The Obama White House and Benghazi and Nixon's White House and Watergate

There are two lessons to be learned from the daily bombardment of information bites from congressional leaders and the media about Benghazi, the attempts by the IRS to shut down the President's political opponents, the harrassment of AP and Fox News reporters in a concerted First Amendment attack. The FIRST LESSON has to do with the trappings of presidential power run amok. When an American President believes that he is somehow above the Constitution and the law, there will always be scandals - minor or major depending on the character and idiosyncracies of the President in power. Clinton preferred women to political power and that produced Monica Lewinsky. Reagan brought on the little-remembered Iran-Contra affair to pay for unauthorized forays into Central American ideological politics. President Obama seems to favor presidential power of a kind that more closely resembles that of President Nixon - stifle the press, lie about what's happening, use the federal bureaucracy at your disposal to bring down your political enemies. Karl Rove recently described this attitude as 'corrosive.' Rove told Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview, “They'll eat away at the president's rating. We'll see it over time and, particularly, as Congress asks more questions in the weeks ahead....This stuff is only starting to seep in,...I am not surprised that it hasn’t begun to impact his job approval just yet.” Rove, like almost everyone, finds the Benghazi cover-up most troubling - he described it as the Obama administration grossly mismanaging the information surrounding the attacks on the US consulate in Libya, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. “The West Wing was complicit in the Benghazi lie,” Rove declared to Newsmax. “And, look, I believe that, ultimately, the president is responsible for setting the tone....You don’t send out [US Ambassador to the UN] Susan Rice to go on five Sunday morning talk programs unless somebody in the West Wing has said, ‘Let's send her out’ — and somebody in the West Wing has said this is what she needs to say or said, ‘O.K., that's an interesting idea. You ought to go ahead and say that.’” Rove says the controversies - which also include the targeting of tea party and conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service and the recent secret seizure of telephone records of editors and reporters at The Associated Press - point to a haughty President. “I do see an arrogance, a belief that the rules somehow don't apply to him - that the norms that other presidents have abided by should not be respected and that he is free to do something that he would criticize in others,” Rove said.“There's lots of things that he has done that are inappropriate.” But the most egregious will always be Benghazi, Rove says. “This involves the president himself,” he declared to Newsmax. “He is the commander in chief, and at 4:08 p.m. in the afternoon on Sept. 11 in Washington, our government received word that attack was underway on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi.“ At 5 p.m., the president was told about this by the Secretary of Defense [Leon Panetta] and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [Gen. Martin Dempsey], who were in the office for a half-hour meeting on another subject. “The president ordered them to deploy whatever forces were necessary,” Rove adds. “They later testified that was the last contact they had with the president that night - and we now know that no forces were deployed. “The president didn't say: ‘I'm going to pick up the phone and call the president of Libya and say: Our facility's under attack. You have an international responsibility to protect our people. What are you doing?’ He talks to him for the first time ever the next morning to say thank you for returning the body of our dead ambassador.“ This is unacceptable,” Rove continues. “Where was the president? What was he doing? Who concocted this lie that was told to the American people? We know that it's a total, complete fabrication, a lie - and we still don’t know who was the person who authored that and told her to go say that?...It's somebody sitting in the West Wing of the White House - and their motivation was to protect the president against criticism that the war on terror was not over and that this was a terrorist attack.” ~~~~~ Dear readers, I gave you Karl Rove's outline of the Benghazi affair not because it contains news but because it describes another sad point in American history. Go back and re-read Rove's Benghazi account -- replace Benghazi with Watergate...replace atrack with burglary...replace Obama with Nixon. Karl Rove is presenting the SECOND LESSON. President Nixon and his White House thought they could use the immense powers of the White House, IRS and Department of Justice to weather the Watergate storm. They hunkered down in the White House. They lied. They covered up prior lies with new lies. They lost. And President Obama will lose, too -- unless he can overcome his political instincts learned in the rough-and-ready precincts of Chicago - unless he can overcome his own worst enemy, his belief that he is not only always right but invincible. The soundbites are increasing in Congress - from both Democrats and Republicans. The use of the Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate oneself by tesyifying under oath has already been used by an administration official. The media smells blood. President Obama is running out of time.