"The Incredible Shrinking President"

Great column by Mark Steyn up on the National Review website today.  Among other things it addresses the ongoing scandal surrounding the Benghazi embassy attack, which keeps getting worse and worse for the president.  He is lucky to have a compliant press corps which relentlessly covers for him on this. 

The Disturbing Pattern of Obama's Administration in Responding to Terrorism

I found this blog post by Jim Geraghty of The Campaign Spot to be chillingly insightful.  Geraghty points out that there have been four major terrorist attacks or attempted attacks on U.S. soil over the past few years, and in EVERY CASE the Obama Administration issued statements in response to those attacks attempting to mislead the public, mischaracterize the facts, and downplay or deny the clear links to Islamic terrorism.  If this had only happened once or twice, it might be possible to chalk it up to honest mistakes, but the fact that it has happened in every case seems to make it clear that it is a deliberate pattern of deception. 

Geraghty links to an excellent The Weekly Standard article by Stephen Hayes which goes into more details about the Obama Administration's claims in the wake of the recent embassy attacks in Libya and Egypt.  After documenting a long list of the false claims coming out of the Administration and demonstrating how they played right into the hands of the Islamic extremists who attacked our embassies, Hayes sums up his case thusly: "Four Americans were killed in a premeditated terrorist attack on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11, and for more than a week the Obama administration misled the country about what happened. This isn’t just a problem. It’s a scandal."  He concludes by noting that "the defining characteristics of [Obama's] foreign policy have been mendacity, incompetence, and, yes, stupidity."

So This Is What Hope-and-Change Looks Like

Item 1: The Justice Department's involvement in a botched operation called "Fast and Furious" which put 2,000 U.S. guns into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. Those cartels then used the guns to kill more than 300 people, including two U.S. agents. The Assistant Attorney General then apparently lied about it in May, when he denied that the government had lost track of any guns. Apparently, Obama's Justice Department is not only woefully incompetent, but also corrupt. Of course, no one has lost his job over this yet, and don't hold your breath either.

Item 2: The Department of Health and Human Services's awarding of a $433 million no-bid contract to a company run by a top Obama donor. Both the bidding process and the product provided under the bid appear to be highly suspect, as this NY Post article outlines, and now even Democratic senators are calling for an investigation. Hmmm...sounds a little like Solyndra. And come to think of it, no one in the Obama administration lost his job over that scandalous waste of taxpayer dollars either.

It's not just that the Obama administration is left-wing. It's that it is incompetent and corrupt. I can understand why liberals would defend an administration that is merely far to the left, but I would think they would be bothered by the incompetence and corruption.

Finally, one of my favorite conservative columnists, Mark Steyn, humorously demonstrates the folly of Obama's big-government mindset in this National Review Online article.