If It Walks Like a Duck...

FROM THE CRIME DESK: Dr. Kermit Gosnell has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in

prison without parole. A jury found him guilty of killing a poor Bhutanese immigrant woman and three infants who were born alive at his Philadelphia abortion mill, which as I have noted in this space, hadn't been inspected for seventeen years and was operated more like a butcher shop than anything else. (The judge dropped three other counts of murdering infants because nobody actually witnessed those particular crimes, so apparently physical evidence - the dead children - wasn't enough.) We are told that the jury agonized over the case for eight days before rendering their verdict, which we might expect after forty years of liberal indoctrination, but they eventually came to the right and natural conclusion: Murdering helpless children is wrong. I guess there's still hope for you, America.

IRS USED TO ATTACK HIS POLITICAL ENEMIES, PRIEST-KING SHOCKED: The Internal Revenue Service has targeted dozens of conservative groups applying for 501(c)3 tax-exempt status, requiring especially burdensome paperwork and detailed, intrusive information to which the agency is not entitled, and extending the approval of such status from weeks to years. We've also been informed that the IRS lied to Congress last year when they stated that no such program was underway, that the effort was not the work of low-level employees in one office (Cincinnati) but was created and managed from Washington, that the IRS was goaded by Democrat politicians on Capitol Hill to target conservative groups, that even Billy Graham Ministries received special scrutiny because of their opposition to gay marriage, that the information the IRS obtained was shared with the left-wing advocacy group ProPublica, and that aside from the acting Commissioner who was pressured to resign Wednesday, absolutely nobody has been disciplined for this criminal activity. Priest-King, for his part, hem-hawed on the subject at his press conference on Monday, trying to acknowledge the severity of the scandal without taking responsibility for it, but let's get real: The guy who fired the CEO of General Motors when he had no authority to do so wouldn't blink at using the IRS to bludgeon his political enemies. THIS IS SERIOUS, PEOPLE. An agency of the Federal government was directing its fearsome powers against American citizens because of their political and religious beliefs, denying them equal protection, collecting extremely private and detailed information to which it had no right, which it then shared with Priest-King's left-wing allies, lying to Congress and the public as to the existence and scope of its efforts, and breaking the law. The Left usually associates this sort of conduct with its favorite bogeyman, Richard Nixon, but they shouldn't be surprised that a man weaned on bare-knuckle Chicago politics would resort to it. For the sake of the American people, Darrell Issa should climb into the IRS with a proctoscope, find everyone involved with this mess and show them what it feels like.

NEWS SERVICE TELEPHONE RECORDS SEIZED, PRIEST-KING SAYS THEY DESERVED IT: We are informed that the Justice Department has obtained telephone records of at least a hundred Associated Press employees in an effort to find out the source of a national security leak that was reported last year (a plot to blow up an American airliner from Yemen to New York that was foiled). Although the intent of the DOJ's investigation was laudable and routine methods had failed, DOJ went waay over the line by casting such a wide net, especially against a news agency so friendly to the Left. Agitating the press, treating them like an enemy, is another hallmark of the Nixon administration but also of authoritarian regimes generally, and this scandal reminds us that Priest-King is an authoritarian of the first order. He demands absolute obedience, permits no disagreement or dissent and will go after anyone who gets in his way. (Remember how Obama refused to appear on Fox News for such a long time, how he demonized conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, and urged his supporters during the campaign last year to take "revenge" on his opponents?) Pursuing national security leaks is a worthy goal but in this case, Priest-King is trying to freeze the American press, terrorize it and bend it to his will. The Left went ape over W.'s Patriot Act and FISA wiretaps when terrorists were the quarry; let's see how far when their outrage extends when their ox is being gored.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee heard testimony from three witnesses, all experienced State Department diplomats, who directly refuted the Priest-King Administration's account of the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, last year and their characterization of it as a public protest gone terribly wrong. These three men - Gregory Hicks, Eric Nordstrom and Mark Thompson - risked their careers by naming names, times, and specific events that exposed Priest-King's
efforts to suppress the truth and mislead the American people as to the dea~hs of our consular personnel in Libya, as well as the threats they have received from their superiors in an attempt to intimidate them from testifying. The Priest-King Administration will smear these men as disgruntled hacks motivated by the desire for fame, fortune and the opportunity to humiliate their bosses, abetted by the Republicans in the House, but that will fall flat. What we have to remember is that we have four dead Americans, left to die in a lonely outpost in a dangerous part of the world, abandoned to their fate for no other reason than Priest-King's political fortune. For months leading up to the election, he had repeated the mantra, "Al Qaeda is on the run," had trumpeted the deaths of Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, had waved his campaign of Predator drone attacks and the retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan as trophies of his inspired leadership. To admit that the attack on Benghazi was a coordinated, sustained, deliberate terrorist attack would contradict everything he had been saying, would call into question his strategy of disengagement and jeopardize his re-election, so Ambassador Chris Stevens and his brave colleagues were abandoned to a storm of fire and bullets not from an Al Qaeda affiliate but from a protest gone haywire. Nothing was done to help them. The consulate was physically relocated to an unstable part of an unstable country. Every request for extra security was denied. After the attack began, fighters weren't scrambled and the DoD ready team in Croatia wasn't deployed. (They would have arrived too late to save Ambassador Stevens but in time to save his embattled comrades in the consulate annex, which was attacked later.) The State Department's own counterterrorism bureau was excluded from the case and every reference to Al Qaeda and terrorism was deleted from official communications. Susan Rice parroted the Administration's phony version on every Sunday talk show, to the point of contradicting the Libyan President who immediately preceded her on CBS' Face the Nation. (The President was so insulted that he refused to cooperate with the FBI investigation, delaying the truth yet again.)

Taking all of these scandals together, we have an administration that is paranoid, obsessed with itself, out of control. Priest-King will resort to anything to protect himself, advance his socialist agenda and destroy his enemies, leaving our consular personnel to die, covering up his role therein, attacking American citizens for their political and religious beliefs and digging into the private communications of a free press. He and his cronies lie, steal, cheat and break the law, they deserve to be turned out into the snow and I pray that my fellow Americans snap out of whatever spell they've been under: If he walks like a crook, talks like a crook and acts like a crook, he's probably a crook.