The scandals continue apace, and it doesn’t seem as if they’re going away soon. A new one was added on in the past couple of days. More on that later. But first, let’s update what we know. Well, keep in mind the only reason we know anything is because whistleblowers and some reporters who still cling to the old idea of ferreting out the facts have overcome the fear of White House retaliation and come forward to present their evidence. If it were up to the White House and the various executive departments it oversees, we would remain in the dark. They want you to believe they are clueless about any wrongdoing, yet should receive total credit for anything that goes right:

At the almost-daily press briefings and on news shows, members representing the administration have one talking point only:

On Benghazi, we haven’t heard as much in the last few days, but it’s still bubbling under the surface. Rumors are that more whistleblowers are about to tell their tales. That can’t be good for those who may have tried to put a cone of silence over their testimony:

One commentator, Andy McCarthy, reminds us of an overlooked part of the Benghazi timeline: President Obama and Hillary Clinton had a 10:00 p.m. phone call the night of the attack, which was just after receiving news that our ambassador had been killed. The next day the false story about the anti-Islam video became the “explanation” for the attack. Coincidence?

We also know now that the administration has identified at least five individuals in Libya who were responsible for carrying out the attack, but have done nothing to get them. Apparently, they are waiting until there is enough “evidence” to try them in a civilian court. Again, this betrays the administration’s worldview. Obama and his people, especially Eric Holder at the Justice Department, believe foreign terrorists are entitled to all the legal protections of American citizens. Wrong.

The IRS scandal currently dominates most of the news cycle for the scandals. I think that has something to do with how every citizen feels about that particular agency. We all know it can come after each one of us individually. There’s not a whole lot love there. And even though we’re told it’s not a partisan agency, facts seem to indicate otherwise:

We also now know that on March 31, 2010, President Obama met with the anti-Tea Party IRS union chief at the White House. The very next day the “jihad” against Tea Party and other conservative organizations began. Another coincidence?

Tea Parties across the nation held rallies yesterday outside IRS offices, protesting the unfair and illegal treatment they have received at its hands. The main person responsible for that treatment, Lois Lerner, is supposed to appear today before one of the congressional committees investigating the scandal. The word is that she has decided to take the Fifth Amendment, which is a little peculiar for someone who claims she has done nothing wrong. Now, I realize the Fifth Amendment is there to protect against incriminating oneself, but one has to wonder what she has to hide—or who else she might be protecting. What promises have been made to her to secure her silence? In the law, a prosecutor must provide evidence for a conviction, so taking the Fifth is an established practice; we are told not to consider anyone guilty until proven so. However, this is not yet a legal court case where those standards exist. There’s another court, that of public opinion, and we are free to believe what we wish about this tactic being used at this point.

Another reason to be concerned about how the IRS handles its business is that it is slated to oversee the implementation of Obamacare, a law frightening enough in itself, even before the IRS is attached to it:

This whole thing has taken on monstrous proportions. How long will American citizens put up with it?

The tapping of the phones of the Associated Press is now an old story compared to recent revelations. Obama has never liked Fox News. Now we know, for a fact, that this organization also has been the subject of scrutiny. It started with the exposure of the Justice Department secretly reading the e-mails of James Rosen, one of Fox’s reporters. Rosen was merely doing what all reporters do—trying to find out information on a story. In this case, it had to do with the North Korea nuclear program. Something about that ticked off the powers-that-be. The DOJ somewhere found a judge who signed off on the secret reading of Rosen’s e-mails because he was called a “co-conspirator” in a criminal investigation.

This jarring news sent a chill through the entire press. Never in the history of this country, except perhaps after the passage of the Sedition Act of 1798, has a member of the press been accused formally of criminal activity simply for pursuing information. Then it came out that the DOJ had targeted other Fox employees as well; a further revelation is that the department also tapped into Fox phone lines. This is unprecedented.

But don’t worry. We’re told the president is a great supporter of the First Amendment. All we have to fear is fear itself.

This is a tyranny in the making. It needs to be stopped. Let the investigations proceed.

National Review, that bastion of conservative thought, startled many this week, myself included, with an editorial that basically wrote Newt Gingrich out of the Republican nomination, and hinted strongly at a Romney endorsement. Many have critiqued that editorial—I think for good reason—but none has done so as excellently as one of NR’s own contributors, Andrew McCarthy.

You can find the critique here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/286053/gingrich-s-virtues-andrew-c-mccarthy?pg=1

It’s a little lengthy, but well worth reading. I urge you to carefully consider what he says. It’s not an endorsement of Gingrich, nor any of the other contenders, but it effectively undercuts the rationale used in the NR editorial.

Do I know for sure that Herman Cain is innocent of all the charges swirling around him at this moment? No, of course not. I wasn’t there to witness what really happened. Do I know that he is guilty of all these charges, or even one of them? No again. But as I ponder the media frenzy over these allegations—anonymous thus far and undocumented publicly—I seek truth. If Herman Cain is guilty, he should step aside; if he is innocent, he deserves our support in this trial by fire.

I do know this: his campaign didn’t handle the initial allegations well. They seemed to be caught off-guard without a solid response. Cain himself then did what I believe was a decent job of explaining the situation. Some have decided he changed his story on the settlement issue, but I can understand the difference in his mind between a legal settlement that required him to sign a confidentiality provision and a simple agreement for severance pay for an employee. Sometimes we make too much out of a minor semantic problem.

The other criticism I have of how the Cain people handled the controversy was the leap they took in blaming the Perry campaign for leaking the story to Politico. Again, as with the allegations against Cain, that could be the truth or it could not. The evidence for Perry’s people being involved is circumstantial; no direct evidence seems to exist. Cain and his team should not have rushed to judgment. By doing so, they put themselves in the same place as Jonathan Martin, the Politico reporter who “broke” this non-story.

I call it a non-story because it is somewhat like the wind—difficult to grasp due to lack of substance.

It sounded worse the other day when a conservative radio personality in Iowa said that Cain’s visit to his station made a couple of his female employees uncomfortable. Yesterday we learned what Cain had done. He had called one of the women “darling” while asking if she could make him a cup of tea. Horrors! Sexual harassment at its worst!

Has it really come to this? Is this what we now call sexual harassment?

Another internet outlet “broke” a story yesterday about a woman whom Cain pressured to come to his apartment and who woke up in his bed. It was all the buzz. Then came the retractions. No one actually saw them get into a taxi. She didn’t wake up in his bed. Etc., etc.

I think Andrew McCarthy at National Review has the right perspective on all of this. He starts off his commentary by stating he is not a staunch Cain supporter, but he is bristling over the lack of integrity in the media on this matter. He notes,

Politico’s initial story was woven out of insufficient evidence, anonymous sources, and vague allegations that—even if you construed every possible inference against Cain—would amount to an impropriety that outfits like Politico would find too trivial to cover like this if the culprit were a left-leaning Democrat.

McCarthy then researched Martin’s reporting on Obama, and here’s what he found:

I’m looking for any indication anywhere that Martin did any reporting like this to vet candidate Obama—Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, Rezko . . . ? I’ve found a couple of pieces in which he suggests that raising Ayers and Rezko was unworthy, desperation politics; and I’ve found an item in which he attacked “Joe the Plumber” after he . . . elicited Obama’s damaging “spread the wealth” comment. But nothing so far that suggests Martin thought Obama should be scrutinized over the sorts of things he seems content to see Cain’s candidacy scuttled over.

The networks—CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC—have gone overboard in their coverage. They’re attempting to turn this into a scandal of Watergate proportions. Why? I believe they hate this candidate and fear he actually could defeat their true love—the current president.

Jay Sekulow, chief counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, offered Cain some good advice on a news program last night. He said Cain should announce a press conference, make his denials as public and as strenuous as possible, and then fifteen minutes later, put his campaign back into high gear, focusing on the issues. Don’t allow this to drag on. Stop responding to all the bits and pieces that continue to drip, drip, drip out of what may euphemistically be called news organizations and get back to work.

As I write this, here are the facts up to the minute: no evidence has been brought forth other than anonymous accusations that Cain is guilty of anything remotely criminal or even disgusting. No legal action ever was taken against him for anything he did at the National Restaurant Association. We have accusations that are akin to wind, but their effect is to leave Mr. Cain twisting in that media wind.

I understand why some people are fed up with the political arena. And the media.

Moammar Qaddafi has been a renegade and terrorist supporter for decades. He deserves to be toppled. I want to see him go. I do have some issues, though, with how we have decided to handle this current Libyan crisis. My concerns are constitutional.

I could try to explain those concerns, but someone else has already done it so superbly that I will defer to him.

Andrew McCarthy, in a piece in National Review, lays out the best arguments I’ve seen for how to proceed constitutionally in a situation such as this. He makes clear distinctions between times when it is acceptable for a president to act on his own initiative and when he must first get congressional approval for military actions. I find his arguments persuasive, so I recommend you read what he has so carefully considered. You can go to his article here. I trust you will find it thoughtful and will appreciate his fidelity to constitutional principles as we try to discern the proper way to respond to the all-too-familiar chaos engulfing the Islamic world.