by Joel B. Pollak
President Barack Obama rarely makes himself available to the mainstream media. They adore him anyway. At rare press conferences, such as the one scheduled for this past Friday at the White House, they lob softball questions or accept his evasive, meandering answers, rarely pressing him for clarity, much less truth. But there are many questions that the president ought to answer, yet which he is unlikely to face at all.
Here is a list of 13 questions, he should answer candidly: Continue reading
CNN won’t challenge the White House with tough questions
by Ken Allard
CNN spent an hour of prime time Tuesday night to air a special anchored by Erin Burnett, “The Truth about Benghazi.” They claimed to have learned two vital lessons from their supposedly extensive investigation of that tragedy: It must never happen again, and politics trumped patriotism.
Really? That’s it? Are you kidding? The smiling, earnest naivete of Ms. Burnett suggested a graduate student who worked, you know, like really hard at the library all weekend — but apparently didn’t get within spitting distance of a reasonable conclusion.
First of all, Ms. Burnett may have noticed that her program aired just as American embassies in the Mideast were shuttered against a resurgent terrorist threat that Susan E. (Second Time’s the Charm) Rice is crisis-managing in her debut as national security adviser. Or that Vice President Joe Biden’s election-year litany — al Qaeda is dead and General Motors is alive — has been updated. Now it seems that al Qaeda is alive, and Detroit has gone belly-up. Continue reading
Denial, evasion, “Let me be perfectly clear” — is this 2013 or 1973?
by Victor Davis Hanson
The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known. Almost a year after the attacks on our Benghazi facilities, we are only now learning details of CIA gun-running, military stand-down orders, aliases of those involved who are still hard to locate, massaged talking points, and the weird jailing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.
We still do not quite know why Eric Holder’s Justice Department went after the Associated Press or Fox News’s James Rosen — given that members of the administration were themselves illegally leaking classified information about the Stuxnet virus, the Yemeni double agent, the drone program, and the bin Laden document trove, apparently to further the narrative of an underappreciated Pattonesque commander-in-chief up for reelection.
Almost everything the administration has assured us about the IRS scandal has proven false: It was not confined to rogue Cincinnati agents; liberal and conservative groups were not equally targeted; and there were political appointees who were involved in or knew of the misdeeds. Continue reading