On Wednesday, President Barack Obama set the tone for the debate surrounding the many controversies that have plagued his administration since the spring. The president called those scandals “phony” and denigrated those who find any worth in their investigation. But, as one prominent conservative opinion writer noted yesterday, it was not long ago that the White House was acknowledging the seriousness of the scandals he now derides as contrived.
“With an endless parade of distractions, political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” Obama said during a marathon speech in Illinois.
During a panel segment on Fox News Channel’s Special Report, The Weekly Standard editorStephen F. Hayes asked a pointed question about these so-called “phony scandals”: “Which of the scandals is phony?”
“The president has already acknowledged the seriousness of two of them – three of them, in one way or another,” Hayes added.
“This is part of the plan to set up an argument for the fall,” he said, identifying how Democrats will counter Republican charges of malfeasance by administration officials ahead of the 2014 midterms. In essence, Hayes implied, Obama and his supporters will accuse the opponents of his administration of a pathological desire to cling to already discredited conspiracy theories.
