{"id":17976,"date":"2013-05-19T16:15:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T20:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=17976"},"modified":"2013-05-19T16:15:26","modified_gmt":"2013-05-19T20:15:26","slug":"artur-davis-dont-dismiss-these-scandals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/17976\/artur-davis-dont-dismiss-these-scandals\/","title":{"rendered":"Artur Davis: Don’t Dismiss These Scandals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis has done a smart, well-reasoned analysis<\/a> of the underlying meaning(s) of Barack Obama’s week of scandals. He rightly notes that “Obama’s administration struggles mightily with the threshold concept of accountability.”<\/span><\/p>\n

And:<\/span><\/p>\n

The emerging argument, which seems to be that the Obama White House was detached enough to rely on the expertise of its department heads to resolve the dilemmas around each event in the current spotlight, would sound strained even if it came during a presidency that was famously disengaged…. <\/span><\/p>\n

More fundamentally, the \u201cwe left it to our division heads defense\u201d would not excuse any executive leadership in the public or private sector from the imperative of setting values and standards of conduct for decisions made inside the organization\u2019s own walls, and policing the extent to which those standards survive.<\/p>\n

It is hard to escape the conclusion that at a minimum, if you credit its defense, that this government seems more rudderless than could have been imagined eleven days ago.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also of great note, Davis rightly focuses on a supremely important facet of the Benghazi scandal that the establishment media seems to have willfully ignored, even though it is one of the most despicable aspects of the administration’s longer-term response to the attack:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Even if one buys the rationalization that Benghazi was only so much internecine backbiting between two old rivals, the State Department and CIA, that rationalization entirely omits the evidence that a career diplomat was punished for raising internal questions about security in advance of the Libyan attack, as well as about the unofficial chronicle, or \u201ctalking points\u201d, regarding what led to the assault. What kind of leadership is oblivious to the immediate fortunes of a reasonably high ranking whistleblower? <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, this is hardly the first time that this administration has tried to bully whistleblowers. They did it to Justice Department whistleblowers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates; they did it to five (!) different Inspectors General<\/a>; and they at the very least undermined a whistleblower in the St. Paul, Minnesota case<\/a> that has so badly (and rightly) harmed the confirmation prospects for Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Anyway, Davis has a lot of other insights well worth reading in his post.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis has done a smart, well-reasoned analysis of the underlying meaning(s) of Barack Obama’s week of scandals. He rightly notes that “Obama’s administration struggles mightily with the threshold concept of accountability.” And: The emerging argument, which seems to be that the Obama White House was detached enough to rely on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3148,3862,3097,735,3103],"class_list":["post-17976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-artur-davis","tag-benghazi","tag-christian-adams","tag-irs","tag-thomas-perez"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17976"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17977,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976\/revisions\/17977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}