spirit of Watergate, I’ve decided to put a “gate” on each one. As far as I’m concerned, they more than deserve that “honor”; each one is far worse than the original.

Benghazigate

• The killing of four Americans, including our ambassador, on 9/11/12 is the only one of these controversies that cost lives. That, in itself, makes it the worst of the three. There are three stages of this controversy:
• Prior to the attack: Security measures were far below standards in a country on the verge of chaos and infiltrated with radical Muslim groups. Repeated requests for added security were either ignored or rejected by the State Dept. Some reports also indicate that we may have been using Libya as a center for a gun-running operation to Syrian rebels, many of whom are also radical Islamists.
• During the attack: On-the-ground communications gave us a blow-by-blow description of what was happening in real time. Those whose lives were in danger asked for help. Two former Navy Seals rushed to the scene and again sought help from the military. There was help available, and as a team was assembled and ready to go their aid, they got a “stand down” order that, according to Gregory Hicks, the top diplomat in Libya still alive, greatly angered the colonel in charge of the troops. Due to that order, no aid came and the Seals were killed after a stalwart defense. Who gave the “stand down” order? No one is claiming responsibility.
• After the attack: Now we know that the decisionmakers, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, had information right from the start that implicated radical Islamists. They chose to edit all mention of terrorism out of the infamous talking points that UN ambassador Susan Rice used to go on Sunday news programs. They uniformly blamed some obscure anti-Islam video on the Internet for causing this attack. None of the documentation that has been revealed thus far provides any rationale for blaming that video, yet even President Obama, two weeks later, was using it as the cause in a speech to the UN. Despite assurances that those responsible would be dealt with, no one in Libya has ever been charged; yet the man who produced the video was rounded up and jailed, and he remains there to this day.
• It’s hard not to believe the accusations that this has been a coverup from day one. Added to the despicable nature of this coverup is that it occurred during the campaign as a way of ensuring another Obama term.
• More whistleblowers may be forthcoming. Not one person who was in Benghazi who survived this attack has ever said a word about what occurred. Are they under a gag order from this administration? Are they being intimidated in some way?

IRS-Gate

• Last Friday, in anticipation of the release of an inspector general’s report, the IRS official in charge of the Exempt Organization Division, Lois Lerner, issued an apology for how the agency had targeted conservative groups for at least two years, holding them to near-impossible standards before allowing them to be considered tax exempt.

• Ever since that admission, there have been daily reports of how these organizations were subjected to harassment. Any group seeking tax exemption that included “Tea Party,” “patriot,” limited government,” or any similar wording in their names became a target. This was a scorched-earth attempt to defund these organizations and to limit their effectiveness as the 2012 presidential election neared.
• It also has come to light that donors to Republicans, particularly donors to Mitt Romney, were singled out for audits. This went beyond donors to other tax-exempt organizations that exhibited support for Romney. The most egregious example was the auditing of the Billy Graham Association after Rev. Graham vocally supported a defense-of-marriage law in North Carolina and then had favorable things to say about candidate Romney.

• President Obama claims he knew nothing about this until he read the news accounts. Right. As if the president of the United States relies on the media for his information. Then he asked for the resignation of the acting commissioner of the IRS, who, it turns out, was planning on retiring in a couple of months anyway. He further says the IRS is an independent agency over which he has no direct control. Really? It is under the Treasury Department, which is run by Obama’s secretary of the treasury. He has direct oversight. Any claim to the contrary is invalid.
• In a particularly strange and tone-deaf move, Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as commissioner of the office overseeing tax-exempt organizations, has now been tabbed to lead the IRS enforcement of Obamacare. What could possibly go wrong?
• Then, yesterday, Obama announced his appointment of Daniel Werfel to take over the IRS. Who is Werfel? A current White House budget official. In other words, let’s hire the fox to guard the hen house.

AP-Gate

• The Justice Department secretly got access to two months’ worth of telephone conversations between reporters for the AP and whomever they might have contacted for their stories. Ostensibly, this was done for national security reasons—that the AP endangered national security by releasing a story about a successful effort to thwart a terrorist attack in Yemen.

• Now we know that there was no longer a threat by the time the AP released its story. It had worked with the administration to sit on it for five days prior to release. Reports now indicate that the offense, if that be the right word, was in releasing it before the administration had the opportunity to boast about its successful operation. There was no national security threat at all at the time AP made the decision.
• This is a clear First Amendment issue (as is the IRS controversy), and the media, which has always sided with Obama, is showing signs of alienation from him for the first time in five years.
• Both Obama and Attorney General Holder say they have no knowledge of what occurred. Obama says, rather implausibly, that the White House doesn’t know what its own Justice Department is doing; Holder says he earlier recused himself from the operation, although he doesn’t recall just when he did so and has nothing in writing to prove it.

In every case, Obama has tried to have it both ways: he knew nothing, yet don’t worry, he’s fully in charge and everything’s going to be fine.

Let’s just say I’m not all that assured. When George Bush was president, you may have disagreed with some of his decisions, but at least you knew what he had decided and that he took responsibility for his actions. The Obama presidency has been a study in opposites:

These controversies have only begun. They have not played out, and won’t very soon in spite of the administration’s desire to put them to rest. Don’t be surprised, either, if a few more get added on to these three. The arrogance of this president and his minions practically guarantees it.

It wasn’t all that long ago—like last week—that President Obama made a rather bold statement about people who warned against big government becoming a tyranny. He said they were off-base and we should avoid listening to them. Remember?

Well, it didn’t take long to peer around that corner and spy the tyranny. This has been a very bad week for Obama:

How bad is it? Even the lapdog media has been rudely awakened:

The funniest/saddest spectacle has been the lame attempt by White House press secretary Jay Carney to handle these controversies. His statements have been so far from objective truth that even the president’s most ardent supporters have to be embarrassed by the performance. In a city—Washington, DC—where politicians and reporters are hesitant to use the “l” word, some have been heard to utter it:

Some cartoonists have been slightly more subtle in making the same point:

Yet, despite it all, there is the president adamantly declaring “there’s no there there.” Kind of reminiscent of someone else who continually assured us there was “no smoking gun”:

Nixonian comparisons are beginning to surface with increasing frequency.

So many significant stories are emerging at the same time, it’s hard to comment on everything. I wanted to be sure to write about the Gosnell verdict on Monday. I freely admit I’m disappointed by the sentence he received: two life terms without parole in exchange for not appealing. As I said in the earlier post, if ever anyone deserved the death penalty, it is Gosnell.

At the same time that the Benghazi investigation heated up last week, we learned the IRS was targeting conservative groups who were applying to become non-profit organizations. An IRS official admitted it publicly last Friday. Any group that had Tea Party in the name or that even spoke about making America better or studying the Constitution, became a target. These organizations had been telling the media this ever since the harassment began in 2009, but no one took them seriously. Now we know they were treated differently simply because of their political views.

The IRS is supposed to be a nonpartisan agency. White House spokesman Jay Carney even pointed to the fact that it has only two political appointees. In fact, the past head of the agency had been appointed by Bush. He testified that nothing of the sort was going on, but now it has come to light he knew back in May 2012. The report on Friday came in the form of an apology.

That apology is far too little and much too late, as far as those organizations who were put through the wringer are concerned. The animus of the IRS toward them was blatant.

Much of this scrutiny was apparently an attempt to blunt the conservative movement’s momentum in elections, both in 2010 and 2012. The IRS became an arm of the Obama administration and campaign.

Naturally, the White House is saying the president had nothing to do with this. After all, the IRS is an “independent” agency of the government. Yet we all know how this works. Previous presidents have been able to use the IRS against their political enemies—FDR and Nixon, for instance, did so. In fact, one of the impeachment articles against Nixon dealt with his use of the IRS to undermine his opponents during Watergate. A president doesn’t have to give anyone a direct order; those in sympathy with him at the agency can easily detect what he wants, something Obama has “joked” about during his presidency—having people investigated by the IRS. One study showed that IRS employees gave far more to his campaign than to Romney’s.

Another feature of this administration is always to push the blame onto low-level employees. In this instance, we’re told some employees in the Cincinnati office didn’t understand the parameters of what was permissible. Yet now information has come forth showing that IRS employees in Washington, DC, were right in the middle of it. But, as far as President Obama is concerned, it’s all separate from his administration. It’s just one big mistake.

I have as much trouble believing that as I do his tall tales on Benghazi.

In a week of breaking news coming at us like a whirlwind, none is more important to me today than the verdict reached yesterday in the Kermit Gosnell trial. The jury did its duty, which was by no means a guarantee. Gosnell was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder, one count of involuntary manslaughter, and a couple hundred other counts dealing with the breaking of Pennsylvania laws regarding late-term abortions and other matters.

We now come to the sentencing portion. Will he get the death penalty? Keep in mind that those three counts of first-degree murder were only the ones that were formally prosecuted. Gosnell has operated his “clinic” since the 1970s. His horrific practices—killing children after they were born—is something that has been going on for years. Frankly, this makes him one of the greatest mass murderers in American history.

Christians who shy away from endorsing the death penalty have a misunderstanding of Biblical justice. The New Testament doesn’t change the principle established in the Old. The most sacred gift God has given is the gift of life. When another human being takes away that gift arbitrarily, without any good reason, he has broken a barrier that God Himself set up. Civil government, in its job of meting out civil justice, has an obligation to take the lives of those who have crossed that line. This is not contradictory; there is a clear distinction between the murderous acts of individuals and the responsibility of governments to bring someone to account for those acts.

So, yes, I favor the death penalty in this case. There are no genuine mitigating circumstances. This man is monstrous, and an example needs to be set.

Some commentators yesterday surmised that this might change the course of the abortion discussion in America and make people less accepting of it, after having witnessed the barbarity of Gosnell’s practices. I hope so, but I’m not yet convinced. The Gosnell case can serve a valuable public service if we are open to learning from it, but never underestimate the desire of people to simply avoid the issue and continue on as before.

This also points to the moral dichotomy that exists in the minds of our citizens. On the one hand, we are disgusted and sickened by the infanticide portrayed via Gosnell; on the other hand, if those babies’ lives had been terminated prior to leaving the womb, many would find no problem at all with it.

The only difference between the life of the baby in the womb and the life of the baby recently emerged from the womb is only a matter of inches. Both lives are equally sacred. Both are innocent. Both deserve the protection of society.

Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, more than 55 million American children have been slaughtered. This is truly one of the greatest holocausts in human history. War is horrible, but just compare the loss of American lives in all our wars with the number who have lost their lives through abortion. This pictorial illustration should make it clear:

So tell me, which one should concern us more?

If the jury decides on anything less than the death penalty for Gosnell, justice will have been short-circuited. Righteousness will have been diminished. What of mercy, you say? How merciful was Gosnell toward those innocent children? God extends mercy when man has a repentant heart. Gosnell is unbowed in his arrogance. He is a man with a seared conscience. He needs to serve as a testimony that this culture hasn’t turned its back completely on a clear understanding of good and evil.

I’m continually reminded of this short passage in the book of Isaiah:

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. . . ; who justify the wicked for a bribe, and take away the rights of the ones who are in the right.

Evil has been clearly identified here. Darkness has been exposed. May the rights of the unborn be restored in our day.

Ever since Watergate, titles for scandals have added the suffix “gate,” to indicate the high level of the scandal. The Benghazi event of 9/11/12 deserves that suffix more than most. After the extraordinary hearing last week with the initial whistleblowers—indications are that more such witnesses are in the wings—the mainstream media finally seems to have awakened from its Obamalove stupor to start asking serious questions. Perhaps they’re startled at the extent to which they’ve been played as fools.

Jonathan Karl of ABC began the questioning with a report on Friday that the so-called talking points used by Susan Rice on all the talk shows the Sunday after Benghazi were substantively edited twelve times, and that every indication is that the truth was stripped out of them and fantasies inserted. Statements from the CIA as to the planned nature of the attack and the attackers’ connections to radical Islamist groups were excised; in their place was the fiction of the anti-Muhammed video on the Internet sparking a spontaneous protest. This was the fiction foisted upon the American people not only by Rice, but specifically by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. They even stood beside the caskets of the dead Americans and told their families face-to-face that the video was the cause and they would make sure to prosecute those responsible.

All of that was untrue, and it began to dawn on every reporter that they had been misled. Into the fray came Jay Carney, press secretary for the administration, to somehow explain how what is evident to everyone is just a mist without substance. In the process, Carney came across as the unsubstantive one. His performance—an appropriate word in this case—was one of the most reprehensible ever carried out by an administration’s press secretary in recent memory. No, make that “in memory” period. Never was a man so unbelievable in attempting to defend that which has no defense. If you cannot convince a roomful of liberal supporters of the president—i.e., White House reporters—that this is all smoke without a smoking gun, you have failed miserably. Carney was misery personified as he weaved and dodged and blamed others. How many times did the names Bush and Romney crop up as part of the blame game? Even liberals thought that was a disconnect from reality.

Keep in mind, though, that Carney is merely the front man for the president. Everything he said was approved ahead of time. He wasn’t writing his own responses; he’s only the mouthpiece. While I can accuse him of spinelessness and/or willingness to deceive on behalf of his boss, the greater sin resides at the highest level.

Have you noticed the silence emanating from the Oval Office itself as this controversy swirls? A president who has never worried about inserting himself into events where he doesn’t belong—remember Louis Gates and Trayvon Martin?—suddenly has nothing to say.

Neither have we heard publicly from Hillary Clinton. If she ever is cornered on this, what might be her response?

We await further developments.