Obomination: The Great Pivot

Investors Business Daily had an interesting editorial entitled “Plenty of Investigation to Go In Growing IRS Scandal” yesterday about a fact that is being overlooked:  

The public may be sore about a stimulus that never stimulated, or ObamaCare encouraging layoffs, but Obama is better off with people thinking about those failures than the possibility that the IRS stole the election.

And so the nation beholds "The Great Pivot" — a presidency that wants to shift away from being about misbehavior to being about mediocrity.

It's time, said White House crisis management chief Jay Carney on Wednesday, to stop paying attention to "the phony scandals that have consumed so much attention here, all to come to naught" — the "pretend scandals," as he called them.

They include:  The near-damning timeline of Obama-appointed IRS chief counsel William Wilkins meeting with the president in the Roosevelt Room on April 23 last year; IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visiting the Old Executive Office Building next door to the West Wing the next day; Wilkins' office sending the IRS tax-exempt division "guidance" on the Tea Party the day after that, as uncovered by the IRS inspector general and reported by the Daily Caller's Patrick Howley.

House Oversight & Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa is going to get to the bottom of this.  One of the key facts recently uncovered, it was not based on decisions made by career employees.

“As a part of this ongoing investigation, the Committees have learned that the IRS Chief Counsel’s office in Washington, D.C. has been closely involved in some of the applications.  Its involvement and demands for information about political activity during the 2010 election cycle appears to have caused systematic delays in the processing of Tea Party applications,” wrote Issa, Camp, Jordan, and Boustany in their letter to Werfel.  “[B]ased on his decades of experience, [career IRS official Carter Hull] determined he had enough facts to make recommendations whether to approve or deny the applications … However, Mr. Hull’s recommendations were not carried out.  Instead, according to Michael Seto, the head of Mr. Hull’s unit in Washington, Lois Lerner instructed that the Tea Party applications go through a multi-layer review that included her senior advisor and the Chief Counsel’s office.”

In other words, much like in the DOJ Black Panther scandal, more neutral career employees were overruled by political appointees.  The political appointees’ agenda was to illegally influence elections by hampering the Tea Party and other groups’ ability to act.

This is a major scandal and all the facts have not come out.  That President Obama is trying to pivot to his mediocre or worse record from illegally activities by his appointees is this week’s Obomination.