Obama and the phony scandals

Pat Smith has something to say to President Obama:

The mother of a Benghazi victim is furious about the new White House strategy of calling the terrorist attack and many other scandals plaguing the Obama administration “fake” or “phony.”Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who was slain in the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack, lashed out on “Your World” on the Fox News Channel…“I don’t believe [Obama] anymore,” Smith said. “He’s wrong. My son is dead. How could that be phony?”According to Smith, she has been given no answers about what happened that night. She said the administration told her she “didn’t need to know.”

And this despite promises Smith had gotten earlier from Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, at the ceremony for the welcoming of the caskets, that “they would get back to me to tell me what happened.” Well, Smith has yet to hear about that from them, and now insult has been added to injury when Obama used the word “phony” in his speech at Knox College on July 24 (full text here) to describe the scandals he’s been facing lately.

The speech was not specifically about Benghazi, of course; it was about the economy. Let’s see what he actually said:

With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball. And I am here to say this needs to stop. Short-term thinking and stale debates are not what this moment requires. Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you – the people we represent.

Pat Smith’s outrage is completely understandable, as is her focus on the scandal represented by the events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, and this administration’s role in them as well as its callous dismissal of her concerns. But that’s only one of the many “scandals” to which Obama was referring and scoffing at—another would be the use of the IRS for the persecution and suppression of political enemies of the Democrats, an activity that Obama himself originally labeled as “inexcusable” and “an outrage.” But apparently his “outrage” was actually directed at those who would investigate what the IRS had done, and who are trying to figure out how high up the buck stopped.

A closer study of the president’s speech reveals even greater ironies. Let’s look at the words “distractions” and “political posturing” that come right before “phony.” Is not Obama’s labeling of the scandals that beset him as “phony” one of the most blatant cases of “political posturing” we’ve yet seen from a president whose specialty seems to be just that? As for “distractions,” who is it who has been distracted from dealing with the economy—which, after all, was the subject matter of the Knox College speech—for virtually his entire four and a half years in office? And have not those “distractions” been almost entirely self-imposed? Everything else came first for Obama—Obamacare, immigration “reform,” all the pet issues of the liberal platform—and those “pivots” to the economy he kept announcing were mere rhetorical flourishes while his true agenda lay elsewhere.

In the paragraph above from his Knox College speech, the president followed with, “Our focus must be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you.” True enough. But where has he been all those years?

Obama’s characterization of the investigations into events such as Benghazi and the IRS targeting as “phony” is also part and parcel of another characteristic he’s exhibited ever since his first presidential campaign, which is to belittle as beneath him those issues and questions he doesn’t feel like addressing. The sad thing is that, with the full and sycophantic cooperation of most of the mainstream media, that evasive and sophistic tactic didn’t stop him from being re-elected.

[Neo-neocon is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at neo-neocon.]

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