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.

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.

“That’s old news.” “What difference does it make now?” “It’s time to move on.” Those kinds of disdainful phrases worked for Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. Will they work again? Subject: Benghazi.

It’s not the new Watergate; it’s worse. As many commentators have reminded us, no one died in Watergate. Was the government’s response to the 9/11/12 attack on U.S. grounds in Libya a case of incompetence, false ideology, or political calculation? Perhaps all three? The official review board set up to investigate didn’t even interview the secretary of state. And when Hillary Clinton finally, begrudgingly, appeared before a congressional committee, she used her husband’s old tactics, hoping the incident would go away. For a while, it looked like it might, but those who were on the ground and responsible have now come forward to tell their story. They are whistleblowers, and the story they tell is not pretty.

Will this story get enough coverage to ensure the public is well informed? It all depends on the media. CBS finally found its voice, but it took eight months:

Yesterday’s hearing in the House was pretty dramatic. I saw and/or listened to much of it. The accusations against this administration were staggering, with most of the testimony pointing to direct orders not to come to the aid of those under attack. Republicans on the committee were well versed and organized with their questions. Democrats decried the whole thing as merely political, as they went into full circle-the-wagons mode to protect their next presumptive nominee for president:

The unasked question yesterday, but sure to come up as this investigation proceeds, is “where was the president during this crisis?” He seems to have been conspicuously absent, more focused on getting to his next big fundraiser in Las Vegas. Does he have reason to worry where this might lead?

After yesterday’s intensely personal and painful testimonies, there’s really only one inescapable conclusion:

One of the whistleblowers, Gregory Hicks, who was the number two man in Libya and who took over when the ambassador was murdered, was asked what role the anti-Muhammed video played in the terrorist attack. Remember, according to both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, this video was the instigation for a “protest” and the resulting violence. Hicks’s response was short and to the point: “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya.” In fact, testimony from all the whistleblowers yesterday made it clear that everyone involved from day one—except those at the top, apparently—called this what it really was, a terrorist attack emanating from radical Islamists.

In his press conference late last week, when asked about government employees being threatened and intimidated into silence, Obama feigned ignorance. He acted like he was completely unaware of any potential whistleblowers:

If there is any connection to the Watergate scandal, it might be the this:

If someone should ask me if what Obama is doing is comparable to what Nixon did, I would have to say no. It’s worse. Four people died.

Since many politicians say “let me be very clear” without really meaning it, I hesitate to use the same phrase—but I do want to reemphasize something. It is not a delightful thing to me to constantly point out the hypocrisies of our president and his administration. I do so only because I believe it needs to be done. It would be far more edifying and and enjoyable to write always about examples of integrity and truth-telling. Yet I feel “called,” if I may use that word, to highlight the inconsistencies and sins of leaders and the citizenry alike. The purpose? To show the contrast with the godly character that is absolutely necessary for our society to flourish the way God intended.

Being a Jeremiah-like character is not fun. It’s especially hard for someone like me who loves to see the humor in life. Perhaps that’s why I use political cartoons so often. They allow a serious point to be made while simultaneously offering a comical take on that which is serious.

For instance, recently, President Obama visited Mexico, where he gave a speech that pretty much blamed the United States for all the violence in Mexico. I think he relies on low-information voters and those with short memories to try to get away with making comments that are the height of hypocrisy:

Now, for the sake of any low-information citizens viewing that cartoon, let me remind you that Operation Fast and Furious was a gun-running scheme of this administration that led to a U.S. border agent being killed, as well as hundreds of Mexicans. For the president to sanctimoniously make such statements is inexcusable. Someone ought to make a movie:

Rest assured I will continue to fulfill my calling, no matter how distasteful it can be at times. Renewal can begin only after first acknowledging the problems.

Four people died in the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt. Four people died in the Benghazi terrorist attack. We had wall-to-wall coverage of the first, virtually nothing on the second, although that may be changing. Hearings this week will highlight whistleblowers who have tales to tell about this administration’s attempt to cover up its incompetence and failure to act. That failure seems to be the result of lack of desire to call out Islamic terrorism for what it is and to ensure reelection by shoving the event under the rug. As the pressure mounts for the truth to be known, how does our president spend his time? What does he consider worthy of attention?

The NBA player is being hailed as a “hero” for coming forward with a declaration of his homosexuality. It’s kind of an upside-down world when that is celebrated and a solid Christian faith is not:

Here’s another example of how backward we have become morally:

Meanwhile, the jury is still out on Kermit Gosnell. One has to wonder if justice will be served there, given the moral state of the country. Who are the jurors? Will they realize the immensity of the depravity on display? Four died in Boston. Four died in Benghazi. Thousands died at the hands of Gosnell. He is the face of the entire abortion industry, which has rightly been termed the New Holocaust. As with Auschwitz, perhaps we should make Gosnell’s facility into a somber reminder of our departure from the laws of God: