The Legacy of Obama and Biden: Weaponizing Federal Agencies
Contrast the Trump/Pence ticket running for re-election with the last time an incumbent ticket ran for re-election: Obama/Biden in 2012. For most of our history, the press has served as a Democracy's child, willing to tell the truth about situations as they unfold. Then, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were elected.
Either because Obama was the first African American president, or the mainstream media was so steeped in their own ideology, they abdicated their position for eight years running, and since then.
From Magnifying Glass to Feigned Disinterest
With Bush/Cheney, the mainstream media covered every infraction, error, and misspoken word and then magnified the issue endlessly. With Trump/Pence, the constant dissection and distortion, 24/7/365, has risen to unimaginable heights.
For the first five years after Obama/Biden took office, the mainstream press treated them with kid gloves and did not pursue anything controversial, at least not for long. Then, their transgressions became so egregious that mainstream media was finding it nearly impossible to continue to shield him. The list of their sordid policies, botched programs, gerrymandering of our democratic process, and outright fraud and deception was ample.
Had Bush/Cheney been at the helm of the IRS targeting of political groups, let alone Fast and Furious, Black Panther voter intimidation, the Benghazi cover-up, the Affordable Care Act’s website debacle, the Gulf Oil Spill, the National Security Agency's snooping, the General Motors recall, the Veterans’ Administration scandal, the Bergdahl swap, the border debacle, the ISIS menace, etc, the headlines would be non-stop.
The Most Dangerous Change
Cleta Mitchell is a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney representing many clients who had been victimized by IRS criminal conduct. She previously served as a Democrat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1976 to 1984. In her testimony before Congress, she asserted that the Obama/Biden administration was responsible for ‘lies upon lies’ covering up the multifarious, politically inspired wrongdoing of the IRS.
Mitchell regarded the politicization of the IRS as the most dangerous change in her lifetime and perhaps in the history of the U.S. because Obama/Biden did liberals' bidding and the press was willing to endure a wide variety of their non-democratic, dangerous practices. Thus, we experienced government intrusion in unprecedented ways, picking sides in the long-term debate between conservatives and liberals and ensuring that liberals win, as happened in the 2012 election.
Mitchell notes, “The charge that Richard Nixon attempted to misuse the IRS” for political purposes was included in the second of the three articles of impeachment against him. Nixon sought to weaponize the IRS, but his efforts were futile. "By contrast with Nixon's failures to misuse the IRS, the IRS have very effectively screwed Obama/Biden’s political opponents...”
We have yet to learn the full story about what Barack and Joe knew and when they knew it. Late one Friday, before the Father’s day weekend, the IRS “announced” that it had lost 28 months worth of Lois Lerner’s emails... after 12 months of looking. In other words, the incriminating communications that the Senate investigating committee had requested “couldn’t” be found. This obstruction of justice, in a democracy, is intolerable.
In any other era, Lerner, an Obama/Biden devotee, would already be serving hard time. Instead, for eight years she’s been enjoying her well-paid retirement, funded by you.
Contorting History
The typical uninformed voter perks up a couple weeks before an election. Such voters find their way by what appears on the front page of news sites, morning newspapers, morning talk shows, etc. Imagine that the Watergate Commission, led by Sam Ervin, investigated a Democratic president. Wait... would the Commission even have been formed?
Obama/Biden’s politicization of the IRS, and our federal agencies in general, which should otherwise be completely non-partisan and non-biased, was an assault on our civilization. The utter contortion of our democracy that we experienced with their Attorney General, Eric Holder, was a sad legacy to leave. Holder stepped over legal and constitutional lines so often that the line faded. His rap sheet is long and involved.
None of the transgressions of Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, or George W. Bush come close to what Obama and Biden did and for which the mainstream media turned a blind eye. Donald Trump and Mike Pence have done nothing on the order of these Democrat contortions. Liberal icon Noam Chomsky summed it up well when he said the Obama administration's attacks on civil liberties "go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don’t seem easy to explain."