Moe Lane

This is what we in the business call a hint .

Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism. While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics.

See, this administration never gives in to terrori… no, wait, sorry: I was thinking of the Bush Administration.  This administration never wants to give into Republicans (which is not even remotely the same thing, fever dreams of the Online Left to the contrary).  So they’re not going to want to escort Eric Holder out of the door simply on my say-so*.  But if they can get a bunch of Democrats to regretfully say that it is of course a shame that the GOP is politicizing this issue, blah blah, that it’s so unfair that Holder is a target of a witch hunt, yadda yadda, but nonetheless the reality must be faced that Republican intransigence has put Holder in an untenable position, etc, etc, etc… we all know how the game is played by now, yes?

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Indirectly, to be sure: but nobody sensible to expect plain talking from Barack Obama anyway.  At the heart of this stunning revelation is this bit from the Hill:

“Do not buy into this notion somehow that, oh, these problems are too big or Washington is broken,” Obama said. “Washington is not broken.  It’s broken right now for a particular reason, but it’s not permanently broken.  It can be fixed.”

Now, of course, folks reading that line are immediately flashing back to this: (more…)

This is a glass two-thirds full kind of situation, really.  Maybe 3/4ths: after all, it annoys some so when I get to chuckle.

President Barack Obama’s approval rating took a hit amid three controversies surrounding his administration, including an investigation into the IRS unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking nonprofit status, a new poll Thursday showed.

Obama has a 45 percent approval rating and a 49 percent disapproval rating — compared with a 48 percent approval, 45 percent disapproval rating from May 1, according to the Quinnipiac University poll.

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There’s something that I am quite happy to point out about the Obamacare jam (H/T: Hot Air) that Democrats are finding themselves in right now…

Conservative groups are preparing to use the deepening public distrust of the Internal Revenue Service to discredit the Affordable Care Act, and the Democrats who support it, in the 2014 election cycle.

Now that the IRS has admitted to unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, Republicans plan to make the agency, which is responsible for carrying out much of President Obama’s health care law, the poster child for dysfunctional government, and a giant liability for Democrats.

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And so did you.

James Taranto, on why the media is circling the wagons around Fox News:

Why the surprising show of solidarity–especially from the Times, which has labored mightily to rationalize away the other big Obama scandals, around Benghazi and the Internal Revenue service? Because they realize the Obama administration’s days are numbered (the number is 1,333 as of today). Even if Holder’s justice department wouldn’t dream of going after the New York Times–and the AP story calls that assumption into question–a future administration might not be so afraid of being seen as Torquemada. So we’re all Fox News now.

Let this precedent stand and future Republican administrations WILL take advantage of it. This is not a bluff; this is a promise to enthusiastically apply negative feedback to unwanted behaviors.

Via Instapundit.

Took Obama a while, of course.  It always does.

“The White House has tasked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan for a no-fly zone inside Syria, that would be done on a multilateral basis with countries such as France and Britain,” said Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s senior correspondent Josh Rogin.

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A lotta white people in that WaPo photo, too. 

Fancy that.

You have got to be KIDDING me (underlining mine):

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Justified, but cold:

There were some muted calls for George W. Bush to engage with the American people as his job approval numbers sank in his second term, but nothing like what we’ve seen with Obama. Even more intriguing is that these calls have been more or less a constant throughout Obama’s terms as president; my first encounter with them came in mid-2009, when a radio host asked me, “What happened to the guy I voted for back in 2008?”

And there, I think, is the answer to why we have this debate, and why I think it is almost a bit unfair to criticize those who wonder why Obama doesn’t engage Congress and the public more in order to accomplish his agenda. Many of the president’s supporters thought they were voting for the Green Lantern in 2008.

…Which is to say, a guy with magic powers that could do anything if only he wished hard enough. Which is kind of a redundant description, actually: one of the reasons that I wish that magic did exist is because then all those poly sci majors would instead go into Conjuration Studies, or something else along those lines…

…while killing rather more citizens accidentally.

The New York Times baldly says why (bolding mine): “One day before President Obama is due to deliver a major speech on national security, his administration on Wednesday formally acknowledged that the United States had killed four American citizens in drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan.” Best to have that finally on the record before said speech, eh?  – Particularly since the administration needs to tread the difficult path of following George W Bush’s basic counter-terrorism policy while still roundly criticizing George W Bush’s basic counter-terrorism strategy*.  Thus pleasing nobody, but then this administration has rarely shown any sort of concern that their actions might be offensive, annoying, or (these days) even comprehensible to others. I understand that it’s part of their, and I use the term loosely, ‘charm.’

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Cynical, but more or less correct:

The hundred pages of Benghazi e-mails released this week tell us almost nothing about how four Americans came to die so tragically in that Libyan city. But they are a case study in why nothing works in Washington.

Rather than reading these messages for their substance on Benghazi (on which officials were still basically clueless three days after the attack), try perusing them as an illustration of how the bureaucracy responds to crisis — especially when officials know they will be under the media spotlight.

What you find is a 100-page novella of turf-battling and backside-covering.

Also: damning.  We were told that this administration was different, somehow.  Which was, of course… a false thing, told to people who are now learning better, and we have to remember that people do not deserve to be lied to, even if they had been warned ahead of time.  The point is that Barack Obama – and his entire staff, explicitly including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – is a creature of the system, not its nemesis.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) This is not going to end up being a windmill joust against Barack Obama.  Much to the Democrats’ secret displeasure.

GOP leaders will help coordinate various House investigations into controversies involving the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the State Department.

But the key Republican lawmaker with jurisdiction on all these matters said that a rerun of the Clinton-era probes won’t occur.

“These are all different agencies of government. This administration owns the failures, but not necessarily the direct blame … we’re looking at each individual case so it’s very different than what you view historically as a target where it [was] always about President Clinton. This isn’t about President Obama,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.

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Title chosen with malice aforethought: after all, if the Left can whine for eight years because they can’t understand the concept of an Electoral College, then surely I can use it once for this:

No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. The use of the Internal Revenue Service’s coercive power to suppress dissent against Obama is the political equivalent of steroids. The history books should record Obama’s re-election with an asterisk to indicate that it was achieved with the help of illicit means.

And I only want to do it once, anyway.  Judging from the last eight years, harping on the illegitimacy of an election kills brain cells like nobody’s business. (more…)