At a Las Vegas tech conference last week, former president Barack Obama told an audience that his presidency had been scandal-free. “I didn’t have scandals, which seems like it shouldn’t be something you brag about,” Obama joked, according to Newsweek. We hear this talking point quite often from Democrats.
Now, perhaps the president didn’t experience the fallout from a scandal, which is very different from never having been involved in one. For this confusion, Obama can thank the political media.
Why does it matter now? For one thing, historical revisionism shouldn’t go unchallenged. Democrats are running to retake power, and many of them were participants or accomplices in numerous corrosive scandals that have been airbrushed.
The other reason, of course, is that when we start to juxtapose the mythically idyllic Obama presidency with the tumultuous reign of Trump, we’re reminded that many journalists largely abdicated their responsibilities for eight years — which has a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in today.
It’s not about Obama’s brazen lying about Obamacare or even recurrent abuse of power. I’m talking about supposed non-scandals like “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program devised by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, border agent Brian Terry.
The body count could have been higher when a homegrown extremist who, with another assailant, attempted to murder the audience at a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas with one of the Fast and Furious weapons. An off-duty police officer killed both of the attackers.
Despite the incompetence, absurdity, recklessness, and fatalities of the program, the entire affair never really received scandal-like attention. No one lost his job. There will almost certainly be a tweet from Trump this week that political media will afford more attention than a story in which an American border agent was murdered with the gun Obama’s ATF provided.
Not even when the administration refused to cooperate with congressional investigators was it handled like a scandal. Not even when a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the gun-walking operation was it treated as a scandal. Not even when we learned that Obama attorney general Eric Holder misled Congress about when he was made aware of the program did it rise to the importance of a Trump tweet. Holder became the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats — and Obama still never paid a political price.
As it was, the Obama administration persistently ignored courts and oversight, breaking norms because it was allowed to do so. The president was articulate, friendly, and progressive. He might have executed an American citizen without a trial (not a scandal!), but his contempt for the process could be forgiven.
It’s why Obama could secretly send planes filled with cash to pay a ransom to a terror state (using money earmarked for terror victims) and most reporters and analysts would regurgitate the justification they heard in the echo chamber. One Politicoreporter might drop a 14,000-word heavily sourced investigative piece (two officials involved in the program went on the record) detailing how the Obama administration undermined law enforcement efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah operating in the United States, and most major news organizations never even mentioned the piece.
When they did, it was usually to give space to former Obama officials to smear the reporter.
It needn’t be said, but if the names were changed to Trump and Russia, the president would be accused of sedition. But by any conceivable journalistic standard, it’s a scandal that should have triggered widespread coverage. So when we see mass indignation over every single hyperbolic statement from the current president, it’s a bit difficult to buy the outrage.
An Obama official famously bragged to The New York Times Magazine that he could rely on the ignorance, inexperience, and partisan dispositions of reporters to convey administration talking points to help push through preferred policy. Rather than being hurt or embarrassed by this kind of accusation of unprofessionalism, many reporters are more reliant on the same people than ever before.
Yet many professionals who supposedly deplore the authoritarian nature of an administration that doesn’t answer CNN’s questions were generally quiet when Obama spied on reporters. The Obama DOJ spied on the Associated Press in an attempt to crack down on internal leaks. The DOJ tapped around 20 different phone lines—including cell phone and home lines—that snared at least 100 staffers who worked for the outlet. The Justice Department spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails and tracking his movements.
Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt similar Trump efforts would be framed as a “rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe,” as if we were pulling the curtains back on a fashion show. It would be, rightly, depicted as an assault on democracy.
Then again, spying was also never really given the scandal treatment during the Obama years. As Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan became aware of an operation of illegal spying of a legislative branch staffer over torture files and misled the media about it. Did the president know? Shrug. The story hardly made a dent. Likewise, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he misled Congress about spying on American citizens. No scandal.
Obama had scandal Free Dictatorship Woo Hoo who is going to beleive that load of Malarkey? Liberals.Democrats,Hollywood,The Usless Nations and the New York Pravda(Times)and other liberal rags like TIME,NEWSWEEK and ROLLING STONE
Yeah, when the media is nothing but an Obama cabinet position, you can “have no scandals” because that’s how the media reports it. Fact sometimes have a nasty habit of rearing its ugly head, though.
One scandal often forgotten: Deepwater Horizon. Obama’s director of the Bureau of Minerals Management gave BP a waiver because the very safety equipment needed to prevent the massive blowout was not ready. In the end, BP was held totally responsible since, of course, as they could not publicly claim, “Hey, we paid good money for the privilege of dodging expensive safety regulations”, since they had donated bundles of cash to the Obama campaign.
The disregard for the rule of law by the Obama administration should be a college course in the study of how nations become dictatorships. Even when Obama’s ineptitude caused the Democrats to lose their total grip on political power, he still ruled by edict, changing passed laws to suit his needs, ignoring those he didn’t like and enacting laws Congress had rejected.
Ultimately, to try and continue their anti-Constitutional spree and cover their tracks, Obama used the powers of law enforcement and intelligence gathering of the government to try and control the outcome of a Presidential election. Thankfully, his record of failure continued and all this has been exposed, finally.
he is a radicalized muslin terrorist