Monday, January 27, 2014

Obama Scandals


* In a Jan 18 letter, Craig Thomas complained that the main-stream media under-reported Obama scandals: IRS, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, NSA, ACA. In fact, these were not unqualified scandals.
* Since Tea Party, Patriot and Progressive organizations were created for politics and propaganda, IRS agents would be derelict not to make those 501.c4 applicants prove that less than half of their expenses would go to politics and propaganda.
* Fast and Furious was part of a poorly designed program initiated by the Bush administration in 2006 to track weapons from southwest gun dealers to Mexican gangs. Under congressional questioning, Eric Holder forgot when he first knew of the program. That's something I could have done.
* While the State Department and CIA can be faulted for inadequate protection of the Benghazi outpost, Susan Rice's talking points reflected early communications from the scene during and after the attack, and the most damning criticism of the American response during the attack was flawed, as there was no stand-down order to assets that could have prevented the deaths.
* After 9/11/01, it is rational for NSA to store communication data so as to identify networks associated with suspected terrorists.
* Given that health-care is 1/6 of GDP, implementing ACA without bugs should not have been expected. Much of the complexity was to accommodate existing stakeholders instead of making Medicaid buyable. Republican governors added to the difficulty.
* Even if all these scandal claims were justified, their total pales beside fabricating reasons to invade Iraq, a secular nation that didn't threaten us and which opposed al Qaeda.