Joe Biden, who launched his 2020 presidential campaign this week, boasted Friday that there was “not one single whisper of scandal” during the Obama administration.
“That’s Barack,” he beamed.
There it is again, that damned, dishonest attempt by Obama acolytes to rewrite the pre-Trump history of Washington corruption. To claim the previous administration — or any previous administration for that matter — was scandal-free is to engage in a falsehood that would be laughable, were it not so breathtakingly shameless.
During the Obama era, in which Biden served all eight years as vice president, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives spearheaded a disastrous “gunwalking” operation in which it lost track of 1,290 firearms from a total of 2,000 that it allowed to be purchased illegally and circulated into Mexico. One of the firearms was used later in the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. In the ensuing congressional investigation, America’s top law enforcement officer, Eric Holder, who actually described himself as the president’s “wingman,” was held in contempt by lawmakers, making him first attorney general in U.S. history to hold that distinction.
During the Obama era, at least seven American citizens were killed by drone strikes. Of those seven, only one was targeted intentionally by the U.S. government. He was executed without any form of due process. Of the remaining six that the Obama White House claimed it killed accidentally, one was a 16-year-old boy, the son of American-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The teen was eating dinner with his father, the real target of the attack, when they were killed by a drone strike. Like the others who were not targeted intentionally by the U.S. government, the Obama administration coolly wrote off the American teen’s demise as collateral damage. Asked to justify the boy’s death, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded by saying: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children.”
In total, the Obama administration authorized 542 drone strikes resulting in the deaths of an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. And all this from a Nobel Peace Prize-winner who once joked in 2011: “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.”
During the Obama era, the Internal Revenue Service was weaponized against conservative groups. Obama’s intelligence chief got away with perjury after he lied to Congress about his agency’s secretive mass surveillance activities. Obama’s secretary of Veterans Affairs resigned in disgrace after it was revealed an estimated 307,000 veterans died awaiting medical attention. Obama’s Office of Personnel Management was hacked. His secretary of state maintained a homebrew server in her bathroom so as to avoid record-keeping laws and procedures. And the Justice Department spied on journalists’ phone lines.
I could go on, but I have a word count to maintain.
It would be enough for Biden and others to allege the Obama administration was not as corrupt as the Trump administration. That can be argued on its merits. But he is greedy in his claims. Obama alumni are not content merely to compare themselves favorably to the current administration. They want also to compare themselves to angels.
They are no angels, as the number of dead American and foreign civilians can attest.
