“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage, basically call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really critical…”  Jonathan Gruber, architect of Obamacare

I just want to preface this essay by mentioning that I voted for Obama in 2008 and Gary Johnson in 2012.  I’ve never voted Republican for president and do not consider myself a Republican.  This is not a partisan thing.

A couple days ago President Obama gave a speech about the election.  In it he mentioned his pride at being one of the few administrations that had never had a scandal.  And I was like wha….???  because I remember several pretty serious ones.   They were as big or bigger than anything that had happened in previous administrations.  The thing that I found different about the Obama administration was that the press simply chose not to report on them.   (this was not partisan, either – the Clintons had many scandals that were similar to Obama’s and they were reported upon ad nauseum.)

The press is NOT reporting on President Obama and they haven’t been for a while.  This is not open for debate, it is a fact.  Any rational person who has lived during any other administration can see it.   That is why it seems like he’s not doing anything most of the time.  Because we never hear about it.  We have US troops deployed in 150 countries and we never hear about it.  Obamacare is crumbling before our eyes and we never hear about it.  I have 17 stories in my Google News feed about the Kardashians every day, and the media is not reporting on the controversial policies and failures thereof, of our sitting president.  This is not something to be proud of, it’s something to be ashamed of.

I’m going to list some of them just to refresh memories in light of the recent undeniable reveal of the mainstream press as being completely in cahoots with the Democrats.  For Obama to have said he’s had no scandals in his administration, with a straight face, is deception on an epic level and that not a single mainstream media source called him out on it, just goes to show how far their standards have fallen.

1)The complete failure of the bailout to prevent rising unemployment.  According to Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise Obama sold the stimulus package at least in part because according to their predictions, it would prevent unemployment from rising as much as it would have otherwise.  Their predictions were completely wrong and it ended up appearing (according to their OWN data) that America would have recovered from the recession quicker without the stimulus package.

2)American Jobs Act and the admitted failure of the ‘shovel ready jobs’ notion.  Obama himself confessed that this hadn’t worked out – “turns out shovel ready wasn’t as shovel ready as we thought”.  This has not been addressed once by mainstream media that I’ve heard, at least not in this election cycle.  http://www.cagw.org/media/wastewatcher/shovel-ready-jobs-swindle When Obama was elected my husband was a supervisor at a manufacturing plant and made over 50k a year plus benefits.   He was laid off in 2012 and now makes 1700 dollars a month at a garbage dump (still has benefits, but we are lucky).  Mine is not a unique story.

3)Skyrocketing health care costs and just general overall failure of Obamacare.  Starting from the moment that an Obama crony was put in charge of creating the Obamacare website, it’s been a disaster.  My family had it for a short while when my husband was unemployed and I couldn’t get a dentist to accept our dental insurance without driving 2 hours away.  One of my adult sons had a potentially cancerous lump and we could not get him in to see a doctor for over 6 weeks (no one was taking new patients in a city of 500,000 people)  until we finally gave up and went to the emergency room – where he was examined right away at a much higher cost to the taxpayers.   Again, not a unique story.

4)Quagmire in Middle East – I’m no expert, but it sure seems like things are worse than ever to me.  Leon Panetta and Robert Gates have both criticized Obama’s leadership and decisions in the Middle East.  And I believe that when those two agree it may be a sign of the apocalypse LOL.  Very few serious mainstream media reports that I have heard.

5)The Romeike family.  A homeschooling family from Germany seeking asylum in the US.  The Obama administration fought to have them deported based on the argument that there is no fundamental right to homeschool ones’ children.  This, at the same time they are seeking amnesty for somewhere between 10-30 million illegal immigrants (and I personally agree with amnesty, just saying).  The Obama adminstration won their legal battle – and then reversed their decision on having the family deported and allowed them to stay.  Some believe this was all a ploy to establish that there is no right to homeschool.  I don’t know if that’s true but it’s utterly bizarre to waste taxpayer resources on this legal fight while simultaneously pushing to let many illegal immigrants remain here.

6)The IRS deliberately targeted conservative and Tea Party groups, and to a lesser extent Occupy Wall Street supporters for political purposes.  The Obama administration did not take this revelation with any seriousness and investigated it with the urgency of molasses on a cold day.  This one was at least given a passing glance by the media.  Even uber-liberals took exception to it.  Jon Stewart said this cast doubts on Obama’s “managerial competence” and Chuck Todd said “This is outrageous no matter what party you are.”

7)Secret Service scandals.  Getting drunk and getting hookers, crashing cars, possibly putting the President and First Lady into danger, possibly allowing questionable people into places where they could have accessed state secrets.  This was the kind of story that the press usually loves to cover because it involves sex and embarrassing law enforcement, but they kept mostly mum about it, possibly because some of the Secret Service agents have dirt on Obama (this has been hinted at by reputable sources).  Ordinarily this is the kind of conspiracy theory I roll my eyes at, but I have seen the media ignoring too many legit stories involving Obama to not at least wonder if there is something to it.

8)Bengazi.  This alone would have brought down just about any other President and Secretary of State but somehow Obama and Clinton came through it unscathed (well, maybe not so much Clinton) and somehow still claiming publicly there had been no scandals in the Obama administration.   As an example, Ronald Reagan was held up for scrutiny by political opponents (and still is – Hillary Clinton invoked his name in her own self-defense) following a 1983 bombing in Lebanon that had far, far less to do with his administration’s failings than Bengazi did Obama’s, given the historical context.  Organized terrorism was just so much less of a thing in 1983 than 2013 that it seems silly for Clinton to hold Reagan to anywhere near the same standard as she should have been held to.  This did get some coverage largely because the Republicans kept bringing it up, but I believe it was and is being minimized to protect Hillary’s presidential ambitions.

9)NSA abuses.  Before Obama was elected he railed against the Patriot Act, but once he took office, he signed its renewal anyway.  During this time, it was revealed that the NSA had created a global surveillance system amassing large amounts of data from phones and email.  Obama defended this, then ignored it, then said that it would have been better if the American people had never known about it.

10)Ruling by executive fiat.  While technically speaking Obama did not make that many executive orders overall, he did an end run around that by churning out tons of new mandates and new regulations.  So, so, very many.   Some say that other presidents made more.  This is no defense.  At some point logic would dictate that every president adding more and more regulations and executive orders and presidential mandates onto us would yield a system of laws so Byzantine that only the lawyers could ever profit from untangling them, and logic would also dictate that we’re already far beyond that point.

11)Mishandling of Ebola issue.  Ignored CDC warnings about the seriousness of emerging diseases and need for more training of medical professionals, which led to two nurses to fall ill due to lack of information, and exposed dozens if not hundreds of people in Dallas to the disease when “Patient Zero” was misdiagnosed and wrongfully discharged from the hospital.  Spent a massive amount of money on public health issues with no oversight for its use, and even the recipients of the money agreed it had been misspent (including 1.75 million dollars given to a “Hollywood liason”.) Assigned a person with no medical experience to deal with Ebola, allowed people who had been exposed to Ebola to enter the country freely and without quarantine, to fly on planes and bowl.  Allowed the CDC to play around with Ebola samples when they had recently mishandled several other samples including anthrax.   Did not insist on quarantines for those entering the country from affected areas, or possibly stopping incoming flights temporarily.  We now know that ebola remains contagious a lot longer than once thought and can be transmitted sexually up to a year after exposure, and also that as many as 1/4 of people who get it are asymptomatic.  I believe we were VERY lucky that this wasn’t way worse than it was.    Even Saturday Night Live agrees that this issue was completely mishandled http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/videos/1.622993

12)Operation Fast and Furious.  During the Obama administration, the ATF allowed the sales of illegal guns in order to track their distribution.   This ill advised idea quickly spun out of their control, and these guns ended up in Mexico where some were later recovered from the murder site of a US Border Patrol agent.  Members of the administration up to and including Attorney General Eric Holder were demonstrated to have lied and covered up their involvement about it.  Eric Holder was the first Attorney General to ever be held in Contempt of Congress.  Obama exercised executive privilege to prevent Holder and others from being prosecuted.  In the end, while some participants were punished, many believe they were mostly lower level scapegoats while the movers and shakers behind the program went free.  Most of the guns were never recovered.

This are just a few of the scandals that occurred under Obama’s watch.

Media, you had ONE job…