Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Ron Fournier: I once asked, “What if Obama can’t lead?” The answer after Paris is painful.







The word “scandal” is bandied about quite a bit when it comes to the conduct of Barack Obama’s White House, and this administration has done more than its share to earn the designation “scandal-plagued.”

From the IRS, to the Department of Justice, to the Department of Energy, to Veterans Affairs, to the State Department managed by Hillary Clinton; this White House has been implicated in a number of controversies and alleged transgressions. All of these scandals prompted a short-lived moment of public angst and exacted a pound or two of flesh from the administration, but none indelibly marked this presidency as corrupt. Perhaps that is because they were, at root, political scandals....

All of these scandals and more are deadly serious for those segments of American society that they affected, but the segmentation of those who suffered narrowed the political impact of these affairs.

That is not the case with matters related to national security and to war and peace. Scandalous revelations that pertain to matters as basic as counterterrorism at home and American soldiers fighting and potentially dying abroad cannot be contained. As with the state of the economy, it is a subject that touches every American....

The revelation first trickled out in fleeting headlines in late August. The Pentagon inspector general’s office revealed to the New York Times that it was investigating the allegation that reports on the state of the anti-ISIS campaign were altered in order to present a rosier picture of the war than was merited. Those reports, it was claimed, were reviewed by a variety of White Hose policy makers including President Barack Obama. “Some senior American officials in recent weeks have provided largely positive public assessments about the progress of the military campaign against the Islamic State,” the Times reported in August. “But recent intelligence assessments, including some by the Defense Intelligence Agency, paint a sober picture about how little the Islamic State has been weakened over the past year, according to officials with access to classified assessments.”

The blockbuster revelation burned hot and bright for a news cycle but soon faded from relevance. Meanwhile, the bodies continued to pile up, and the bombs continued to explode in Baghdad, and then in Beirut; then they started going off in Ankara, in airplanes over the Sinai desert, and finally in Paris. Americans had forgotten the lessons of September 11th and, out of complacency and exasperation, allowed a terrorist safe haven in the Middle East to mature. That hopeful self-delusion was shattered on the evening of November 13 when large-scale terrorism returned to the heart of Europe....

No president, no political persuasion, no ideological conviction is worth sacrificing American national interests or the public safety. This isn’t a political scandal; it’s a criminal abuse of the public trust. If in the coming days these revelations are treated as such, we will know whether or not we have a truly dispassionate and independent Fourth Estate.
at Labels: , , , , , ,