Lois Lerner, head of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt organizations office, told Congress last week that she had broken no laws and had done nothing wrong.  Then she hastily “took the Fifth” – ie refused to say anything more or answer any questions so as not to incriminate herself, as the Fifth Amendment allows her to do.

So she would have us believe that there was no corruption in her department under her authority. No crime was committed. None at all.

Yet this happened. It comes from Discover the Networks:

The Barack H. Obama Foundation (BHOF) was established in 2008 by Abon’go Malik Obama, the half-brother of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Abon’go, a Kenyan-born Muslim with twelve wives, created the foundation in memory of his (and President Obama’s) biological father, Barack H. Obama (1936-82) of Nyan’goma Kogelo village in Kenya.

Seeking to “provide people everywhere with resources to uplift their welfare and living standards,” BHOF claims to be “committed to a wide array of development and humanitarian projects which will help mitigate social shortcomings in areas of education and literacy, health and well-being, poverty, and … community infrastructure” — particularly as regards “basic needs such as water, electricity, shelter and sustenance.” The foundation’s guiding principle is “the inherent belief that no one can truly enjoy the riches he has reaped if his neighbor suffers.”

A noble sentiment. But how nobly has BHOF acted?

BHOF currently identifies its major project as the Siaya Community Self-Help Group, which focuses on helping impoverished residents of Siaya, Kenya to access clean drinking water, financial assistance, K-12 education, academic scholarships, medical care, leadership training, and guidance in small-business development. The foundation also claims to have funded the construction of a madrassa in Kenya. There is no concrete evidence, however, that BHOF has actually done any of these things.

Financial records indicate that from 2008-10, the foundation received grants and donations totaling $42,923 but awarded no grants at all.

Shared none of the riches it reaped with the impoverished residents of Siaya in Kenya? Nope. None at all.

On its website, BHOF asserts that its “future projects in Kenya and elsewhere around the globe” will focus on:

• Education development
• Child development and welfare
• Infrastructure development, to include water, electricity and sanitation
• Energy development, to include wind turbines, solar and power generation
• Health improvement through health clinics, vaccinations and disease prevention
• Humanitarian and natural disaster intervention and response
• Nutrition, to include food security, diet assurance, vitamin deliver [sic]
• HIV/AIDS, particularly child-affected transmissions and prevention
• Advocacy and Partnerships
• Life skills, training and modeling

BHOF’s website lists the foundation’s physical address as 107 S. West St. #401 in Alexandria, Virginia, a location that actually houses only a UPS store. “They probably just rent a mailbox here or receive mail here,” said one UPS employee there in May 2013.

Equally problematic is the address listed in BHOF’s IRS filings — 4201 Wilson Blvd., Suite 110-152 in Arlington, Virginia — which houses only a marketing center for a drug-and-alcohol treatment organization known as A Better Today Recovery Services. When questioned about BHOF in May 2013, not a single employee in A Better Today’s office had ever heard of the foundation.

From 2008-11, BHOF operated illegally as a nonprofit group and falsely claimed tax-exempt status —f or which it had not yet formally applied. The foundation finally submitted its 2010 application for nonprofit, tax-exempt status on May 23, 2011; seven days later, it submitted its filings for 2008 and 2009. Within just one month of these filings — on June 26, 2011 — Lois Lerner, the senior official who headed the IRS’s tax-exempt organizations office, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to BHOF.

This promptness represented a stark contrast to the experience of many conservative organizations that, beginning in 2010, had been intentionally forced (by Lerner’s office) to wait more than three years, in some cases, for approval. Moreover, Lerner broke with the norms of tax-exemption approval by making BHOF’s tax-exempt status retroactive to December 2008.

According to Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center: “The Obama Foundation raised money on its web page by falsely claiming to be a tax deductible. This bogus charity … had not even applied and yet subsequently got retroactive tax-deductible status.” Boehm described Abon’go Malik Obama’s attempt to raise money under the nonprofit banner as “common law fraud and potentially even federal mail fraud.” 

The case of BHOF needs to be compared with the case described  in our post Political persecution in America, May 21, 2013, which is about Catherine Engelbrecht having waited for three years – and waits still – for tax-exempt status to be granted by Lois Lerner’s office for two “non-profits” she founded. In that time she and her husband and their business and their farm have been  investigated … and investigated … and investigated. The IRS required her to answer “hundreds and hundreds of questions”. Other  government agencies were sent to inspect their manufacturing  business, which was fined thousands of dollars for trivial “offenses” such as an employer wearing the wrong type of protective glasses.

Mrs Englebrecht is not related to President Obama, and the organizations she launched, King Street Patriots and True the Vote, are not planning ambitious projects round the world, or promising to re-distribute grants and donations to the poor in Africa. She declared them to be patriotic and against voter fraud. Not causes, we now know, scoring high marks on the approval chart of Obama’s IRS.

Free marketeers should never let go of the proposition that taxation is theft.

However, as they are realists, they have also to concede – very grudgingly – that some money must be given to a government. As little as possible. Just enough for it to do what only a government can do: protect the country and the freedom of everyone in it.

So okay, governments may take a small percentage of earners’ incomes and label it “not stolen”.

But they always take more, and that’s morally abhorrent.

They make their immorality look honest by dressing it in laws.

Needless to say, the biggest thieves are the socialists. The more socialist a government is, the more it robs the nation. The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

Every now and then a government reveals its naked criminality. As now, for instance, in Cyprus, where the state is visibly extending its prehensile claw to snatch people’s money out of the banks. It calls the looting a tax.

This is from an article by Paul A. Rahe at Ricochet:

This weekend, the government of Greek Cyprus — under pressure from the European Union — negotiated a bailout that had as one of its provisions an assessment on the capital of those with deposits in the banks on Cyprus.

“An assessment on the capital” implies taxing, but the intention is to steal a portion of it.

Those with under 100,000 Euros in their accounts are slated to receive a 6.6% haircut while those with more than 100,000 Euros in their accounts will be docked 9.9%.

Rumor has it that the first proposal by the EU muggers in power was to seize 40%.

Whether the government can secure the approval of the Cypriot legislature for this unprecedented move remains unclear. There is talk of lowering the tax on deposits under 100,000 Euros to 3% and of raising the tax on larger deposits to 12.5%. But while the difference no doubt matters to ordinary Cypriots, whose savings are modest, and to the Russian oligarchs who have parked huge sums in the Cypriot banks, when viewed from a larger perspective, it matters not one whit. Indeed, at this point, it does not even matter whether the Cypriot government backs off from this plan altogether.

Banks are fiduciary institutions. They rely on trust; and, if there is a breach of trust, they are cooked. Individuals deposit money in banks instead of stuffing it in their mattresses because they believe that it will be safe there. Once they realize or even suspect that the money they put in the bank is anything but safe, they will take what is left of their money and run — and the bank will collapse. …

The Greeks will draw their own conclusions, as will the Spanish and the Italians and perhaps even the Irish and the French. No one who lives in a country that is in financial trouble and that may need emergency help from the European Union will entrust his loose change to a bank in his own country. The Euros in his mattress will retain their full value; those which he entrusts to the bank may, at least in part, be confiscated. …

That’s assuming the state won’t expropriate his Euro-stuffed mattress.

It would be hard to imagine what one could do to turn an ongoing crisis into a total catastrophe that would be more effective than the terms imposed by the European Union on Cyprus. That such a move is in contemplation is an indication of the degree to which the authorities in Brussels and Nicosia are in the grips of desperation.

And are foolish. And criminal.

Greek Cyprus got into in trouble in large part because of … Russian [mafia] deposits. The banks there had a great deal more money than they knew what to do with on the island, and so they loaned money to their less than creditworthy cousins in the republic of Greece. Now they have obligations that they cannot pay, and so they have turned to Brussels.

Had Greek Cyprus not joined the Euro, this problem would be relatively easy to solve. The government could simply devalue the currency and give the Cypriot banks’ Russian depositors a haircut in this time-honored fashion. That is what was done with considerable regularity in places such as Greece and Italy before they joined the Euro; and, if the Cypriots could do it now, it would have this virtue. The haircut imposed on their own citizens would — initially, at least — be less onerous. Abroad, the savings of the Cypriots would buy them less, to be sure. But, at home, for a while, it would buy them what it had before. Moreover, what the Cypriots produced at home would be more competitive in the world market — since its purchase would set the buyer back less — and as a tourist destination the island would be more attractive, since accommodations and food would for foreigners be cheaper than it had been. For a time, there might even be a boom.

I am not suggesting that devaluation is a joy nor that its long-term consequences are salutary. It isn’t a joy, and the consequences are not good. Inflation is apt to erupt, and inflation can all too easily become habitual. But a devaluation of the currency would not lead to a complete collapse of credit, which this tax on savings might well achieve.

Credit, you need to keep in mind, is what makes the world go round. Modern economies do not operate on cash. They operate on credit — which is to say, they rely on the very trust against which the European Union and the Greek Cypriot government have launched a devastating attack.

Bill Tatro points out that such robbery by the state could happen in America: 

To think those types of financial and economic events couldn’t happen here, hmmmmm…..In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared a national bank moratorium (he closed all banks.) Then, via Executive Order 6102, the government confiscated all gold and gold certificates, exchanging them for paper. Consequently, if you didn’t surrender your gold, you went to jail. The price of gold was set at $20.67 per ounce. Yet, within a year, the government reset the price to $35.00 per ounce, effectively fleecing the American public by 69%.

And speaking of rip-offs, just remember that … in 2009, President Barack Obama [when he bailed out GM] rejected the rule of law for GM senior and subordinated debtholders, thus relegating them to the back of the line. …

[And remember that] after extensive 2011 Congressional analysis failed to discover where the missing $1.6 billion of MF Global customer money had gone, J.P. Morgan was recently found to not have disclosed the risks taken and monies lost by the excess deposits as compared to the loans domiciled at J.P. Morgan. …

Following the “lost decade” of investment (2000-2009) which shed a very bright light on the failure of self-directed retirement accounts, former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner discussed the possibility of nationalizing IRAs and 401ks [retirement savings accounts] …

So, regarding the current situation involving the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, can it happen right here in our country? …

It has happened, it is happening right now, and it will continue to happen.

An IBD editorial reports and comments:

Markets tumbled after Cyprus and the EU said they might tax private bank accounts to pay for a bailout. …

As bad as tumbling markets around the world are, they seem to be the only signal strong enough to catch the attention of Europe’s otherwise unaccountable bureaucrats who have long since learned to ignore street riots.

As stocks fell from Tokyo to New York, Europe’s leaders are scrambling to say they had nothing to do with the cause — the shutdown of all Cyprus banks and ATMs for at least three days and the expropriation of a large chunk of each now-captive account, as a “tax” to pay for Cyprus’ $13 billion EU bailout, Europe’s fifth.

Cyprus Prime Minister Nicos Anastasiades bitterly asserted he had been “blackmailed” by the EU and the International Monetary Fund to go along with the idea on Saturday, or there’d be no bailout. …

Aside from the fact that no fiscally responsible country should need a bailout and the roots of Cyprus’ financial crisis is based on long-term big-spending government and low-information voters, the bank shutdown nevertheless sets an ugly precedent rooted in the growing arrogance of EU power.

Until now, tax hikes and haircuts for bond-holders have been how Europe’s bailouts have been handled. …

Confiscating savings in banks and denying people access to their property without warning is something entirely different — and will do great damage to citizens’ willingness to save, invest and build wealth.

Oh sure, the rationale was that most of the depositors were shady foreigners, particularly from Russia, laundering money. But the photos of Cypriots banging on bank doors and protesting, much as the people of Argentina did when the same thing happened to them in 2002, tells a different story of human suffering.

The expropriation of the tiny country’s savings may have seemed like an easy test case for the EU because the population is small and some of the depositors are rich and unsympathetic, but the blowback will hit savings and investment — and future economic growth — all over Europe.

Worse still, it could catch on here.

Already Congressional Democrats are plotting the expropriation of Americans’ private 401(k) and IRA retirement savings accounts in favor of “a guaranteed income.”

If bank accounts can be casually expropriated in Cyprus to pay for big-spending governments and bailouts, there is no reason a nice slice of the $19 trillion in retirement accounts can’t get the same treatment.

Determined violent killers who cannot get guns will not refrain from killing; they’ll use less efficient weapons, such as knives or clubs, and so in all probability make the killing slower and more painful.

The answer to anti-gun fever is that it isn’t the gun that kills but the person who shoots with it. 

Here the case is well argued by Daniel Greenfield writing at his website Sultan Knish:

Every day another one of the stories comes in. A teacher panicked by a plastic gun, an army man on a cupcake, a t-shirt, a pop tart chewed into the shape of a gun or a finger gun hits the panic button. Supensions and lectures quickly follow as the latest threat to the gun-free zone, usually in the form of a little boy, is tackled to the ground and lectured to within an inch of his life.

There are some very stupid people in charge of schools!

Tellingly these incidents rarely take place in the inner city schools where teenage gang members walk through metal detectors at the start of the day. The safety officers in those schools, big weary men with eyes that look everywhere at once, don’t waste their time on toys. Not unless those toys are full-size, painted black and filed down to look like real guns.

It’s usually the schools where a shooting is wholly unlikely; where gun violence is not a daily reality, but an unlikely convergence of horror, that institutional vigilance hits an irrational peak as every school imagines that it could be the next Columbine or the next Sandy Hook.

The NRA’s initial proposal of armed school guards was met with an irrational chorus of protests. More guns aren’t the answer, was the cry. And the leading crier was the White House’s expert skeet shooter. … The problem was not the man, it was the gun. Get rid of the guns and you stop the killing. Schools across the country are banning not [only] the gun, but the idea of the gun. It is a conceptual prohibition that is meant to push away the threat of gun violence by eliminating any mention of the G word. Gun-free zones mean places where guns cannot be mentioned, depicted or even symbolized as if the refusal to concede the existence of a firearm will eliminate the threat of it being used on the premises.

This isn’t a precautionary attitude, but a pacifist one. Gun horror is not a productive emotion, but learned helplessness disguised as moral superiority. Rather than teaching children to hate killers, schools are instead teaching them to hate guns. And reducing murders to instruments rather than morals, children are left with no sense of right and wrong, only an instinctive horror of violence.

Pacifists have always demonized armies rather than invaders. …  By dealing with the object rather than the subject, they are able to avoid the question of moral responsibility. Rather than hold the Nazis, Communists or Islamists accountable for their actions, they extended a blanket condemnation over the weapons-wielders. …

While the left likes to indulge in stereotypes of gun-toting rednecks and bomb-brandishing generals, the only people who judge the worth of a man by his weapon are the pacifists, the gun-fearers and gun-hiders who mythologize weapons as black agents of evil.

To believe that there is no such thing as constructive violence is to reject free will. Without accepting the necessity of constructive violence, there is no good and evil, only armed men and unarmed men. Without constructive violence, two boys playing cops and robbers in the schoolyard are not acting out a childish morality play, they are becoming desensitized to murder …

If there is no such thing as constructive violence, then the police officer is not the solution to crime, he is part of the cycle of violence. And if that cycle of violence does not begin with a man choosing to use a gun for good or evil, then it must begin with the gun. The man becomes the object and the gun becomes the subject. American ICBMs become just as bad as Russian ballistic missiles. An Israeli soldier killing a suicide bomber is just as bad as the terrorist. There are no good guys with guns. To have a gun is to be the bad guy.

For decades the gun-control lobby has brandished assault rifles at press conferences and spent more time describing their killing power than their manufacturers have. The rifle has been upgraded to the assault rifle and now, in the latest Orwellian vernacular used by the White House and the entire media pyramid beneath it, weapons of war. …

Shootings in America are not caused by guns, they are caused by crime. Guns really do not walk off store shelves and go on killing sprees. That’s what criminals are for. But the trouble with that discussion is that it takes us into moral territory. … We have to ask the difficult question of what does kill people.

It’s a bigger question than just Adam Lanza pulling the trigger in a classroom full of children. It is a big question that encompasses the Nazi gas chambers and the Soviet gulags, the Rape of Nanking and September 11. It is a question as big as all of human history.

Pacifists once used to be able to address such questions, but they have become obsessed with the technology of violence … ,[which] is largely beside the point. Guns do not motivate people to kill. …

Some of history’s worst massacres happened long before firearms became useful for more than scaring off peasants. The heavily armed Americans of the 50s had lower per capita murder rates than medieval London. It isn’t the gun that makes the killer. It’s not the hand that kills, but the mind.

The gun-free society has little interest in individuals. Its technocratic philosopher-kings want big and comprehensive solutions. Their answer to gun violence is to feed a horror of guns. Their answer to obesity is to ban sodas. Their solutions invariably miss the point by treating people like objects and objects like people.

In the Middle Ages, rats were put on trial for eating crops. Today we put guns on trial for killing people.

The left has tried to reduce people to economics, to class and then race, gender and sexual orientation. It has done its best to reduce people to the sum of their parts and then to tinker with those parts and it has failed badly. The best testimony of its … failure is that the worst pockets of gun violence are in urban areas that have been under the influence of their sociologists, urban planners, psychologists, social justice activists, community organizers and political rope-pullers for generations. And what have those areas brought forth except malaise, despair, blight and murder?

Banning guns will do as much for those areas as banning drugs did. …

The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from [the murder of children at Sandy Hook school in] Newtown as they drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that weapons are bad, the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the tool that matters. It’s the man.

Unwishing the gun brings us back to the sword. Unwishing the sword brings us back to the spear. Unwishing the spear brings us back to the stone club. And what then? When every weapon that ever existed or will exist is undone, all that remains is the deadliest weapon of all. The mind of man.

The gun, the sword, the spear and the club took countless lives and saved countless lives. Civilization has always balanced on a future made possible by little boys playing cops and robbers and playing with little green army men. They can either grow up to be the protectors of the future or the frightened men who will stand aside and do nothing when they hear the screams begin to come because they have been told that all violence is evil.

South Africa is a geographical paradise. For the beauty of its landscapes of mountains and valleys and forests and vast plains, for the grandeur of its cities, for the comfort and cheer of its climates, for its blossoming indigenous trees, its bushlands of immense variety, its brilliant flowers and exotic fruits, for the colors of its birds (not their sounds, they do not sing but squawk and shriek and twitter and tweet), for its wild animals, for its smooth beaches and immense safe bays where the white waves roll in and the fishing boats trawl for their silver harvests, for the elegant Cape Dutch architecture of its historical towns and farmhouses, for its rich vineyards, and the bounteous mines of gold that have flourished since the goldrush that did not fail, no superlatives can be too strong. No meat in the world could taste better than South African beef and mutton. No table-grapes can match the long, firm, green honey-sweet Hanapoots. And this praise poem could go on for pages, as do the praise-poems sung to African chiefs.

That said, the country is a human tragedy. For decades millions of people suffered under the cruelty and humiliation of the policy of apartheid. It ended, and in 1994 the Communist ANC (African National Congress) came to power. Despite its predominant ideology, the new black leadership had the good sense to let the private sector of the economy continue – though under ever more irksome restrictions – and it has kept the nation afloat. But the lot of most people, the millions of blacks, has not improved. What a huge disappointment the change to democracy has been. The black slums are still there and much bigger. The first ANC minister for housing, the (white) Communist Joe Slovo, who returned from exile to put his long dreams into effect, managed to have built   – how many good houses for poor urban blacks? One. Just one model house, as far as we can discover. But a shantytown, or “informal settlement”, has been named after him. Here’s a description of it (from Project Muse):

The highway connecting Port Elizabeth to the town of Uitenhage passes by one of these informal settlements, known as the Joe Slovo Community. Over four thousand people live in the maze of 1,200 shacks. There is no access road to the settlement. To get there one simply pulls off the highway into the mud. Homes in Joe Slovo are made of found materials including cardboard, corrugated metal, and plastic, and offer little shelter from the elements.

Like many other informal communities across South Africa, Joe Slovo has no electricity or sanitation system, and only a handful of communal water taps. The only semblance of urban development are six 100-foot tall security lights whose pink glow turns the hazy night sky to cotton candy. Ninety percent of the adult population is unemployed, and twenty percent is HIV-positive. [Until recently] there was no public school in Joe Slovo, and children had to cross the highway to get to the nearest school, five kilometers away.

And now the country is degenerating into another Zimbabwe, as it was bound to do. Here’s a very recent report by Arnold Ahlert, which we quote from Canada Free Press:

For decades, the country of South Africa was the focus of an international rallying cry against the injustices of apartheid. On June 17, 1991, South Africa’s Parliament abolished the legal framework for the practice of racial persecution. In 1994, Nelson Mandela and his Marxist African National Congress (ANC) assumed the reins of power. The international community looked away, satisfied that justice had prevailed. They continue to look away, even as South Africa has degenerated into another racist pit, best described by an Afrikaner farm owner: “It’s politically correct to kill whites these days.”

In July of 2012, Dr. Gregory Stanton, head of the nonprofit group Genocide Watch, conducted a fact-finding mission in South Africa. He concluded that there is a coordinated campaign of genocide being conducted against white farmers, known as Boers. “The farm murders, we have become convinced, are not accidental,” Stanton contended. “It was very clear that the massacres were not common crimes,” he added — especially because of the absolute barbarity used against the victims. “We don’t know exactly who is planning them yet, but what we are calling for is an international investigation,” he added.

The number of farm murders, or “plaasmoorde” as they are called in Afrikaans, is staggering. Over the last decade, it is estimated that at least 3000 Boers have been killed. Estimating the number of murders is necessary because the ANC has banned crime statistics from being compiled, claiming they scare off foreign investment. Moreover, the world knows little about the savagery that accompanies those killings. Many victims, including women and infant children, are raped or tortured before they are killed. Some have boiling water poured down their throats, some are burned with hot pokers, and some are hacked to death with machetes, or disemboweled. Several others have been tied to their own cars and dragged for miles.

The ANC, whose leader Jacob Zuma was reelected with over 75 per cent of the total voting delegates at the ANC National Conference held in Bloemfontein last December, denies that genocide is occurring, insisting that such attacks are part of the larger crime problem. …

What is known is that the ANC celebrated its 100th year anniversary with a song led by President Zuma himself. “Dubula iBhunu” or “Shoot the Boer” was a line in the lyrics of an apartheid-era song, “Ayesaba Amagwala” (“the cowards are scared”) that violates the South Africa constitution prohibiting the “advocacy of hatred that is based on race … and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.” Yet Zuma apparently felt no compunction to refrain from singing it, because the ANC considers it an integral part of the anti-apartheid movement that is part of their heritage.

In 2010, Julius Malema, then leader of the ANC Youth League, revived the practice of singing the song after many years. After the South Africa High Court ruled it was hate speech, the ANC appealed. Last October, the ANC and AfriForum, a lobby group that wanted the song banned from public performance, reached an out-of-court settlement.

Dr. Stanton concluded that Malema’s revival of a song advocating murder moved South Africa from the fifth stage on his genocidal scale to stage six. When the South African judiciary ruled it to be unlawful hate speech, Genocide Watch put South Africa back at stage five. When President Zuma was caught on tape January 2012 singing, “We are going to shoot them with the machine gun, they are going to run/You are a Boer, we are going to hit them, and you are going to run/shoot the Boer…” South Africa was raised to stage six once again.

Stage six is known as Preparation: “Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is expropriated. They are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved.”

The sixth stage is followed by stage seven: Extermination. …

The Afrikaner civil rights group AfriForum … is calling for attacks on South Africa’s mostly white farmers to be designated a crime of national priority. They delivered a memorandum to the country’s police minister, Nathi Mthethwa, urging him to give the murder of farmers the same level of urgency aimed at rhinoceros poachers and copper cable thieves. …

According to Johan Burger, a senior researcher with the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies’ crime and justice program, white farmers’ concerns are legitimately “special”. He reveals that it is now twice as dangerous to be a farmer in South Africa than a police officer … [and says that] many murderers “take out their hatred for all those past wrongs, and show who’s in control now.”

Like so many societies where demonstrating who’s in control becomes a necessity, disarming the population becomes a priority. In 2010, the ANC-led regime changed the Firearms Registration Act, demanding that all legal guns be re-registered by July 31, 2011. In the process of re-registration, more than half the applicants were turned down, and 90 percent were turned down again on appeal. Thus, white farm families were forced to relinquish their last line of defense against the tens of thousands of criminal gangs roaming the countryside – armed with AK47s. and as Genocide Watch noted on its website last July one more step was taken as well. “The government has disbanded the commando units of white farmers that once protected their farms, and has passed laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons,” it reported. “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”

There is also a movement, much like the one that occurred in Zimbabwe, to confiscate white farmers’ land. Julius Malema led the charge, saying all whites are criminals, and that his ANC Youth League members were going to take all the land back without compensation, unless farmers relinquish 80 percent of it. …

That is a recipe for famine, as revealed by Rural Development and Land Reform Minister Gugile Nkwinti. In 2009, he told Parliament that more than half of the farms purchased for black farmers, at a cost of $891 million in government outlays, had either failed or were “declining.”

Yet ANC president Zuma remains undeterred. “The structure of the apartheid economy has remained largely intact,” Mr. Zuma said, in a speech given June 26, 2012 to thousands of delegates at ANC’s policy conference, held every five years, where the party’s pre-presidential election platform is discussed. “The ownership of the economy is still primarily in the hands of white males, as it has always been.”

Embedded in that platform is the idea that making peace with white South Africans following the end of apartheid has “hampered” the transfer of wealth to black South Africans. Thus, a “second transition” was proposed, which even the see-no-progressive-evil New York Times was forced to concede represents a “sharp leftward shift for the A.N.C., which despite its roots has largely backed a free-market economy …”

[Dr.] Stanton [of Genocide Watch] sees a bigger picture. In a speech in Pretoria, organized by the Transvaal Agricultural Union, Stanton claimed the ANC was demonizing white farmers, who have been in South Africa since the 1600s, by calling them “settlers.” A Genocide Watch reports reveals the strategy behind those efforts. “High-ranking ANC government officials who continuously refer to Whites as ‘settlers’ and ‘colonialists of a special type’ are using racial epithets in a campaign of state-sponsored dehumanization of the White population as a whole,” it stated. “They sanction gang-organized hate crimes against Whites, with the goal of terrorizing Whites through fear of genocidal annihilation.”

ANC President Jacob Zuma continues to fan the flames of racial division. Last December, he admonished black South Africans for being dog owners, saying that doing so amounts to copying white culture. Zuma’s office contended the message was aimed at “the need to decolonize the African mind post-liberation”.

It is a post-liberation effort that remains alarmingly on track to emulate all the other historically blood-soaked efforts by Marxists, who invariably need an enemy at whom to direct their anger. White African farmers are that enemy.

Racism as national policy did not end in South Africa in 1994. It is the motivating passion of the Marxist government. So the oppression, cruelty, and killing will have no stop.

Ed Driscoll interviewed Monica Crowley, whose book What the (Bleep) Just Happened Again was recently published. You can find the whole interview on video and in transcript here at PJ Media.

Monica Crowley’s opinions of Obama and his policies are very close to our own. So we are posting some extracts from the transcript, letting her speak for us, while we nod in the background – only  interjecting a few words.

On transforming America:

I really believe that Obama’s objective from the beginning — and it’s not just him, it has been the objective of the far left for a very long time — … is to change the very nature of America. America, the gift that the Founding Fathers gave to us  … a nation that was exceptional because it was based on an idea. And the idea, instead of being based on the ambitions of men …  was centered on the concept of limited government and individual freedom.

And those two things are deeply interrelated. You can’t really have tremendous individual freedom when you have a big government. The idea of the last few decades has been to try to transform that fundamental Americanness, that great American idea that has given us tremendous prosperity and tremendous power, [and made] America into a great nation [and] a good nation. … The far left has been on this mission to strip away both … the limited government part and the individual liberty part.

And for many years they had success in putting up these big, huge entitlement pillars, dependency pillars, pillars that would change the way the government related to the individual; big redistributionist pillars like Social Security and like Medicare, like Medicaid. But they were never able to sort of put the whole thing together and do a dramatic socialist overhaul of the country until they found their perfect marriage of man and mission in Barack Obama.

And so from the beginning, and from day one of his first term, Obama and the far left set out to change the very nature of America, to change our character. And by that I mean strip away the self-reliance that underpins limited government and individual freedom. Strip that away and replace it with massive dependency; dependency on government.

So over the last four years, what they have done, and they have largely succeeded, is change the balance between the government sector and the private sector, change the relationship between the government and the individual, and created and expanded this massive dependency society. …

Obama and the far left have had enormous success in changing the character of this country. …

On the state of the GOP today:

I think over the next four years, certainly, we are going to see — we’re going to see federalism come to the fore. We’re going to see that Tenth Amendment rise.

And the reason is … Republicans now control thirty out of fifty governorships. We control the vast majority of state houses across the country. And it’s been a very interesting phenomenon to watch, because those offices are closer to the people than the presidency and then Washington, Congress, the Senate, and so on.

So when people have a choice, when they think that their vote will actually matter to their direct lives, meaning governor, state houses, they’re going more conservative. They’re going toward conservative governors, not even just Republican governors, but conservative governors, in most states. …

And so what I think you’re going to see is a real tension — and we already see this tension now, but I think it’s going to increase — between Washington, the federal government, and the states. And we’re going to see the states, as they’re starting to do now, on gun control, on immigration, … on a whole range of issues, you’re going to see the states pushing back and asserting their rights on behalf of the people that put them into office.

Taking on the federal government is a really tough thing, especially now, because it’s so big and it’s so powerful under Obama. But I think you’re going to see an increase in states going forward with their own agendas and pushing back on Washington. …

On foreign policy:

I actually believe [Obama] wants Iran to get a nuclear weapon. He has done nothing to stop Iran. Those sanctions that his administration put into place are toothless. The Iranians have found every way to get around them.

He has done nothing but stall. And the Iranians have used that time to go ahead and a) slaughter their own people in the streets when they revolted in 2009; and b) try to acquire a nuclear weapon. And they are getting there with every passing hour … This president has done nothing to stop them, on purpose.

I would also say on the Arab Spring, this is a man who wants to see the rise of the Islamists. He wants to see the rise of the Islamists across the board, and that is why he threw over a long time ally of the United States, Husni Mubarak in Egypt. That is why he paved the way for Muammar Gaddafi, who yes, was a longstanding terrorist, but over recent years Gaddafi was trying to reach out to the United States and providing us with crucial intelligence on the movements of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood across Northern Africa. And now we see what a problem that is. This president then went to facilitate his overthrow as well.

Why hasn’t he moved in Syria, where you have, what, upwards of maybe 40,000 people slaughtered under the Assad regime? Well, it’s because he’s been waiting for the Muslim Brotherhood to be poised and ready to take control there as well.

This is a man who knows exactly what he is doing. It is incredibly dangerous. It is completely antithetical to American interests. And now here we are. And we see it with China. He hasn’t taken on China. China continues to be a currency manipulator, getting very aggressive along the Pacific Rim, with very close allies of ours, like Japan and South Korea. Obama hasn’t lifted a finger. North Koreans just tested another nuclear weapon. No consequences from the United States. …

Yes. Obama wants victory for Islam in the world as much as he wants victory for socialism in America. A big step towards Islamic victory would be the defeat, and so the destruction, of Israel. He has to seem to be somewhat supportive of Israel, somewhat even-handed in the – totally defunct – “peace process” ostensibly still taking place between Israel and the Palestinians. But meanwhile he lets Iran build a nuclear arsenal because the quick and reliable way to destroy Israel would be by nuclear attack.

This president came into office with a far left ideology of wanting to take down America a notch or two or ten abroad, because we are not worthy. America’s full of sin from the past, and we have had our way around the world, and now it’s time we pay the price.

So I would argue, and I argue in this book, that his whole philosophy is all being carried out and it’s all deliberate and it’s all on purpose. There is no incompetence. There’s no naivete. It’s being carried out exactly as he’d like to see it. …

On the collusion of the media:

The philosophy of the Obama administration is we will do what we want, Constitution be damned. And we know that nobody’s really going to cover the bad stuff, because they’re all out to protect us. They’re with us ideologically. They’re never going to allow the first black president to get into any real trouble. They will protect us. So therefore, we will get away with everything.

And they have. And like I said, with a few exceptions of certain news outlets that have covered Fast and Furious, it really hasn’t gotten covered. And they believe that when the bad stuff happens, whether it’s Fast and Furious or Benghazi or any of the range of unconstitutional maneuvers this president has done, that they can just wait it out, because it doesn’t get covered. So they wait it out, they stonewall, they don’t give any explanations. They continue to smile, and the story blows over. …

These scandals [the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal, and the scandal of the Benghazi murders] under Barack Obama actually have an American body count. Watergate, nobody died. So you tell me which one is the more serious. They have covered up these scandals. They go as high as Eric Holder, possibly the President of the United States, and still, no sense of curiosity from the mainstream media. It’s astonishing. And they ought to be ashamed. …

On how badly Obama is wrecking America:

Assuming he does leave in 2017… I think the extent of the damage we don’t even know yet. I think we have a sense of the extent of the damage, but we really have no idea [of]the destruction that he has wrought and is wreaking on this country.

This is a man who spoke in 2008 about his dream of the fundamental transformation of the nation — his words, not mine — the fundamental transformation. He also talked about remaking America — again, his words, not mine.

And he would invoke the phrase “a more perfect union.” And you know, part of his genius [or Alinskyite training – ed] four years ago was, in allowing those statements to kind of float out there on their own, and allowing the American people to hear those statements and assign to them their own meaning, what they thought he meant by those phrases.

What I argue in the book is, don’t pay attention to what you think he meant. Pay attention to what he meant by it. Now we have four years of evidence as to what he meant by the fundamental transformation of the nation. And that is he intends to change us and is changing us, very quickly, into a European-style socialist state.

The result of that is, as we see in Western Europe, after decades of socialism, we see stubbornly and permanently high unemployment. We see sovereign debt crises that are imploding nations, if not the entire continent of Europe. We see immigration policies out of control, where these nations have lost their very identities, because they have been overrun by all kinds of different ethnicities, including radical Muslims that have taken over a lot of these countries, or at least exerting a lot of influence there.

So you see the results that are absolutely devastating in Western Europe. No economic growth. We see that now here. We have seen it. All of those results of decades of socialism building up in Western Europe, that is imploding all of those once-great nations. We see it happening here on a much more accelerated scale, because this economy is so much bigger, this country is so much bigger than any country in Western Europe.

So it’s happening a lot faster here. And when he leaves office, I do think that this country — the tentacles of redistributionism that he has wrapped around every major pillar of this economy, from the industrial base, to the financial sector, to the energy sector to the healthcare sector, those tentacles will be wrapped so tightly after eight years, that it will be almost impossible to unwind without great, enormous economic pain and dislocation. I think that’s where we’re heading. …

The laws of economics will kick in, and everything will come to a screeching halt.

Inflation, interest rates going up, higher taxes, no jobs. You’re seeing it happening across Western Europe. The debt crisis will kick in and it will be brutal, and it will affect every single person.

You can’t spend the last four or five years — actually longer than that, with the easy money policy from the Fed — you can’t spend all this time pumping trillions of dollars down into the system and not expect inflation to kick in big time. That is actually — massive inflation is actually a tax that affects the middle and lower classes more than anybody else. That is coming. …

We have had brave Republicans like Paul Ryan put out budget after budget and plan after plan saying, guys, this is foreseen. We can see this coming. And here’s how we fix it before the crisis hits. But people don’t want to hear it. People vote them out. People — people take the courageous folks and throw them out on their ears. And they don’t listen until they have to. And by that point, the pain so intense that it is going to be an absolute nightmare.

Can it be repaired? Yeah. But I fear, I really worry, that we’re going to have to hit rock bottom before we even get to that point. I hope that’s not the case. But I fear that it may be.

The night the US mission in Benghazi was attacked, Ambassador Stephens was hideously murdered, and three other Americans were killed …

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not concerned …

and nor was President Obama.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta seems to be telling the truth – until he says: “Nobody knew really what was going on there.”

This is from a Washington Times report published December 11, 2012:

Live video from a drone flying over the U.S. Consulate during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, was monitored at a Defense Department facility, but was not fed  to the White House, senior officials say.

The Obama administration has declined to respond to media requests for details about who was watching the live video,  but a senior defense official told The Washington Times that “the surveillance aircraft captured footage of events on the ground” and “it wasn’t available that night at the White House”.

“Not available” because not asked for. The Commander in Chief was otherwise engaged.

Panetta had met with Obama at 5 o’clock  for a half-hour pre-scheduled 30-minute session, where, Panetta said, they “spent about 20 minutes talking about the American embassy that was surrounded in Egypt and the situation that was just unfolding in Benghazi”. So the President knew that the Benghazi mission and the ambassador were under attack, but throughout that night he made no enquiries about how the crisis was developing.

Will Obama ever be held to account for his gross and callous dereliction of duty on that fatal night?

Religion, say the religious, teaches moral behavior.

What was done to a little Saudi girl by her father, a Muslim imam, is so atrocious it is hard just to read about it.

From Creeping Sharia:

This imam doubted his 5-year old’s virginity [!] so he brutally raped, tortured and killed her! It’s unknown whom he suspected of taking the poor child’s virginity. …

Lamia al-Ghamdi was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011 with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns… She died last October 22.

Fayhan al-Ghamdi, an Islamic preacher and regular guest on Muslim television networks, confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries … They said the father had doubted Lamia’s virginity …

A social worker from the hospital where Lama was admitted, said the girl’s back was broken and that she had been raped “everywhere” … her “rectum had been torn open and the abuser had attempted to burn it closed. One of her fingernails [was] removed, [and]the side of her head was smashed” …

What must be done to punish a man who commits such a crime? His religious law says – nothing much.

[According to] Islamic laws …  a father cannot be executed for murdering his children.  

The  imam father spent a short time in prison awaiting his trial. Then the judge ruled the prosecution could only seek blood money to be paid to the little girl’s mother, and that the time the defendant had served in prison “suffices as punishment”.

Imam Fayhan al-Ghamdi

An all-powerful all-knowing good god was at work again recently when 26 people, 20 of them little children, were shot to death by a young man. God was busy saving some of the children, according to some whose children were not shot. And there are Christian priests and other liars and sentimentalists on TV talking about forgiveness. Forgiveness on behalf of the victims is an empty gesture, and the dead of course cannot forgive. Forgiveness is in any case part of the Christian doctrinal revolt against justice.

We won’t spend many moments considering such heartless nonsense. We will observe in passing, though, that if someone must believe in an all-powerful all-knowing god who controls the universe, it would make quite a bit more sense to believe he is evil. An evil god can be whimsical. He can decide not to do evil now and then. Believers could even ascribe good deeds to him without falling into a mess of inconsistency, since an evil god would enjoy confusing his creatures.

But enough bothering with idiotic beliefs. Let’s say how we view such human deeds. Throughout our lives we are continually and inevitably to a certain extent in the hands of other people. We should try not to do harm to one another. That is a very high standard of morality. We will not succeed, but we can and should try.

And what of those who deliberately do harm? Whenever possible they should be punished. He who has taken a life (and lives on) should have his life taken from him. If he has taken many lives, there is nothing more that can be done. Punishment of the mass-murderer cannot be commensurate with his crime. Justice is elusive. We cannot always, or often, achieve it. But again, we can and should try.

When someone kills 26 people, 20 of them little children, and then kills himself, so putting himself beyond even such justice as is within our power, all we can do is blame him and express – yes – our hatred not just of the deed but of the perpetrator. Hold him responsible. That is all we can do in such a case to uphold the principle of justice. To forgive him, even if only in theory, would be to commit another crime – and resign the principle.

As we say in our Articles of reason: Justice may be elusive, but judgment is inescapable.

As everybody knows, a short video purporting to be the trailer for a film that was apparently never made, and which hardly anyone noticed for months, was publicly blamed by President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and White House spokesman Jay Carney, for an outbreak of anti-US riots in Islamic countries, and for the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya, on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.

The filmlet – puzzlingly titled “Innocence of Muslims” – mocks the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet Muhammad is a mythical construct (even if based on one or more obscure historical figures of the 7th century), made by his inventors in accordance with their own ideals as an intolerant mass-murdering lecher. And that’s how the filmlet depicts him.

For making it, a small-time hoodlum named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been put in prison. Ostensibly his criminal offense is breaking terms of parole in trivial harmless ways such as going on the internet, but in fact he is a political prisoner who used his Constitutionally granted freedom of speech to say something the regime that now rules the United States of America does not like.  

(For more about the video, Nakoula, the riots and how the video was used to stoke them up, see our posts: Muslim evil rising, September 13, 2012; Islam explodes, and Obama lit the fuse, September 14, 2012; The pretext giver, September 15, 2012; To make a mocking movie, September 23, 2012; Muslims made the anti-Muhammad video?, September 26, 2012.)

This is from PowerLine by John Hinderaker:

Liberal support for free speech has been waning for a long time, and at present it seems to be just about extinct. The latest evidence is a story in today’s New York Times about Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who made the video that was falsely blamed for the Benghazi attack, and has languished in jail for the last two months as a result. One might think that the Times would regard jailing a man for exercising his First Amendment rights as an outrage requiring daily denunciations, but no – the tone of the article, by Serge Kovaleski and Brooks Barnes, suggests that Nakoula deserved what he got.

Start with the article’s title: “From Man Who Insulted Muhammad, No Regret.” The Times finds it remarkable that Nakoula isn’t penitent:

“Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making ‘Innocence of Muslims,’ his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.”

So is America now a country where we imprison people so they can rethink the wisdom of making a video with the wrong political point of view? Apparently the Times thinks so; there is strong evidence that Barack Obama does, too.

“Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction. Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called ‘the actual truth’ about Muhammad.”

Which raises an interesting point. I have never seen anyone comment on the historical accuracy of Nakoula’s film (assuming that anyone has actually seen it) or the YouTube trailer. Muhammad was, in fact, a “bloodthirsty, philandering thug.” You could say worse things about him than that without straying from the truth. But this question is not one that the Times, or any other media outlet I am aware of, has seen fit to explore.

The Times tries to keep alive the fiction that Nakoula’s video might have had something to do with the Benghazi attack:

“There is a dispute about how important the video was in provoking the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the United States ambassador and three other Americans.”

Actually, I don’t think there is any dispute at all. To my knowledge, there is zero evidence that the Ansar al-Sharia terrorists who carried out the attack knew or cared about Nakoula’s video.

The main point of the Times article – the only point, really – is to establish that Nakoula is disreputable and untrustworthy. But this is an odd perspective to take on what appears to be an extraordinary violation of the First Amendment – jailing a man for political speech regarded as inconvenient by the Obama administration. …

The Obama administration doesn’t even pretend that Nakoula was imprisoned for any reason other than as punishment for his impermissible speech. Recall Charles Woods [father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Americans murdered in Benghazi] recounting how Hillary Clinton approached him at his son’s memorial and said, “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And it is blindingly obvious that tossing a probationer in the slammer for using an alias and accessing the internet, notwithstanding that those actions violated the terms of his probation, is not standard practice.

The writer asks –

In the view of the New York Times, is the First Amendment reserved for the honest and the respectable?

And comments –

That certainly wasn’t the Left’s position when Communists were availing themselves of the bourgeois right of free speech.

Now, it seems, it may be reserved for those who submit to Obama and Islam.

In fact, the New York Times and American “liberals” in general have been against freedom as such for a long time now. Collectivists calling themselves liberal  – in the manner described by George Orwell as Newspeak  – is like Communist tyrannies commonly calling themselves People’s Democratic Republics. Or the main party of the Left in America calling itself the Democratic Party.

*

11/29/12. The real name of  Nakoula Basseley Nakoula may have finally emerged. Fox News reports:

An Egyptian court convicted in absentia Wednesday seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor, sentencing them to death on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that had sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world [ie had been used to spark riots]. … The man behind the film, Mark Basseley Youssef, is among those convicted. He was sentenced in a California court earlier this month to a year in federal prison for probation violations in an unrelated matter. Youssef, 55, admitted that he had used several false names in violation of his probation order and obtained a driver’s license under a false name. He was on probation for a bank fraud case.

When Howard Dean, who once thought he would make a good president and offered himself to the nation, said just before the recent election that if the Republicans won in Ohio it would be by voter fraud, he was sending out a warning in disguise. The Left habitually accuses its opposition of the crimes and misdemeanors it practices itself. And sure enough, voter fraud was practiced by the Democrats on a vast scale. And, as always, shamelessly.

This is from IBD:

Democrats say America doesn’t need voter identification laws because there’s no evidence of election cheating. But when a candidate doesn’t get a single vote in 59 precincts, you’ve got to wonder.

One candidate did just that last week in Philadelphia, where Mitt Romney was shut out 19,605-0 in 59 voting divisions. …

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato told the Philadelphia Inquirer that it deserves scrutiny.

“Not a single vote for Romney or even an error?” he asked. “That’s worth looking into.”

Philadelphia is also where 75 legal and credentialed Republican election workers were blocked or removed from the polls on Election Day. And Pennsylvania is the Democratic state where a duly legislated voter ID law was blocked by a judge for the 2012 election.

Romney was similarly blanked in nine precincts in nationally pivotal and heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County, Ohio, centered on Cleveland, where he did even worse than third-party candidates.

Seem impossible? Yes, it does. …

Equally as implausible were the turnouts in Democratic strongholds that either exceeded the number of registered voters or the voting-age population.

It’s possible for voter participation to exceed the number of registered voters — new residents and unregistered voters can register on Election Day and vote. But it’s unlikely when the average voter turnout has been 64% in the last two presidential contests.

Yet that happened in, yes, Pennsylvania, where Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has complained that some precincts voted at more than 100%.

Even more unlikely is turnout surpassing the voter-age population. But that happened in two counties in Colorado, a state won by Obama.

Despite all the smoke strongly suggestive of fire, left-wing publication Mother Jones ran a headline in August that read “UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud,” which sums up nicely the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward the issue. …

An Obama supporter said on Facebook, on election day, “that he’d voted four times in North Carolina and was planning to vote once more.”

Though Obama won last week, he lost in all four states that strictly require would-be voters to present photographic identification before receiving a ballot.

The Republican Party is raising no fuss about all this. It has become a party of John McCains, all too gentlemanly to fight dirty against the dirtiest fighters in the history of the United States.

It is absolutely necessary that Republicans prove themselves now to be very bad losers.

We think the Constitutional Republic is lost beyond recovery. Those who believe it was the last best hope must constantly and unremittingly criticize, accuse, denigrate, decry, disparage, attack, insult the new, socialist, Islam-friendly state. Give it no quarter. Haters of tyranny unite against it. You have nothing more to lose.

*

Bearing out what we say about the Republicans being too gentlemanly – or spineless – to fight a dirty fight when it’s the only way to win, here’s a maddening item from Canada Free Press:

More than a week before the election, an FBI whistleblower went to a Republican member of Congress with explosive details about a national security scandal [General Petraeus’s adulterous affair] that could have stopped President Obama’s re-election campaign dead in its tracks. But the potentially devastating “October Surprise” was hushed up by Republicans. … Despite the explosive nature of the allegations, two Republican members of Congress, Dave Reichert and Eric Cantor, decided to pass on the information to the FBI director and take no action themselves. They didn’t even inform their colleagues on the House Intelligence Committee or in the House leadership. It was a terrible mistake on their part that enabled Obama to escape the damaging repercussions of the scandal right before what many conservatives called the most important presidential election of our lifetimes.