May 28, 2013
Obama's Most Dangerous 'Enemies' are Being Targeted
ByEd Lasky

There is a pattern emerging in the Obama Presidency. He is at war with reality; his greatest enemies are facts. And he has been targeting for years a small group of people whose duty is to expose the truth. Their loyalty runs to the citizenry and not to Barack Obama. They are not Republicans and they are certainly not journalists. And Obama has been trying to muzzle them. One man stands in the way.

Inspectors General (IG) are government employees who are responsible for ferreting out mismanagement, fraud and corruption in the federal government. The Barack Obama presidency has provided them with a target-rich environment. They are responsible for uncovering a wide range of Obama failures. These include:

The Department of Justice's Fast and Furious Fiasco; Massive waste and corruption in the stimulus and "green energy" programs with an agenda to reward Obama donors and whose weatherization programs were rife with waste and fraud.

Deluxe spending of taxpayer money by GSA employees who clearly did not take their assigned duties (to save government money spent by others) seriously and mismanagement at the US Department of Agriculture;

The State Department's Inspector General is investigating the special internal panel that probed the Benghazi failures for its apparent whitewashing of the scandal behind the deaths of Americans.

The Special Inspector General, Neil Barofsky, of the Troubled Asset Relief Program reported that the Obama administration had engaged in 'Enron-like accounting" to hide its mismanagement (as covered below, he earned the wrath of the Obama hit squad).

Recently, of course, the normally lapdog press has been compelled to cover the controversy over the role of Treasury Department's meting out "special treatment" to conservative groups and donors to Republicans to neuter them as forces in the 2012 election has generated headlines. The IRS Inspector General's report triggered the planting of a question at an ACA meeting, and the public apology by Lois Lerner, which in turn ignited hearings and press coverage.

The list of abuses uncovered by the Inspectors General has been multiplying as rapidly as the national debt has under Obama. The government wastes billions by not listening to Inspectors General Obama wants to all but eviscerate them.

Inspectors General are career employees not political appointees. Obama's minions cannot dismiss their reports as being merely partisan attacks (many of them, such as Barofsky, are Democrats). They operate in obscurity, away from the klieg lights, diligently searching for malfeasance while protecting taxpayers. They do not profit from exposing wrongdoing; their credibility is rock-solid. Impure motives cannot be imputed to them-a favorite rhetorical weapon of Obama and his team.

There are very few unsullied heroes in Washington-very few people looking out for hard-working Americans. Among them should be Inspectors General.

They are threats to Obama's image and agenda and have therefore earned their place on Obama's enemies list. While Obama can't send the drones after them they do have targets on their backs.

Where are those missing Inspectors General?

Over the past few years Barack Obama has attempted to starve the beast by refusing to fill vacancies in the ranks of Inspectors General as they have arisen. The White House been routinely chided for years over its negligence. Timothy Smith of the Washington Post reported in May of last year that "there were 10 IG vacancies, including five at cabinet-level agencies. Four of them had been vacant for more than 3 years."

Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Government Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, stated that 'This administration's failure to fill inspector-general vacancies has weakened the effectiveness of the inspector-general community, thus exposing American taxpayer dollars to waste, fraud and abuse". Well...never let it be said that Barack Obama did not accomplish one of his most important goals. And it took so little work on his part.

The Project on Government Oversight (an independent, nonpartisan good government watchdog) has even launched a web page that tracks how long vacancies have been left open across the federal Inspector General system.

Obama has also attempted to slash the budgets of the inspector general for the Office of Management and Budget: one of the key Inspector General positions since the official has a broad mandate to focus on government spending. This from a man who never met a budget he did not want to expand or a person he did not want to put on the federal payroll. Yet, the one program he wants to slash (aside from the Defense Department) is the program that is designed to protect taxpayers. Incidentally, he did plan on a $30 billion dollar program that was uniquely designed to have no oversight by any Inspector General (i.e., a bigger slush fund than anyone ever cooked up in Cook County) but Republican resistance squashed his plans (for once).

Shocked?

Read more:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/o...r#ixzz2Ub9YB7hO

I'm really disappointed that Obama can have so much controlling power. I thought we had better checks & balances within our government but it's beginning to look like Obama can reign as he sees fit and no one can stop him.