God's Own Crunk

What?

In a must-read piece at NRO, Andrew McCarthy posits that were he investigating the Benghazi affair, he’d begin by zeroing in on the 10 pm phone call between Hillary Clinton and POTUS Obama the night of 9/11/12.

Again – what?

This is one story I’ve followed closely and remain strong in my feeling that this is the nastiest of all scandals plaguing the White House. I admit ignorance – I had no idea there was such a call. One of the enduring mysteries of Benghazi is, at least optically, the curious absence of POTUS Obama for eight hours as the siege took place. McCarthy, with what now appears to be, er, obvious sourcing, demolishes the idea that the POTUS was out of the loop, asleep, etc. To be clear on this, El Rushbo himself repeatedly went to the idea of ‘where was the President’ all last week during his show – no one on the Conservative side of things (and duh, the Liberal side) has focused on this.

It keeps getting worse – I cut a chunk, but click and read the whole piece:

I had the good fortune to be trained in Rudy Giuliani’s U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. Rudy famously made his mark by making law enforcement reflect what common sense knew: Enterprises take their cues from the top. Criminal enterprises are no different: The capos do not carry out the policy of the button-men — it’s the other way around.

So if I were investigating Benghazi, I’d be homing in on that 10 p.m. phone call. That’s the one between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — the one that’s gotten close to zero attention.

via The 10 P.M. Phone Call | National Review Online.

Three quick comments to precede this prescient column by Mark Steyn, his best work in ages.

1) Benghazi remains the real story – so much of a clusterfuck is it that a planted question last Friday led to this story getting out. As ugly as it is, it’s still meant as cover for the Benghazi shenanigans. The GOP would be wise to keep their eye on the far-more combustible story that involved four Americans getting killed and the political cover-up that was meant to save the faces of, respectively, POTUS and SecState. I keep hearing how GOPers shouldn’t make this political, and my response is simple: why not, since the Administration made it political from the get-go, never concerned with the facts on the ground or how they might affect the actual people on the ground?

2) Standing alone, away from the other myriad of “scandals” (a better term would be “civic atrocities”), the IRS story will continue to grow legs because of how patently evil the IRS people come off, and not because their chosen route in life was enforcement of the tax code. Steven Miller, who testified before the House Ways & Means Committee today, came off as arguably the most unsympathetic figure to testify before a Congressional Committee in televised American history. In a nobler day, he’d have been garrisoned before appearing in front of a firing squad at sunrise for his utter contempt for the body questioning him – a body that represents us, mind you.

3) The naked ugliness of Benghazi and the IRS stories remains that both were meant to ensure the re-election of the tin-pot, banana-republic figurehead at the top of the ticket. I don’t doubt POTUS knew more than a few of the details of this business – I’ve always questioned his intelligence, but I’m starting to wonder if he’s the most intellectually incurious figure to ever darken the door of the Oval Office. Sold as this kind of hyper-intellectual-intellectual’s-intellectual, I’d be mighty curious to know when the last time this halfwit actually read a book from cover-to-cover. Maybe Katie Couric can score and interview with him and find out what new publications he reads? A boy can dream, no?

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.

via The Autocrat Accountants | National Review Online.