Doc7505
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- Feb 16, 2016
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Hey Joe Biden, Here Are Some Scandals You Forgot About
06/13/2019 ~ By David Harsanyi
“Know what I was most proud of?” presidential candidate Joe Biden told a crowd on Wednesday. “For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie.”
In an era where every presidential tweet is an existential threat to democracy, there are probably plenty of people who believe this myth. Off the bat, though, it should be mentioned that even liberal factchecking outfit PolitiFact once awarded Barack Obama the “Lie of Year” for misleading the American people about his technocratic health-care plan.
Our former vice president, no slouch about misleading the public on the ACA, probably forgot.
Obama’s most famous lie, of course, upturned millions of lives. Without it, it’s doubtful Obamacare—which was perhaps the only wholly partisan national reform effort in American history—would ever have passed. Even with a stream of falsehoods, the bill had to be shoe-horned through Congress. Media did a lot of heavy lifting for the administration in those heady days.
“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” was only one of an array of demonstrably false statements fed to the public to give (now-extinct) moderate Democrats cover. You might remember one of Obamacare’s architects, Jonathan Gruber, explaining how this “lack of transparency” compounded by “the stupidity of the American voter” was a huge political advantage for the administration. Or maybe you don’t.
How many Americans knew, for instance, that “Operation Fast and Furious” put around 2,000 weapons into the hands of narco-traffickers (and an Islamic terrorist), leading to the murder of hundreds of Mexican citizens, and at least one American, a border agent named Brian Terry? Not enough.
There must have been at least a sniff of scandal, by the way, because even after a federal judge rejected Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in efforts to deny Congress files relating to the operation, the administration wouldn’t budge. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, refused to cooperate in the investigation, becoming the first sitting attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress — a vote that included 17 Democrats.
That’s odd, because today asserting executive privilege is exactly like Watergate. And ignoring courts? Well, Obama did that all the time. Then again, perhaps Biden feels “most proud” of his mythical eight years of non-scandals because it’s about the only thing in his political past he isn’t going to be forced to abandon.
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We shouldn't be so hard on Joey. After all, he has the functional intellect of a potted plant, and one not particularly well-cared for. But he did say he will cure cancer.
The Justice Department had already spied on AP news reporters, Sharyl Attkisson, and Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails, and tracking his movements, including tapping Rosen's parents phones.
So other than all the above and other scandals the media tried to bury during the Obama administration they were scandal free. To quote Bath House Barry, "Not a smidgeon."
