Belmont Club

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A Circle in a Spiral

Richard Fernandez — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:22:45 +0000

The Los Angeles Times reports that a top IRS official at the heart of the inappropriate audits and harassment of the Obama administration’s political enemies will take the 5th Amendment. She won’t talk and rather not be embarrassed with questions she won’t answer.

A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd….

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

The entire agency appears to be clamming up. ABC News reporters in Cincinnati found themselves shadowed by an armed Federal office as he attempted to speak to someone in the IRS building.

As we traveled the public hallways of the building – watched over by security cameras – an armed uniformed police officer with the Federal Protective Service followed us. We were looking for a particular office—of someone who would not want to be seen talking to reporters–but chose to bypass it because of our official babysitter.

Asked why we were being escorted in a public building, the officer identified himself as Insp. Mike Finkelstein and said he was only trying to make sure that the newsmen were not a “nuisance.” He brushed aside further questions. The cop said a supervisor would call to explain.

The supervisor never called to explain. As with the mother of the embassy staffer who was assured by officials that someone would call her to tell her how her son died, the return call will be a long time coming.

By then a lot of people will be a long time gone.

The administration appears to be trying to get its story straight. National Public Radio reporter Ari Shapiro spotted pundits Jonathan Capehart, Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein headed into the West Wing on unspecified business. At least they know someone who will talk — about talking points at least.

For there are wheels within wheels apparently. Eli Lake says the unnamed chief of the Benghazi annex — known only as “Bob” — was decorated at a secret CIA ceremony.

The honor given behind closed doors to “Bob,” the officer who was in charge of the Benghazi intelligence annex and CIA base that was attacked in the early morning of September 12, 2012 and then abandoned for nearly three weeks, illustrates the murky lines of command that preceded the attack, and helped make it a politically volatile issue. While the State Department was responsible for elements of the security for the diplomatic mission at Benghazi, the mission itself was used primarily for intelligence activities and most the U.S. officials there and at the nearby annex were CIA officers who used State Department cover …

Even though the CIA’s role at the Benghazi mission and nearby annex has been widely reported in the U.S. and international press, its role in Benghazi remains a classified secret.

That implies that whatever Benghazi was about it isn’t what the official line describes. One man who might have known how all the pieces fit was David Petraeus. Thomas Jocelyn describes the two day process during which the cover story was crafted.

After nearly two days of editing, then CIA director David Petraeus was sent the revised Benghazi talking points on September 15, 2012. He was less than impressed, to put it mildly.

“No mention of the cable to Cairo, either?” Petraeus wrote in an email. “I’d just as soon not use this, then…”

Petraeus punted, however, writing that ultimately it was the National Security Staff’s (NSS’s) “call” to use the edited talking points.

That suggests that the National Security Staff is ultimately in control of the narrative, responsible for putting together the political explanation that the public would be fed. Though Petraeus as director of Central Intelligence would have been on the National Security Council the staff under Tom Donilon apparently had charge of the talking points.

Interestingly Tom Donilon, like so many of his administration colleagues, is rumored to be on his way out. Laura Rozen at the Back Channel writes:

Several associates tell the Back Channel they believe that National Security Advisor Tom Donilon is planning to leave this summer—several months earlier than previous reports had suggested, and even as the White House said Donilon has no plans to depart.

On the one hand he doesn’t seem to want to leave, but he’s been doing this five long years, one associate, speaking not for attribution, said Friday …

US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice is expected to succeed Donilon as National Security Advisor.

So perhap Rice’s embarassing stint as the spokesman for the lie about the video made in LA didn’t really hurt her career after all. Now she gets to sit at the right hand of Obama.

From the administration’s style of work one might come to believe that a disinformation component is built into almost every major initiative the administration undertakes. Benghazi, the AP scandal,the IRS crackdown on the President’s political opponents in the lead up to the 2012 elections — all these — seem compartmented into levels of access. like layers of an onion, each layer guarded by the stalwart likes of Lois Lerner.

The particular problem the administration faces with eruption of a multiplicity of scandals is not that they are many, but that they are really one. Each of these scandals isn’t a separate brook with its sources in a different part of the mountain. Rather they are all the same spring; ultimately a particular instance in the actions of a single manager; the product of a place where all the threads converge, the throne to which all roads lead. Where would that be? Well maybe Jonathan Capehart, Josh Marshall, and Ezra Klein can tell us.

At least these gentlemen can tell us what they’ve been told it is. Whether they themselves believe it, one cannot say. Still I have my theory about what this all comes to — which I’ll share with you in a couple of decades when I’m done editing my talking points.

Raymond Maxwell, one of the lower level State Department officials who fired over the Benghazi attacks was also something of a poet. After his dismissal Maxwell made news by penning lines which some might interpret as protest verses.

The web of lies they weave
gets tighter and tighter in its deceit
until it bottoms out
-at a very low frequency –
and implodes

Yet all the while,
the more they talk,
the more they lie,
and the deeper down the hole they go

But poet though Maxwell is someone expressed the thought before him …

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it’s own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone,
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream,
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

As the images unwind
Like the circles
That you find
In the windmills of your mind

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Long Live the Digital Revolution

Richard Fernandez — Tue, 21 May 2013 00:30:20 +0000

The digital revolution has left no part of the world untouched. But each country has adopted technology in its own particular way. In the Philippines cellphones are used to transfer small sums of money among criminal gangs. In Boston phone cameras were used to track terrorists down. And all over the world millions of abstracted people are glued to their smart phones and tablets making their dates, finding their way or just watching stuff. But in some countries the digital revolution has taken a particular form. Russia for example, is the world capital of the dash cam video.

The question is why.

“Dash cams turn out to be nearly indispensable for Russian drivers.” Law enforcement is so corrupt in Russia and crime so prevalent that by general assent the dash cam has been nominated the most objective witness available.

It’s an interesting example of how a society without any trusted institutions creates a web of collateral information that essentially relies on a the correlation of distributed, unrelated sensors. When nobody is trusted, then trust nobody.

Lax law enforcement has also made is easier for organized crime to make millions from insurance scams. It’s a straightforward racket — crashes can be staged, or already damaged cars presented as evidence of a crash that never even occurred. The perpetrators can certainly produce witnesses that corroborate their version of events.

These scams became so common that Russian auto insurance companies have started denying claims with little reason. … the Russian civil code allows judges a ton of latitude in determining what evidence can be presented in court. Eyewitness testimony can be offered, but it is rarely given much weight because of the myriad of issues discussed above. Dash cams won’t lie, so you really need one to have any hope of winning a case.

So without further ado, Russia presents — the dash cam.

And from Aristide.

Self-referential Lies

Richard Fernandez — Mon, 20 May 2013 09:12:41 +0000

It’s them low-level officials acting up again. The Blaze reports another leak. “The U.S. has apologized to Israel for leaking details of the attack in Syria. Senior administration officials said to their [Israeli] counterparts that they are examining the issue and that low-level [officials] were responsible for the leak. US officials told that they [will] review the matter. The leak forced Assad to react harshly.”

Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center, told TheBlaze, “It requires the Syrians to react officially rather than deny that it happened or that it was an accident. It forces Syria and Hezbollah and Iran to react officially and say they want to seek revenge, which makes things more dangerous for Israel.”

“Can you imagine if things were reversed and somebody did that to the U.S.?” he added.

There are no “somebodys” in the US, Barry. Only flunkeys who do the wrong things entirely on their own.

Israel was identified in a CNN article dated May 3. “The United States believes Israel has conducted an airstrike into Syria, two U.S. officials first told CNN.”

U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are reviewing classified data showing Israel most likely conducted a strike in the Thursday-Friday time frame, according to both officials. This is the same time frame that the U.S. collected additional data showing Israel was flying a high number of warplanes over Lebanon.

One official said the United States had limited information so far and could not yet confirm those are the specific warplanes that conducted a strike. Based on initial indications, the U.S. does not believe Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace to conduct the strikes.

The New York Times also carried the story on the same day. “WASHINGTON — Israel aircraft bombed a target in Syria overnight Thursday, an Obama administration official said Friday night, as United States officials said they were considering military options, including carrying out their own airstrikes.” The NYT story said the Israelis weren’t talking, but their American sources — peons to be sure – had a great deal to say.

A spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington declined on Friday night to comment on the Israeli attack, which was first reported by CNN, saying only in a statement, “Israel is determined to prevent the transfer of chemical weapons or other game-changing weaponry by the Syrian regime to terrorists, specially to Hezbollah in Lebanon.”

The Israeli attack came as the Obama administration — as part of its examination of possible responses to obtaining conclusive proof that Mr. Assad has used chemical weapons — is considering military options with allies. Those options include attacking Syria’s antiaircraft systems, military aircraft and some of its missile fleet, according to senior officials from several countries.

Those officials say that attacking the chemical stockpiles directly has been all but ruled out. “You could cause exactly the disaster you are trying to prevent,” a senior Israeli military official said in an interview last week in Tel Aviv.

But attacking Mr. Assad’s main delivery systems, the officials say, would curtail his ability to transport those weapons any significant distance. “This wouldn’t stop him from using it on a village, or just releasing it on the ground, or handing something to Hezbollah,” said one European official who has been involved in the conversations. “But it would limit the damage greatly.”

A paranoid person might think that someone in the administration — low level of course — was simultaneously glad to report that Israel had enforced President Obama’s Red Line so he wouldn’t have to sweat bullets while simultaneously relieving him of the the remotest responsibility for it.

It’s like those scenes in police stations where the answer to every question is, “he did it”.

At any rate some beneficial purpose was served though who can say what. But we live in an age of marvels, where stuff just happens, where Presidents learn of their subordinate’s actions only after reading the newspapers and Libyan out for a walk attack embassies at the instigation of YouTube videos and yet people can’t recall nothing about nothing.

Of course the Syrians would have strongly suspected, if not outright known that someone like Israel was responsible for obliterating one of their top-secret military facilities. But as Barry Rubin pointed out, knowing and hearing someone fess up to it are two different things. Just ask Eric Holder or any of the administration’s spokespersons whose memory can alternate in an instant between photographic and completely amnesiac. It is apparently permissible to insult the intelligence of the listener for so long as the dishonesty is uttered in a solemn and lawyerly way, though perhaps that is a contradiction in terms or even worse a term of art.

What is interesting to consider is whether things were always this way — only we are more aware of the evasions now — or whether Washington DC is now so saturated with spin doctors, communications consultants and attorneys that they’ve spun everything conceivable on general principle so that we’ve reached the point where they only completely factual thing on the front pages of the major newspapers is the date on the masthead.

That raises a peculiar problem, which can be phrased in this way: if one day the administration decided to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth how would we know? Would we recognize it? How would a public accustomed to be lied to and spun finally regard a true fact? The first reaction to anything presenting itself as the truth would probably be suspicion.

“No it can’t be.”

And perhaps for that reason there’s no alternative but to keep telling fibs, planting questions in open forums, rigging polls, seminar calling TV shows, leaking secrets, parsing words, redacting memos, altering talking points. This is how we talk to each other now in a world where there is no alternative to lying. We are hoist by our petard. Doomed to pay each other in debased coinage. After all this time maybe even the truth would not recognize itself.

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Within Range

Richard Fernandez — Sun, 19 May 2013 19:58:05 +0000

One trivial but often underappreciated fact about the battle of Midway was that for Spruance to hit Nagumo he had to expose his carriers to reciprocal damage. Once you close with an opponent he closes with you. Risk is often symmetric. Nimitz understood this well, and it lies at the heart of his order to the carriers on that occasion. He told Spruance, “you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting… greater damage on the enemy.”

The Bob Woodwards of the future will have their hands full examining whether Barack Obama understood this principle as well as Nimitz. Jean Kaufman at PJMedia has an incisive piece titled “Obama, the Betrayer” which indirectly addresses this very point. She argues the Obama’s past political triumphs were essentially achieved by pre-emptive strikes on his foes, none of whom had the temerity to retaliate effectively. Perhaps for Obama as for Nagumo there developed the conceit of the Gaishu Isshoku — “one touch of the iron gauntlet” — which was all it took to win the day. Kaufman describes the genesis of Obama’s style:

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s well worth reading to get a key to the very special Obama ruthlessness. The gist of it is that newcomer Obama, after being tapped by established Chicago African-American politician Alice Palmer to be her successor, mounted legal challenges to the petitions of all his Democratic rivals (including, it turns out, Palmer), knocking them off the primary ballot on technicalities and running unopposed, thereby guaranteeing his own victory before the voting ever began.

Obama won his first race for office not because of his intra-party collegiality, but due to his lack of it. Thus, when he got to the Illinois Senate his reputation preceded him and his potential for power was acknowledged. He seems to have adopted the Machiavellian strategy that it is better to be feared than loved.

The efficacy of secrecy, speed, disinformation and ruthlessness — especially ruthlessness — may have surprised Obama at first. But once proved these methods became part of his political technique. The Daily Beast has a portrait of the kind of man required for this style of operations: Jonathan Malis was an attorney who impressed Eric Holder by being even meaner than him; and whom he consequently recruited.

One of the lead federal prosecutors behind the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of the Associated Press’s phone records is deputy chief of the criminal division Jonathan Malis—a hard-charging 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office who is known among colleagues for a single-minded, even zealous, pursuit of his criminal targets. And there’s perhaps no better illustration of his aggressive style than the fact that he once had a caustic, highly personal exchange with Eric Holder, who at the time was a defense lawyer in private practice but is now the attorney general—that is, Malis’s boss.

Malis was Holder’s kind of guy. Like the Borg, Obama’s team assimilated the most ruthless of the opponents they encountered. But if character is fate, so is bureaucratic repertoire. Agencies develop a set number of scripts they can run; and limited repertoires were memorably illustrated in the dialog from the movie “Five Easy Pieces”.

Dupea: I’d like a, uh, plain omelette, uh, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, a cup of coffee, and wheat toast.

Waitress: No substitutions.

Dupea: What do you mean? You don’t have any tomatoes?

Waitress: Only what’s on the menu. You can have a number two – a plain omelette. It comes with cottage fries and rolls.

Dupea: Yeah, I know what it comes with, but it’s not what I want.

Waitress: Well, I’ll come back when you make up your mind.

Dupea: Wait a minute. I have made up my mind. I’d like a plain omelette, no potatoes on the plate, a cup of coffee, and a side order of wheat toast.

Waitress: I’m sorry. We don’t have any side orders of toast. I’ll give you an English muffin or a coffee roll.

Dupea: What do you mean you don’t make side orders of toast? You make sandwiches, don’t you?

If you keep recruiting corsairs then piracy becomes an inevitable part of the way you operate. Once thuggery is on the menu it worms its way into the dishes. Soon it will come with the sandwiches as standard. As pointed out in a previous post, the most striking thing about the Obama scandals is “the sheer, unbridled malevolence” of them; it seems almost a signature. Maybe it is signature.

To illustrate Forbes describes a suit by a health care provider in California against the IRS for seizing 60 million health care records, including those of all California state judges, without a warrant.

According to a story by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed healthcare provider in California is suing the IRS and 15 unnamed agents, alleging that they improperly seized some 60 million medical records of 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges on March 11, 2011. …

“These medical records contained intimate and private information of more than 10,000,000 Americans, information that by its nature includes information about treatment for any kind of medical concern, including psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual or drug treatment, and a wide range of medical matters covering the most intimate and private of concerns,” the complaint states.

“Despite knowing that these medical records were not within the scope of the warrant, defendants threatened to ‘rip’ the servers containing the medical data out of the building if IT personnel would not voluntarily hand them over,” the complaint reads.

Comes a point when you just don’t do things any other way. Actions like these were a sign that “calculated risk” had given way to habitual recklessness. And recklessness — as Nagumo discovered — isn’t free. It catches up with you sometime.

It’s interesting to speculate how early in the administration’s history this recklessness became established. There are signs that suggest it was there as early as Benghazi. Andy McCarthy at the National Review argues from timing that the infamous video story had its genesis in a 10 pm phone call between Hillary and Obama on the night of the attack.

We do not have a recording of this call, and neither Clinton nor the White House has described it beyond noting that it happened. But we do know that, just a few minutes after Obama called Clinton, the Washington press began reporting that the State Department had issued a statement by Clinton regarding the Benghazi attack. In it, she asserted:

Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.

Gee, what do you suppose Obama and Clinton talked about in that 10 p.m. call?

Interestingly, CNS News asked Carney whether, in that 10 p.m. phone call, the president and Secretary Clinton discussed the statement that Clinton was about to issue, and, specifically, whether they discussed â€œthe issue of inflammatory material posted on the Internet.

Carney declined to answer.

They thought they could play fast and loose with reality. Why? They had done it before. So they would do it again.

What happened next may have surprised Obama. Unlike the earlier challenges mounted at him the Benghazi scandal did not go away. Maybe he had made too many any enemies. Perhaps there were too many in the know to shut up entirely. But in the end the conservatives kept coming in their own clunky way, almost like the torpedo squadrons at Midway. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the Benghazi hearings is they never gave up, even when none of the hearings or stories in the conservative media seemed to strike a direct hit. But they held the public’s attention until a seemingly endless serial of scandals materialized out of the sky to fall on Obama’s narrative.

Clarice Feldman has a wonderfully atmospheric piece describing the the process of lawyering up. Attorneys are scavengers of the DC ecosystem. They feast on the fallen. And what is more the fallen need them. Still, scandals mean legal fees and legal fees mean lawyers. The culture of the District is dog-eat-dog and for the first time in its long career Obama’s sneak attack force is feeling the bite of the dogs.

In a little noticed set of articles both Bobby Jindal and John Boehner now say that ‘firings are not enough’. ”You cannot take the freedom of law-abiding Americans, whether you disagree with them or not, and keep your own freedom. When you do that, you go to jail.” That shifting in talking points is interesting. It suggests a decision has been considered, perhaps only by a faction in the Republican Party, to take the “calculated risk” of closing with the Obama political machine and up the ante.

This creates a dynamic of its own. The way the world works — a fact Nimitz understood — is that any time you get close enough to threaten someone with jail you take a symmetric risk yourself. One of the reasons that political crises spin out of control is that stakes are raised beyond the normal. And all of a sudden the currency stops being access or invitations to cocktail parties. What starts to matter is survival and staying out of jail. You stop talking to friends and nothing is the same.

The Washington Examiner is reporting that the lower level IRS employees in Cincinnati are now leaking in self-defense. “Everything comes from the top.” It does? Well what do you know.

An Obama on the defensive may prove less formidable than the same person on the attack. The biggest liability now facing the Obama team is that maybe they’ve forgotten how to act when the enemy can hit back. Nimitz knew that reality always bites back. But maybe that’s why history will remember Nimitz as Nimitz whereas Obama has already been compared to Nixon and that may be the best he can hope for.

Things are by no means over. In fact the action has scarcely begun. Yet perhaps for the first time it’s a real fight, whose future will be driven by one thing: the degree of acceptance by Obama’s opponents of political risk. As they say, no guts no glory.

The Poisoned Chalice

Richard Fernandez — Sat, 18 May 2013 04:30:19 +0000

Perhaps the most incisive comment on the Obama administration’s plague of scandals comes from the National Journal. It argues that the scandals will hurt the Republicans “by enraging the base and strengthening the faction least willing to compromise with Obama, the IRS and Benghazi affairs could hurt a GOP shot at the presidency.”

In other words the scandals could so damage trust in the system among some conservatives that they’ll simply opt out of the party game. Sickened by the slow motion, kid-gloves complicity and apparent incompetence of the establishment GOP, a critical mass of Republican supporters may just stay home, like a viewer who’s finally decided that the sport of wrestling is rigged and not worth watching.

This will impede “deal making” according to the National Journal; and deprive the GOP of the juice to put together the coalition necessary to take their turn at the trough. Once they permanently exit the game then by default only the Democrats will keep the field.

There is another danger facing Republicans which the National Journal doesn’t directly address. It can be described thus: if the scandals go too far at unearthing the administration’s rot then even the most craven Republicans will be compelled to do something about it. Like a man in a saloon card game who’s caught someone cheating at cards either they call him out and take what comes or pretend the game is still honest. It’s either ignore the cheating or get ready to clear leather.

What the scandals have done to Washington is taken the former process of horse-trading perilously close to a zero-sum game. Each new revelation bolsters the belief that the administration has already done precisely what the Republicans don’t want to do: gone for for big brass ring. Gone for world domination. There are a lot of suggestive indicators. They’ve politicized the IRS, Treasury, Justice — maybe even the defense department. Maybe they’ve already opted for the zero sum game — with themselves as the winners.

The sheer apocalyptic implication of that possibility gives stories which offer an excuse for inaction a curious attractiveness: “We made mistakes, but without malice”. How one hopes that’s true. These stories allow everyone to hope, permit everyone to delay the irreparable breach. It permits one to plausibly think it is all a misunderstanding, like the man finding someone in bed with his wife or discovering a murder in progress. Because if it is real then all ways run ill.

The key problem for the Republican Party — and also for conservatives of a whole — is deciding what they’re seeing. Whether it the dreaded Incoming over the Pole everyone has watched the radar for all these years or whether is it a flock of birds, a false positive that will clear up momentarily.

The game theoretic of this dilemma is well trodden. Launch on warning, launch on attack, assured second strike. One thing’s for sure: the Republicans won’t launch on warning.

Prudence will probably stay the hand of conservatives and let things limp along for awhile. It will take more, perhaps much more to establish the belief they are actually under attack.

This is as it should be, for the issues are so momentous that nobody wants to risk the political peace by some hot-headed response. Just as it was rational to wait till New York or Los Angeles vanished in a fireball, to wait till one was absolutely sure, it is probably prudent to wait on events since the stakes are just too high not to mind one’s words.

Things will probably have to get a whole lot worse before a critical mass of voters choose the path of despair that the National Journal warns against: the point where they exit the game.

The difficulty is that the restraint does not so far seem symmetric. What is perhaps most disturbing is the sheer effrontery of the administration. They seem unabashed and oblivious to the damage they are causing. They are telling lies that nobody can be expected to believe, almost as if the stranger hiding under the marital bed explains that he’s looking for change he dropped there. He doesn’t actually expect you to believe it. What he wants to know is whether you’re man enough to call him on it.

There is still some way to go until things become crystal clear; a brief space in which to make certain about what is really going on. Like a scan or ultrasound or biopsy you’re waiting on. For once we know the knowledge will bind us. There are dangerous lines to cross, which once traversed make it is hard to go back. Would that the administration’s minions had thought that way. The structures of the Republic were designed to make stark choices unnecessary. Permanent power is a chalice no one should want to drink from. Once that cup is tasted something very wicked this way comes.

A very precious commodity — mutual trust — is at risk in the coming days. If it is trashed and expended, it will be a long time rebuilding it again. We rarely know the value of what we have until we lose it.

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The Lying King

Richard Fernandez — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:05:59 +0000

At a dinner not long ago someone described the wonders of a new product which uploaded your vital signs to the Cloud, a process that was so much more accurate than having to take it yourself and write it down on a piece of paper. It’s a great idea and there are an increasing number of such services which plan to offer that feature such as this, which proclaims “doctors can now establish online CarePods™ to assemble extended care teams, share medical records, collect and analyze real-time clinical information, and coordinate treatment plans with patients, their families and health providers.”

One thing that may give a customer pause, however, are headlines like this: “IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office.”

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

The American economy increasingly runs on information. That also means that it increasingly runs on trust. Peggy Noonan, writing about the IRS scandal, says: “As always it comes down to trust.” She is right, but doesn’t go far enough. The level of trust that Noonan talks about is simply whether the president can be trusted in the ordinary political sense:

Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? … The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice.

The assertion that Obama knew nothing of his underlings’ actions seems almost an obvious lie. But do lies still matter? Kimberley Strassel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asks the same question as Noonan but with a different slant. The way Strassel puts it: “What did the president say?” Can we determine the content of the administration’s policy from what the president says, or do we have to decrypt it by breaking into a “second channel” where the real signal is sent?

Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Listen to the “dog whistle,” Strassel seems to say, don’t listen to the fancy, eloquent speeches. That’s just for show. The real goodies are inside the wrapper.

Lee Smith raises the exact same question not in regards to the IRS, but in respect to the president’s nuclear containment policy. If you were a foreign president, what should you believe when the president talks? Smith raises the possibility that the Iran policy was doubletalk all along. Smith cites the case of a think tank which, after years of tirelessly assuring the public that Obama would never let Iran get the bomb, now argues that we should start thinking about what to do when it does:

On Monday, the Center for New American Security published an 84-page report, called “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran.” The subject matter is particularly noteworthy given the report’s provenance. CNAS is a think tank close to the Obama administration that, among other things, advised the White House early in its first term on Afghanistan policy. Several of its scholars joined the administration, including CNAS founder Michelle Flournoy who served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009-2012; and Colin Kahl, formerly the Obama administration’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, who is lead author of this latest CNAS report.

…

Kahl’s CNAS report asserts that prevention is still the policy. Obama, the paper argues, has “made clear that, on matters of war and peace, ‘I don’t bluff.’ There are good reasons to believe Obama means what he says.”

Sure, Obama believes it, but what if he can’t make his belief a reality? What happens, asks the CNAS paper, if the administration has to move to containment? “This is not because the United States wants to find itself in a situation in which containment becomes necessary,” the report says. “But rather because prevention – up to and including the use of force – could fail, leaving Washington with little choice but to manage and mitigate the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.”

The Obama administration may be the first since World War Two to attempt a new and innovative policy best described as “trust me to lie to you.” If you were astute, then you wouldn’t believe us. If you were sophisticated you would make the default assumption that the Iran policy was for public consumption, since only rubes and simpletons could have possibly believed that the Obama administration was telling the truth.

Smith wonders how this will work with allies:

If the White House’s containment policy is a consequence of the failures of the American intelligence community and the U.S. armed forces, why would regional partners, as the report recommends, make “commitments not to pursue independent nuclear capabilities” in exchange for protection under a “U.S. nuclear umbrella”? What kind of “U.S. nuclear guarantee” would convince Israel that the administration really intended to keep its word this time around? In short, why would allies entrust their national security to a president whose policy represents an accommodation with failure?

There is no good reason one can think of. The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price.

A Degree of Malevolence

Richard Fernandez — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:57:05 +0000

The most striking characteristic emerging from accounts of the IRS audits of the administration’s political enemies is the sheer, unbridled malevolence of them. It was, like a friend told me over dinner, as if we had suddenly awoken “in the middle of the third Obama term” to find everything that could never happen, all that was said to be impossible — indeed unthinkable — suddenly upon us. I ate another mouthful of pizza before realizing that, in fact, the events now being decried had happened in his first term.

The IRS inquisitors even demanded printouts of Facebook pages, the minutes of meeting back to whenever, a detailed description of every statement, political or otherwise, under penalty of perjury.

Some of the letters asked for copies of the groups’ Web pages, blog posts and social media postings — making some tea party members worry they’d be punished for their tweets or Facebook comments by their followers…. And each letter had a stern warning about “penalties of perjury” — which became intimidating for groups that were being asked about future activities, like future donations or endorsements.

Moreover, there was a kind of capriciousness about the pattern of inquisition that defied rational explanation. One Catholic professor — an eminent but hardly a household name — was audited in 2010 by the IRS, which demanded to know what her politics were.

Someone at the IRS was even passing the content of conservative application forms to liberal NGOs.

It sounded like people were running wild, doing what they wanted because they could.

And unsurprisingly, nobody can remember nothing about nothing. Eric Holder could not for the life of him recall who might have authorized such a wide-ranging investigation into the Associated Press. The seizure of an entire news agency’s phone records seemed like a dime someone had mislaid; a trivial something that happened “a long time ago,” like Benghazi, and ‘can you remind me,, Congressman, what that was about again?’

“I’m trying to find out who authorized the subpoena,” Rep. Sensenbrenner said. “You can’t tell me if Deputy Attorney General Cole authorized the subpoena. Somebody had to authorize the subpoena because the code of federal regulations is pretty specific that this is supposed to go as close to the top as possible.”

“No, what I’m saying is that I can’t say as a matter of fact,” said Holder. “I have to assume, I say I would probably 95%, 99% certain the deputy attorney general acting in my stead was the one who authorizes the subpoena.”

A little bit later, Holder said, “Let me say this: I’ve been given a note we have confirmed that the deputy was the one who authorized the subpoena.”

What the note probably said was you have to remember that you remember.

About two chews through the slice of pizza, it occurred to me that we were witnessing the uncovering of an entire parallel network, a kind of shadow operation that ran outside the normal channels. Somehow the atmosphere made certain people feel so empowered, so unaccountable, so free of restraint it was almost as if they had ingested the fictional drug Valkyr. They were invincible, and they could fly!

“And by so doing,” I blurted out, “they’ve left the square empty. The public spaces aren’t where it happens any more. The regular meetings where things are supposed to happen are now Potemkin processes.”

That is probably the single most disturbing thing about these scandals. The Valkyr-fueled rage has undermined the political mechanisms and trashed the processes through which persons of disparate political persuasions of the nation are supposed to come to an understanding. America is a diverse place — and not necessarily diverse in the way some people insist on regarding it — and it works only when no one goes around intimidating people from the shadows.

Sarah Hoyt has an emotionally telling post exhorting everyone to “get off the floor” and fight for their rights. Look who she invokes. Its a cry from the heart, and one never thought to hear it in these terms.

Get up off the floor. First, if you’re a believer, despair is a sin. And if you’re not a believer, despair is spitting on the graves of all the men and women who fought in much worse conditions than you face. The ghosts of Tiananmen Square rise up against you. The men who in the Gulags carried a hope of freedom accuse you. The victims of communism point fingers at you. The millions of dead at the hands of marching statism would like to remind you that to give up is to die. And that’s when you should give up. Not a second earlier.

Tiananmen Square? The Gulag? Can things be so bad that such parallels can be invoked in America? Perhaps the worst trespass has been the violence to trust; such that one can’t dismiss Sarah Hoyt’s metaphors out of hand. After what’s happened, when the unthinkable has occurred then how do you laugh it off?

The task then is to make the unthinkable impossible again; to restore the belief that bad things won’t come in night. For in the end everyone has his turn at power; every party has its time in office. Robert Bolt put the argument succinctly in A Man for all Seasons, when Thomas More explained why he would not trash the law. The law is all we have to keep us off each other’s throats. Destroy the law and all the bets are off.

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

And that really sums it up. The challenge to resolving the scandals is not simply to leave someone holding the bag; to pin it on somebody and return to the same old bad behavior — but to convince everyone — both from the Left and the Right — that these things will never reoccur, that the remainder of second term will be different from the first, and that a third term, will all it implies, can never ever come.

The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99