of, if you’d prefer the Latin, ignorantia legis excusat. That turns on its head the normal principle in which ignorance of the law is no excuse. That, however, appears to be the position of Attorney General Eric Holder:
Holder seemed to regard this ignorance as a shield protecting him and the Justice Department from all criticism of the Obama administration’s assault on press freedoms. But his claim that his “recusal†from the case exempted him from all discussion of the matter didn’t fly with Republicans or Democrats on the committee, who justifiably saw his recusal as more of an abdication.
“There doesn’t seem to be any acceptance of responsibility in the Justice Department for things that have gone wrong,†said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), after Holder placed the AP matter in the lap of his deputy. “We don’t know where the buck stops.â€
Of course, as we all know, a Republican’s complaint that an attorney general in a Democratic administration should, oh, do his job or know what’s going on is completely invalid because of his obviously partisan motivation while a Democrat’s complaints about an attorney general in a hypothetical Republican administration would be motivated solely by the purest of intentions.
What astounds me in the revelations of the Department of Justice’s extraction of the phone records of hundreds of reporters is its imprudence. They must be remarkably confident in the loyalty of the press. There’s a wisecrack falsely attributed to Sam Clemens that you should never start an argument with a man who buys ink by the barrel. For the Obama Administration the situation is even more serious. They’ve benefited enormously by a friendly press.
Either they don’t understand just how friendly the press has been to them or they’re very confident that they’ll hold that friendship even if they challenge it by going after reporters’ phone records. Quite a gamble.
Yesterday I posted a Jon Stewart joke about the ignorance defense. Today Ed Morrissey has me cracking up with his take on it:
The attempt to take refuge of ignorance really isn’t funny, of course, but those are great lines.
It’s no gamble at all. The press is having a momentary lapse of reason as they instinctively do their jobs. Plouffe and Axelrod will crack the whips soon enough, and the press will return to its prior groveling posture.
I’m not really sure why Holder recused himself. He was asked questions?
@icepick, I saw Axelroad on Morning Joe yesterday, and I don’t think he did Obama many favors. Perhaps he’s looking for new clients that may not like what happened to the AP. Or perhaps he lacks his requisite mustacheness.
Cstanley,
That Morrissey remark gave me a chuckle as well, especially when I pictured what he was saying.
The MSM, though, has long provided soft landings for leaps of Obama’s judgment and a broad umbrella as cover for issues that even looked like they might pose problems for either him or his presidency. The AP grab of phone records, however, was too close to their own lofty perch, so they have temporarily taken the blinders off their collective faces and are acting like legitimately apolitical reporters. But, how long that will last is dubious. For, party affiliation tends to have a stronger pull than the truth. And, most reporters see themselves ensconced in the left side of the political spectrum, and that ideology seems to predictably color any assessment of the ‘facts.’
More Ed Morrissey, this time quoting Bob Schieffer’s dismay, regarding what appears to be a headless government.
Yeah, who seems to have been “standing around drinking Slurpees” now?
Um, er……….how long have I been talking executive competancy?
4 years? I evaluate horse flesh for a living. Remember the Robert Redford line from the movie so many years ago?
What now?
What gets me is that pretty much nothing has changed since this time last year. Obama has been a weak executive the whole time he’s been in office. It’s why he likes things like the drone strikes: they allow him to act largely independently without having to interact with anyone other than a small cadre of his favorite insiders.
I can’t help but wonder what Bill Clinton really thinks of all this. And if I could resurrect one President from the dead to ask them about this, it would be LBJ. I’d love to know what HE thought of a guy who delegated decision making to those who would delegate decision making to those who would delegate the decision making again and so on and so on until people at the bottom rung wwere setting policy.
Although, according to a report from out of Cincinnati, those low level staffers may tell a different tale:
Hmm.
Does the Administration pay any attention at all to what it’s doing?
As someone suggested, Clint Eastwood’s empty chair is looking like a better metaphor for this Presidency every day.
(And Drew, don’t tell us you told us so. We know you did. And most of the people that post here already knew that when you told us the first time.)
Accountability!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I about fell off my chair when I heard Sarah Ingram, who had been in charge of the tax exemption division from 2010 — in other words at the beginnings of these targeted probes — has now been elevated to overseeing the tax part of Obamacare.
It just gets worse….
Not only that, Jan, her bonuses spiked while her division decided to hammer conservative organizations. She made an extra $100,000 off the deal.
Heartburn — I saw that in the story I read about her, Ice.
The Obama Administration, though, has all their hatches bolted down. They are only disseminating selected emails — none from the 2 day period immediately following the consulate attack. They are deflecting like mad, trying to blame the R’s on budget cutbacks, when that has already been disproven. Holder, is weirdly uninformed about everything controversial, and yet refuses to have an independent council appointed to look into these issues. If all else fails, Obama can pull an F & F, applying an EO to pull the plug on more inquiries.
The biggest ruse, though, is how there is a coordinated effort by some of the MSM, dem hacks, and diehard libs to repeat the broken record assertion that these controversies are nothing more than a hyped fabrication of the R’s to being the D’s down. The substance of these issues seems to go right over the heads of these people, forming clouds of dense denial.
Well, senior Administration people knew in 2012 about what was going on with the IRS, so ignorance won’t be an excuse there.
BOINK!
It’ll be funny when the link to Turbo Timmay finally gets made. I can’t believe that this went from the Treasury inspector general for tax administration to the Treasury’s general counsel and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin and then just stopped. I can believe that Geithner would have sat on the information and not done anything – I suspect he’s smart enough to figure that out.