Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama,
triggered a collective national “WTF” moment on Sunday when she said on CNN
that the Obama Administration had been scandal free. Jarrett, who might have
been playing Rip Van Winkle for the past eight years, said, “The president
prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he
hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”
Pardon us while we scoff.
The Obama Administration started off with a scandal as a
plethora of Obama appointees, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, were
revealed to be tax cheats. The problem didn’t go away after the original round
of confirmations in 2009. In 2012, Investor’s
Business Daily found that 36 Obama aides owed almost a million dollars in
back taxes.
The president’s signature piece of legislation, the
Affordable Care Act, was tainted by backroom deals to get Democrats on board.
The phrase “Louisiana
Purchase” took on new meaning as the revelations of $200 million for
Louisiana’s Medicare in exchange for Senator Mary Landrieu’s vote angered Americans.
In the end, even with the secret deals, Obamacare required quasi-constitutional
maneuvering to get through the Senate with no Republican votes.
Does Valerie Jarrett not consider it embarrassing that the
president was awarded the dubious distinction of having told the Lie of the
Year by Politifact
for his statement that, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
As it turned out, many Americans could not keep their plans because insurers
canceled them since they didn’t comply with the new law. Even plans that
weren’t canceled weren’t the same after Obamacare. Premiums skyrocketed as new
federal mandates went into effect.
How about the Solyndra
scandal? Obama’s administration put hundreds of millions of dollars into
green companies, many of which promptly went bankrupt. Does that count as a
scandal?
How about Fast
and Furious? Obama’s ATF released illegal guns into Mexico where they were
used to arm drug cartels. One of those guns eventually killed a US Border
Patrol agent, Brian
Terry.
Is the politicization of the IRS worthy of being called a
scandal? The targeting
of political opponents by the Internal Revenue Service is positively
Nixonian. The main difference is that Nixon’s
IRS commissioner refused to comply with similar unethical orders from the
Nixon White House.
Originally published
on The
Resurgent
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