GOP: Don't overplay your hand

Republicans have a nasty habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  Just when you think they may have it won they find a way to lose it.  The latest trio of issues swirling around the White House might very well be President Obama’s undoing if only the Republicans don’t overplay their hand.  One of the three is not really a scandal.  Can the Republicans tell which one?

Some conspiracy theorists believe the entire IRS scandal is a red herring, a diversion to distract us from the Benghazi scandal.  Were that true the Democrats would had to have planned the entire scheme two years in advance because that’s when the IRS started targeting conservative groups.

Outgoing IRS Commissioner Steve Miller now claims they grouped the conservative applications together so that one group wouldn’t be approved while another was being reviewed.  No one thought to ask Mr. Miller one simple question.  How did he know which groups were conservative?  That simple question would’ve boxed him in a corner.  Once again, the Republicans wasted a golden opportunity.

But where a lot of Republicans and conservatives are overreaching is on the Fox News story.  Like the AP story, it’s not a scandal.  It may have been heavy-handed treatment by the administration but, so far, there’s nothing to indicate anything illegal.

In the case of reporter James Rosen from Fox News, he was reporting information on North Korea that was classified.  Whether or not he knew it was classified is another matter but this administration – any administration – is obligated to plug such leaks and that’s what they did.

They accessed security badge records at the State Department from Rosen and matched his movements to department employees.  They obtained a search warrant for his e-mails and between the two found the leak.  Now Fox News is outraged that the administration was targeting their reporter.  The fact is had he not been broadcasting classified information there would’ve been no investigation.

As I’ve stated before, the administration’s investigation into the Associated Press over another leak pertaining to a CIA operation in Yemen is what’s driving the mainstream media to actually do their job on the IRS and Benghazi scandals.  The last thing the Republicans need to be doing is trying to equate the AP and Fox News issues with the real scandals.  Once all the facts come to light and it’s clear the administration was simply trying to plug leaks the Republicans cannot have been on the wrong side of those issues if they want to be on the right side of the real scandals.

Obviously the IRS was targeting not only conservative groups but conservative individuals.  Who knows how deep or how high this scandal goes.  We do know that senior White House officials were aware of the Inspector General’s investigation.  Saying they never told the president stretches credulity. 

We also now know the State Department gutted the original CIA talking points on Benghazi and inserted their own, including the ridiculous notion that the attack was simply the product of a YouTube video protest gone bad.  The simple question is who made up the excuse about the video and why?

If the Republicans allow themselves to get sucked into the Fox News story as some sort of scandal they run the risk of destroying the credibility of the real scandals and that would be a real shame.

This is probably as close as we will ever get to leveraging an issue to make fundamental changes in our tax system and scale back the beast known as the Internal Revenue Service.  Please, Republicans, don’t blow it.

How Benghazi, the IRS and the AP are all connected

There are three stories swirling around in the press right now and I'm going to tell you how they're all connected.  There's the Benghazi cover-up.  We'll get back to that one in a moment.  There's the IRS story in which the IRS was targeting conservatives.  Then there's the AP story.  The Obama justice department subpoenaed phone records from the AP ostensibly in search of a leak about a CIA operation in Yemen.  This is the story that connects the other two.

You see, the Associated Press and most of the mainstream media view the subpoenaed phone records as overreach, at the very least, and a gross violation of the sacred bond between a journalist and his or her source, at the very worst.  Once anonymous sources understand the government will violate that bond whenever they please then secret sources will cease to exist.  The mainstream media types view this as an abuse of power by the Obama administration and they know that anonymous sources are the bedrock of investigative journalism.

The AP story may not yield anything criminal by the administration.  After all, they saw a CIA operation compromised by someone who leaked information to the Associated Press and they're probably within their rights to plug that leak.  The White House denying any knowledge of the details of the story is laughable but that's another issue.  But what that story has done is it has made the mainstream media suspicious of the White House.

The IRS story, although it only involves conservative victims at this point, is troubling to the mainstream media because they know an administration powerful enough to sic the IRS on conservatives is powerful enough to sic the IRS on them, if they ever have a mind to.  That's why they're covering this story.

ProPublica, which bills itself as an investigative journalism organization, is really little more than a front group for George Soros and his liberal agenda.  They are funded, in part, by Soros' Open Society Foundation.  And they partner with practically every mainstream media outlet in the country including NPR and all the major news networks, as well as many establishment newspapers.  Pretty scary.  They have now admitted to getting nine confidential applications from the IRS last year and using them in hit pieces they tried to pass off as investigative journalism.  As the noose tightens on the IRS scandal it was inevitable that ProPublica would be exposed.  They tried to get out in front of the story to pass themselves off as whistle-blowers when, in fact, they're part of the entire ugly conspiracy to target conservatives.

ProPublica's involvement in this nasty affair is a not-so-subtle reminder to the rest of the mainstream media that the thin line between their being used by this administration and serious journalism is far thinner than they were previously willing to admit.  They feel sullied by it all.  They've awakened to the sad fact that they had become little more than apologists for this administration instead of holding it accountable, as is their duty as journalists.  The news in recent days that the heads of CBS News and ABC News both have siblings who not only work in the Obama White House but are directly involved in the Benghazi affair surely are jolting enough even for a jaundiced news media.

The AP story and the IRS story have caused the mainstream media to double back and start asking more questions about Benghazi.  What first appeared to them as conservative hysteria over minor details is now being viewed through the newly-grinded lens of an administration that will disregard any law to get what it wants or to cover up its indiscretions.  Here we are eight months after the Benghazi attacks and the major networks are just now demanding to see the e-mails pertaining to the talking points on Benghazi.

The AP story will probably pan out to be a non-issue but it will prove to be the catalyst that finally opened the eyes of the mainstream media about what's been going on for the last four-plus years.

For the first time ever the mainstream media don't trust Barack Obama.  Welcome to the club.