Obama Administration Hit With A Triple Whammy

While President Barack Obama was doubling down on his discredited narrative concerning the attack by terrorists on the Benghazi consulate, in the course of which Mr. Obama’s personal minister – that is what an ambassador is; the personal minister of the president – was murdered, it was revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had targeted Tea Party groups for what may turn out to be punitive audits.

National Public Radio briefly reported that when the president was asked a question concerning “reports that the IRS targeted organizations that identified themselves as ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot groups and gave their applications for tax-exempt status extra reviews, Obama said:

"’This is pretty straightforward. ... If in fact IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported ... and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that's outrageous and there's no place for it.’ Those responsible, he said, will ‘be held fully accountable.’”

Mr. Obama was asked about the audits during a press conference that featured British Prime Minister David Cameron. The president’s initial response, the promise of a severe dressing down of the IRS, passed muster with the increasing band of journalists who thought Mr. Obama’s handing of the Benghazi assault was seriously deficient. Even Fox News, unrelenting on Benghazi, slathered the president with commendations. Brit Hume of Fox News generously allowed the president’s initial response was the right one.

An explanation offered by IRS tax-exempt chief Lois Lerner quickly came under fire. Ms. Lerner attributed the possible “outrageous” conduct to “line people” in Cincinnati, Ohio who had “used names like Tea Party or Patriots” as criteria for selecting tax-exempt applications for further scrutiny.

Chairman of Americans for Limited Government Howard Rich noted in a piece written for Forbes Magazine that Ms. Lerner pointedly did not mention that “the IRS’ Cincinnati office is the central location for all tax-exempt application evaluations – meaning the discrimination that took place there “wasn’t an isolated, dumb incident by some random field office,” as The Washington Post concisely noted. In other words this was no error: It was official policy – which directly contradicts testimony previously provided by the agency’s leadership to Congressional investigators.”

A Reuters report noted, “When tax agents started singling out non-profit groups for extra scrutiny in 2010, they looked at first only for key words such as 'Tea Party,' but later they focused on criticisms by groups of ‘how the country is being run’ …  At one point, the agents chose to screen applications from groups focused on making ‘America a better place to live.”  Other IRS search terms included: “Government spending”, “Government debt, or taxes.” On Jan, 25, 2012, the criteria for flagging suspect groups was changed to "political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement,’ according to an advance copy of a report done by Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which notes that agency leadership was made aware of the discrimination nearly two years ago, who said nothing – and clearly had no plans to alert the public to what had happened.

On ABC This Week, columnist George Will remarked that the country had just celebrated – if that is the proper word – the 40^th anniversary of the Watergate summer and read from then President Richard Nixon impeachment records: “He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.”

Finally, shortly after the possible “outrageous” conduct of the IRS towards the much maligned Tea Party groups knocked the Obama administration on its noggin, a third shoe fell. The Justice Department, led by Fast and Furious Eric Holder, had wiretapped the phone lines of more than a hundred Associated Press reporters in an attempt to uncover the source of a leak of top secret information. Mr. Holder, who had recused himself from investigating the event, explained in a press conference that the taps were justified because of the nature of the leak.

This is not theway to gain friends and influence reporters among the national media. To judge from subsequent media availabilities in which presidential spokesman Jay Carney was relentlessly grilled, some worm had turned in the breast of reporters, and the Obama administration, which tends to treat words as incantations that magically alter objective reality, was playing hardball defense.

The Trouble With Lameduckery

The president’s office is time sensitive because of term limits. No president since Franklin Roosevelt has served more than two terms or eight years in office.

Mr. Roosevelt was the only president elected to a third term; his supporters pointed to the war in Europe as a reason for breaking with precedent. Mr. Roosevelt won a fourth term in 1944 during World War II but suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in office the following year and died. After more than a dozen years in office, the bloom had fled the rose.

The 22^ndamendment owed its inspiration to a precedent established by President George Washington’s farewell address and Thomas Jefferson’s aversion to monarchy. In 1807, Jefferson wrote in reply to a query from Vermont’s legislature, “if some termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will in fact become for life."

New York Democratic Rep. Jose Serrano reintroduced a bill in Congress early in January of this year repealing the 22nd Amendment, but the bill is not likely to pass, however infatuated more than 50 percent of the American public and 90 percent of the news media have become with wunderkind President Barack Obama.

The presence of a presidential term limit presents both opportunities and problems for the chief executive.

Mr. Obama was looking on the bright side of his lameduckery when he whispered to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have "more flexibility" to deal with contentious issues like missile defense after the U.S. presidential election.

During talks in Seoul, Mr. Obama “urged Moscow to give him‘space’ until after the November ballot, and Medvedev said he would relay the message to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin,” according to a March 2012 Reuters report.

Two months after Mr. Obama begged Mr. Medvedev for more space, Vladimir Putin was elected, for a second time, President of Russia. The present Russian government, apparently unconcerned with Mr. Jefferson’s quibbles, is a product of centuries of monarchical government, followed by a promising but betrayed revolution, followed by 30 years of Stalinism, monarchy’s modern counterpart. Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev have managed to satisfy an apparent hunger in Russia for democratic forms by swapping jobs every so often, a modern tyrant’s answer to the 22^nd amendment.

Had Mr. Putin been running for president of the United States, he would not have been eligible to serve, because the 22^ndamendment is a bulwark against proto-Stalinist chief executives; it nips in the bud the megalomania of the larval tyrant by giving the president of the United States only two terms of “space” in which he may ruin the country and bring republican government to its knees.

Here is the hitch with lameduckery: At some point during a second term in office, it becomes obvious to presidential supporters that the duck is lame. At that point, politics pivots. During the second term of virtually every president who labors under the austere restrictions of the 22^ndamendment, the president is found gathered together with his ardent supporters during his first term -- including party leaders in the Congress -- and everyone in the room realizes that there is but one lame duck in the room; the rest of them will be running for re-election long after the president has strut his hour upon the stage. They begin to think, dangerously, of surviving in a political universe that does not include the nominal leader of their party. This is a prelude to funeral rights, the beginning of the end of what the French call “la trahison des clercs,” the betrayal of the intellectuals, in many authoritarian regimes the footstools of megalomaniacal tin pot political saviors.

Modern monarchical and authoritarian regimes, both fascist and communist, solve the problem by having non-subservient intellectuals -- usually violently or artfully repressed in authoritarian regimes -- shot or imprisoned or socially castrated.

Authoritarian regimes fail for a good reason: The larger and more omnicompetent a central authority strives to be, the more incompetent it becomes; a government that strives to do everything will do nothing well. There are no small errors in fascist or quasi-fascist regimes. Even in Cuba, the balled fist is loosening: One half of the Castro tyranny, Raul, a boilerplate communist, recently announced that he was considering term limits.

In governments operating under republican constitutions, the pivot, that point during which a party understands that the captain of the ideological ship will soon be departing, occurs usually midway into a second presidential term.

Assuming Mr. Serrano is unsuccessful in scuttling the 22^ndamendment, political commentators will begin mapping the ideological cracks in the Obama administration around the second year of the Mr. Obama's second term. A collapse in the economy will of course push the date closer to the beginning of his second term.