Ma propre ville de Chicago a compté parmi les villes à la politique locale la plus corrompue de l’histoire américaine, du népotisme institutionnalisé aux élections douteuses. Barack Obama (Nairobi, Kenya, 2006)
J’ai appris hier avec stupéfaction et colère les aveux de Jérôme Cahuzac devant les juges. Il a trompé les plus hautes autorités du pays: le chef de l’Etat, le chef du gouvernement, le Parlement et à travers lui tous les Français. (…) J’affirme ici que Jérôme Cahuzac n’a bénéficié d’aucune protection autre que celle de la présomption d’innocence et il a quitté le gouvernement à ma demande dès l’ouverture d’une information judiciaire. François Hollande (3 avril 2013)
Je vous l’assure : à l’instant où je l’ai appris, j’ai mis toute mon énergie pour faire en sorte que ce problème soit réglé. (…) Je peux vous affirmer que je n’étais au courant de rien à propos de ce rapport de l’inspection générale des services fiscaux avant qu’il n’y ait des fuites dans la presse. Barack Obama (16 mai 2013)
One lesson, however, has not fully sunk in and awaits final elucidation in the 2012 election: that of the Chicago style of Barack Obama’s politicking. In 2008 few of the true believers accepted that, in his first political race, in 1996, Barack Obama sued successfully to remove his opponents from the ballot. Or that in his race for the US Senate eight years later, sealed divorced records for both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked by unnamed Chicagoans, leading to the implosions of both candidates’ campaigns. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in the history of public campaign financing to reject it, or that he was also the largest recipient of cash from Wall Street in general, and from BP and Goldman Sachs in particular. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in recent memory not to disclose either undergraduate records or even partial medical. Or that remarks like “typical white person,” the clingers speech, and the spread-the-wealth quip would soon prove to be characteristic rather than anomalous. Few American presidents have dashed so many popular, deeply embedded illusions as has Barack Obama. And for that, we owe him a strange sort of thanks. Victor Davis Hanson
Selon le professeur Dick Simpson, chef du département de science politique de l’université d’Illinois, «c’est à la fin du XIXe siècle et au début du XXe que le système prend racine». L’arrivée de larges populations immigrées peinant à faire leur chemin à Chicago pousse les politiciens à «mobiliser le vote des communautés en échange d’avantages substantiels». Dans les années 1930, le Parti démocrate assoit peu à peu sa domination grâce à cette politique «raciale». Le système va se solidifier sous le règne de Richard J. Daley, grande figure qui régnera sur la ville pendant 21 ans. Aujourd’hui, c’est son fils Richard M. Daley qui est aux affaires depuis 18 ans et qui «perpétue le pouvoir du Parti démocrate à Chicago, en accordant emplois d’État, faveurs et contrats, en échange de soutiens politiques et financiers», raconte John McCormick. «Si on vous donne un permis de construction, vous êtes censés “payer en retour”», explique-t-il. «Cela s’appelle payer pour jouer», résume John Kass, un autre éditorialiste. Les initiés affirment que Rod Blagojevich ne serait jamais devenu gouverneur s’il n’avait croisé le chemin de sa future femme, Patricia Mell, fille de Dick Mell, un conseiller municipal très influent, considéré comme un rouage essentiel de la machine. Le Figaro
C’est un système pourri, une toile d’araignée qui organise sa survie en nommant ses amis à des postes clés de l’administration en échange de leur soutien politique et financier. Anthony Peraica
Dans ce contexte local plus que trouble, Peraica affirme que la montée au firmament d’Obama n’a pu se faire «par miracle».«Il a été aidé par la machine qui l’a adoubé, il est cerné par cette machine qui produit de la corruption et le risque existe qu’elle monte de Chicago vers Washington», va-t-il même jusqu’à prédire. Le conseiller régional républicain cite notamment le nom d’Emil Jones, l’un des piliers du Parti démocrate de l’Illinois, qui a apporté son soutien à Obama lors de son élection au Sénat en 2004. Il évoque aussi les connexions du président élu avec Anthony Rezko, cet homme d’affaires véreux, proche de Blagojevich et condamné pour corruption, qui fut aussi le principal responsable de la levée de fonds privés pour le compte d’Obama pendant sa course au siège de sénateur et qui l’aida à acheter sa maison à Chicago. «La presse a protégé Barack Obama comme un petit bébé. Elle n’a pas sorti les histoires liées à ses liens avec Rezko», s’indigne Peraica, qui cite toutefois un article du Los Angeles Times faisant état d’une affaire de financement d’un tournoi international de ping-pong qui aurait éclaboussé le président élu. Le Figaro
Mr. Obama’s lesson in lack of political accountability also seems to be trickling down (…) There’s a certain infantilization of the federal government here that should be especially alarming to taxpayers who have ever crossed paths with the IRS. (…) If the scandal is showing anything, it is that the White House has a bizarre notion of accountability in the federal government. President Obama’s former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC recently that his guy was off the hook on the IRS scandal because "part of being President is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast." In other words, the bigger the federal government grows, the less the President is responsible for it. Mr. Axelrod’s remarkable admission, and the liberal media defenses of Mr. Obama’s lack of responsibility, prove the tea party’s point that an ever larger government has become all but impossible to govern. They also show once again that liberals are good at promising the blessings of government largesse but they leave its messes for others to clean up. (…) If the President isn’t accountable, then we really have the tea party nightmare of the runaway administrative state accountable to no one. If Mr. Obama and his aides are to be taken at their word, that is exactly what we have. The WSJ
As of September 11, the race was dead even. (…) Beneath Obama’s calm veneer that September there were lots of things the public did not know, and from the administration’s point of view apparently should not know until after the election. Just three months earlier, the Treasury Department’s inspector general had reported to top Treasury officials that the Internal Revenue Service had been inordinately targeting conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Such political corruption of the IRS was a Nixonian bombshell, with enormous implications for the election, especially given that during the campaign Obama’s economic adviser Austan Goolsbee had claimed that he had knowledge about the Koch brothers’ tax returns, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was lauding himself as a “wrecking crew” as he swore he had the inside dope on Mitt Romney’s taxes. (…) In other words, in cynical fashion, the Obama team won on two counts: The IRS had intimidated conservative organizations for months and had very possibly helped to prevent them from repeating their successes of 2010, while keeping the illegal activity from the press and the public.
As of September 11, 2012, the American people also did not know that the attorney general’s office had four months earlier been conducting secret monitoring of two months’ worth of records of calls made from private and work phone lines of Associated Press reporters — this surveillance supposedly due to suspicions that administration sources were leaking classified information to these reporters. (…) Reporters were outraged when they eventually learned that some of their brethren had been subjected to stealthy government surveillance — but they learned this a year after the fact and only following the reelection of Barack Obama.
On September 11, 2012, of course, there was the violent attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, and a host of unanswered questions in the heat of the campaign: What was such a large CIA operation doing in Benghazi? Why was our ambassador left so vulnerable both before and during the attack? Why had the much-praised “lead from behind” campaign to remove Qaddafi earned us a dead ambassador and a nation full of anti-American terrorists, some of them perhaps al-Qaeda–related? We know now from a flurry of e-mails, public talking points, and public statements from staffers that when the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted that the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration over an Internet video, they knew in reality that the video had nothing to do with the attack. Yet coming clean before the American people apparently might have involved explaining why no one in Washington was willing to beef up security in answer to Ambassador Stevens’s requests. And during the attack, worry over a Mogadishu-like firefight two months before the election may have been why the administration ordered available units to stand down rather than sending in help by any means necessary. (…) Again, the cover-up worked perfectly in accordance with the September campaign narrative. The American people did not find out the truth of what happened in Benghazi — the “consulate” was never attacked by “spontaneous” demonstrators enraged by a video emanating from the United States — until eight months after the attack.
In the matters of the Associated Press surveillance, the IRS scandal, and Benghazi, the White House prevailed — keeping from the public embarrassing and possibly illegal behavior until the president was safely reelected. As in the mysteries surrounding David Petraeus’s post-election resignation, and the revelation about the “train wreck” of Obamacare, what the voters knew prior to November about what their government was up to proved far different than what they are just beginning to know now. And so Obama won the election, even as he is insidiously losing half the country. Because breaking the law and telling untruths eventually surface, we will come to learn that Obama was reelected into oblivion. Victor Davis Hanson
Mensonges ou non-dits électoralistes sur l’attentat de Benghazi (4 morts dont l’ambassadeur, gommant, en ce 10e anniversaire du 11/9, toute référence à Al Qaeda qui aurait pu effrayer l’électeur), profilage du fisc pour les seuls groupes d’opposition, presse sur écoutes (saisie de deux mois de relevés téléphoniques d’une vingtaine de journalistes), atermoiements sur la Syrie, impuissance sur la fermeture de Guantanamo, défaites sur le budget et le contrôle des armes à feu …
Alors que les scandales se multiplient autour du 2e mandat d’un président américain qui nous refait lui aussi le coup de la complète ignorance …
Et que chez nous le fisc confirme, contrairement aux dénégations présidentielles, qu’il était au courant pour Cahuzac depuis au moins 2001 …
Comment ne pas voir comme le confirme l’historien militaire Victor Davis Hanson …
L’étrange gémellité entre d’un côté le président français le plus impopulaire de l’histoire de la Ve république et de l’autre le singulièrement précoce canard boiteux et auteur chicagoan du double casse du siècle de 2008 et de 2012 ?
The administration spent the last six months of the campaign in cover-up mode.
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review
May 21, 2013
On September 11, 2012, Barack Obama was 1 point ahead of Mitt Romney in the ABC and Washington Post polls. He was scheduled to meet Romney in three weeks for the first debate. The president was increasingly anxious. Unemployment was still at 7.8 percent, and the Solyndra and Fast and Furious scandals had only recently disappeared from the news — and they had done so only thanks to the use of executive privilege.
But the Tea Party seemed to have lost its 2010 momentum, despite its renewed warnings that Obamacare would be a disaster if not repealed in 2013. The president was running on the slogan that GM was alive and bin Laden was dead — the implications being that massive influxes of borrowed federal money had allowed GM’s work force to survive, and that with the death of bin Laden came the unraveling of the “core” of al-Qaeda. Libya, of course, was cited as an overseas success — a sort of implied un-Iraq.
The contours of the campaign, in other words, were well drawn. Obama claimed that he had brought peace overseas and restoration at home, while Romney claimed that we were less secure on President Obama’s watch and that the economy was ossified because of too much debt and government spending.
And the race was neck and neck. In a few days the secretly taped “47 percent” Romney video would emerge and tar Romney with the charge of social insensitivity. And in the second debate, in mid-October, the moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, in utterly unprofessional fashion, would interrupt Romney’s reference to Benghazi and cite a transcript in such a way as to falsely turn Obama’s generic reference to terrorism into an explicit presidential condemnation of the Benghazi attacks as a terrorist action, and swing the momentum of the debate back to a stumbling Barack Obama.
Again, as of September 11, the race was dead even.
Beneath Obama’s calm veneer that September there were lots of things the public did not know, and from the administration’s point of view apparently should not know until after the election. Just three months earlier, the Treasury Department’s inspector general had reported to top Treasury officials that the Internal Revenue Service had been inordinately targeting conservative groups that were seeking tax-exempt status. Such political corruption of the IRS was a Nixonian bombshell, with enormous implications for the election, especially given that during the campaign Obama’s economic adviser Austan Goolsbee had claimed that he had knowledge about the Koch brothers’ tax returns, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was lauding himself as a “wrecking crew” as he swore he had the inside dope on Mitt Romney’s taxes.
The inspector general of the Treasury recently testified before Congress that he had told Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin of the IRS’s shenanigans in June 2012, five months before the election. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who had been grilled during confirmation hearings about his own improper tax deductions, must at some point have been told of the IRS mess, but somehow all these disturbing developments were kept under wraps for the duration of the campaign. Are we to believe that, each time Geithner met with the president between June and November, he did not mention the scandal brewing in his department because his own deputy had never told him?
In other words, in cynical fashion, the Obama team won on two counts: The IRS had intimidated conservative organizations for months and had very possibly helped to prevent them from repeating their successes of 2010, while keeping the illegal activity from the press and the public.
As of September 11, 2012, the American people also did not know that the attorney general’s office had four months earlier been conducting secret monitoring of two months’ worth of records of calls made from private and work phone lines of Associated Press reporters — this surveillance supposedly due to suspicions that administration sources were leaking classified information to these reporters.
But something was awry here too. First, the administration did not start by apprising AP that it wished to talk to their suspect reporters, as is normal protocol. Stranger still, the administration itself apparently had leaked classified information about the Stuxnet cyber-war virus, the drone protocols, and the Seal Team 6 raid that killed bin Laden (remember Defense Secretary Bob Gates’s “Shut the f*** up!”) — all in efforts to persuade the voting public that their president was far more engaged in the War on Terror than his critics had alleged.
These efforts to squelch any mention of the monitoring of journalists worked as well. Reporters were outraged when they eventually learned that some of their brethren had been subjected to stealthy government surveillance — but they learned this a year after the fact and only following the reelection of Barack Obama.
On September 11, 2012, of course, there was the violent attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, and a host of unanswered questions in the heat of the campaign: What was such a large CIA operation doing in Benghazi? Why was our ambassador left so vulnerable both before and during the attack? Why had the much-praised “lead from behind” campaign to remove Qaddafi earned us a dead ambassador and a nation full of anti-American terrorists, some of them perhaps al-Qaeda–related?
We know now from a flurry of e-mails, public talking points, and public statements from staffers that when the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted that the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration over an Internet video, they knew in reality that the video had nothing to do with the attack.
Yet coming clean before the American people apparently might have involved explaining why no one in Washington was willing to beef up security in answer to Ambassador Stevens’s requests. And during the attack, worry over a Mogadishu-like firefight two months before the election may have been why the administration ordered available units to stand down rather than sending in help by any means necessary. The truth was clear: Libya was not quiet, nor was al-Qaeda leaderless.
Instead, blaming the violence on a petty crook and supposed “Islamophobe” squared the circle: A right-wing bigot had caused the problem; he could be summarily jailed; and the president could both be absolved from blame for the unexpected violence and praised for his multicultural bona fides in condemning such a hateful voice on our soil. Again, the cover-up worked perfectly in accordance with the September campaign narrative. The American people did not find out the truth of what happened in Benghazi — the “consulate” was never attacked by “spontaneous” demonstrators enraged by a video emanating from the United States — until eight months after the attack.
In the matters of the Associated Press surveillance, the IRS scandal, and Benghazi, the White House prevailed — keeping from the public embarrassing and possibly illegal behavior until the president was safely reelected. As in the mysteries surrounding David Petraeus’s post-election resignation, and the revelation about the “train wreck” of Obamacare, what the voters knew prior to November about what their government was up to proved far different than what they are just beginning to know now. And so Obama won the election, even as he is insidiously losing half the country.
Because breaking the law and telling untruths eventually surface, we will come to learn that Obama was reelected into oblivion.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals is just out from Bloomsbury Books.
Voir aussi:
Obama fragilisé par une succession de scandales
L’opposition républicaine accuse le fisc d’avoir multiplié à dessein les enquêtes contre des groupes proches du Tea Party.
Laure Mandeville
Le Figaro
«Il y a du sang dans l’eau», écrit John Avlon dans le Daily Beast,pour décrire la position défensive et affaiblie dans laquelle se retrouve acculée une Administration Obama rattrapée, en quelques jours, par les scandales. Plus que par les critiques quasi obsessionnelles des élus républicains contre les mensonges ou les non-dits de la crise de Benghazi, le président réélu est aujourd’hui rattrapé par les sombres manœuvres du fisc américain visant à cibler des groupes conservateurs Tea Party, ainsi que par la surveillance des échanges téléphoniques de plusieurs journalistes de la prestigieuse agence de presse AP. Certains parlent déjà d’une débandade à la Nixon pendant le Watergate, d’autres préférant faire plus sobrement référence aux affres de «Clinton II» et à la «malédiction», classique, des deuxièmes mandats. «On est encore dans le registre des abus mineurs, en comparaison avec les autres présidents», tempère le politologue Larry Sabato.
Dans un rapport publié mardi, l’inspecteur général de l’administration fiscale, qui dépend du département du Trésor, n’en a pas moins reconnu que l’IRS (Internal Revenue Service) a failli à sa mission en ciblant «selon des critères inappropriés» des groupes conservateurs qui réclamaient des exemptions fiscales. L’épicentre du scandale semble concerner une cellule du fisc de Cincinnati, où des groupes Tea Party et des mouvements «patriotes» de droite se sont vus soumis à des enquêtes approfondies sur l’origine de leurs fonds et le nom de leurs donateurs entre 2010 et 2012. L’inspecteur a affirmé que ces actions discriminantes constituent une infraction au principe de neutralité de l’État mais que rien ne permet de prouver qu’elles aient été commanditées de l’extérieur. «Ces conclusions sont intolérables et inexcusables. L’IRS doit appliquer la loi de manière juste et impartiale et ses employés doivent agir avec la plus grande intégrité», a condamné le président embarrassé, ordonnant au secrétaire au Trésor Jack Lew de sanctionner les coupables. Le FBI a par ailleurs ouvert une enquête.
« On est encore dans le registre des abus mineurs, en comparaison avec les autres présidents »
Le politologue Larry Sabato.
La question centrale est de déterminer si les actes des inspecteurs du fisc ont été le fait d’individus isolés ou si d’autres administrations, dont la Maison-Blanche, ont été associées. Une telle découverte changerait évidemment l’équation politique du scandale. La directrice des services d’exonération fiscale, Lois Lerner, parle d’un acte isolé dans lequel la présidence n’a eu aucun rôle. Elle affirme avoir eu vent de ces pratiques en 2011 et avoir ordonné un changement des critères de sélection. Mais les employés du fisc les auraient modifiés à nouveau sans en informer leur hiérarchie…
Peu convaincus, les élus républicains du Congrès s’apprêtent ce vendredi à lancer des auditions sur le sujet. À en croire certains groupes conservateurs ciblés par l’IRS, des agents du fisc leur auraient expliqué que leurs dossiers étaient examinés… à Washington. Plusieurs cellules Tea Party, de la Californie à la Virginie, affirment avoir été les cibles de contrôles du même type.
Pour les groupes conservateurs, qui vivent dans une méfiance instinctive du centre fédéral et accusent Barack Obama de vouloir instaurer un État centralisé dictatorial espionnant les citoyens et les privant de leurs libertés fondamentales – peur alimentée par son projet de contrôle des armes -, l’affaire de l’IRS est une aubaine, un formidable slogan de campagne potentiel pour les élections de mi-mandat de 2014.
Le porte-parole de la Maison-Blanche a beau affirmer que la présidence ne se sent «nullement» assiégée par ces dossiers d’abus de pouvoir, le bateau Obama semble avoir du mal à colmater les brèches, forçant «son capitaine» à la défensive. Pour le président, qui vient de subir deux défaites cuisantes sur le budget et le contrôle des armes à feu, cette tempête tombe mal, même si elle ne débouche pas sur une mise en cause de son intégrité. Son bilan législatif de deuxième mandat s’annonce squelettique, à l’exception de la loi sur l’immigration. Épuisé par ses efforts infructueux d’ouverture, il peine à définir le cadre de sa «conversation» avec le pays, handicap majeur dans une démocratie définie par un cycle d’actualité continue impitoyable, note l’ancien porte-parole de Bill Clinton, Mike McCurry. Même le consensus naissant sur l’immigration se retrouve occulté par les combines de l’IRS et les écoutes d’AP. Si on ajoute à ces couacs répétés, les atermoiements sur la Syrie et l’impuissance sur le dossier de la fermeture de Guantanamo, on voit se dessiner le portrait d’une Administration hésitante et paralysée par les couacs et les polémiques mesquines. «Mon intention est de gouverner», a pourtant lancé Obama clairement exaspéré, appelant ceux qui préfèrent «penser à leur élection qu’à la prochaine génération» à en assumer les risques.
La presse se déchaîne après la surveillance téléphonique de plusieurs journalistes
Déjà très remontée contre l’opacité de son Administration, la presse est furieuse contre Barack Obama. Avec la décision du ministère de la Justice de se faire communiquer les factures détaillées de journalistes de la vénérable agence Associated Press, elle se sent trahie et a déterré la hache de guerre. Il suffit de lire l’éditorial du New York Times ce mercredi pour comprendre. D’ordinaire plutôt amène vis-à-vis d’Obama, la rédaction épingle «le zèle glaçant de l’Administration à enquêter sur les fuites et à poursuivre leurs auteurs en justice». Pour l’heure, tout en affirmant ne pas avoir été impliquée dans les écoutes, la Maison-Blanche justifie de telles pratiques au nom de la sécurité nationale.
Voir aussi:
Les trois affaires qui embarrassent Obama
Groupes d’opposition ciblés par le fisc, journalistes espionnés, cafouillage de la communication sur l’attentat de Benghazi: l’Administration américaine est empêtrée dans une série de scandales.
Anne-Laure Frémont
Le Figaro
15/05/2013
L’année 2013 ne porte pas chance à Barack Obama. Déjà affaibli par son incapacité à faire passer une loi sur le contrôle des armes à feu, le président américain fait face, ces derniers jours, à une succession d’affaires dont les républicains se servent pour fustiger les «abus de pouvoirs» de l’Administration.
1- L’excès de zèle du fisc américain
La justice américaine a annoncé ce mardi l’ouverture d’une enquête après le mea culpa embarrassant du fisc. Vendredi, l’IRS (Internal Revenue Service) a en effet reconnu avoir ciblé quelque 75 groupes proches de la mouvance conservatrice et anti-impôts du Tea Party, en lançant des examens plus approfondis de leur demande de statut spécial (qui conferre aux groupes dits «501(c)4» le régime fiscal de non-imposition, au même titre que les ONG ou les Églises). Les groupes dont le nom comportait le mot «patriote» étaient par exemple, particulièrement visés.
Depuis l’an dernier, des dizaines d’entre eux se plaignaient des questions très intrusives du fisc. En ciblant les groupes d’opposition, ce dernier a enfreint la loi et choque démocrates comme républicains. «Nous allons attendre de connaître tous les faits et les détails. Mais je n’ai aucune patience pour cela, je ne le tolérerai pas et nous ferons en sorte de comprendre exactement ce qu’il s’est passé», a promis Barack Obama lundi, évoquant un acte «scandaleux» lors d’une conférence de presse sur un tout autre sujet, à laquelle le premier ministre britannique David Cameron assistait. Son porte-parole, Jay Carney, a tenu à préciser mardi que le président n’avait rien à voir avec cette affaire. Même si l’IRS est un organisme indépendant, tout mauvais agissement de sa part rejaillit forcément sur la Maison-Blanche, estime toutefois Ron Bonjean, ancien assistant républicain au Congrès.
2 – Les journalistes de l’agence de presse AP espionnés
En voulant à tout prix contenir les fuites d’informations confidentielles, Washington est peut-être allé trop loin. L’agence de presse américaine Associated Press (AP) a dénoncé lundi une «intrusion massive et sans précédent» du département de la Justice, qui se serait secrètement saisi de deux mois de relevés téléphoniques d’une vingtaine de journalistes de l’agence. Selon AP, la justice aurait pris cette décision après la publication d’une dépêche dans laquelle, en mai 2012, l’agence révélait une opération de la CIA au Yémen ayant permis de déjouer un projet d’attentat d’al-Qaida visant à faire exploser une bombe à bord d’un avion à destination des États-Unis. La saisie aurait eu pour but de traquer l’identité des informateurs de l‘agence.
Le ministre de la Justice, Eric Holder, a tenté de se justifier mardi, indiquant que les fuites d’informations en question étaient «parmi les plus, si ce n’est les plus graves» qu’il ait jamais vues «depuis 1976», date à laquelle il a démarré sa carrière à la justice. «Ce n’est pas une exagération, cela mettait les Américains en danger et tenter de déterminer qui en était responsable, je pense, exige une action très offensive», a ajouté le ministre, qui a refusé de dire si d’autres médias étaient concernés. Mardi, Jay Carney a assuré qu’Obama soutenait le premier amendement – qui garantit la liberté d’expression – mais qu’un «équilibre» était nécessaire entre les libertés publiques et l’impératif d’enquêter sur des pratiques criminelles. Le sénateur démocrate Harry Reid a pour sa part jugé cette procédure «inexcusable». «J’ai du mal à défendre ce qu’a fait le ministère de la Justice (…), il n’y a aucun moyen de le justifier», a-t-il déclaré.
3 – L’interminable dossier Benghazi
L’Administration Obama est empêtrée dans l’affaire de l’attentat de Benghazi, en Libye. Un attentat au cours duquel l’ambassadeur, Christopher Stevens, et trois Américains ont été tués, le 11 septembre dernier. Les élus républicains, qui mettent notamment en cause l’ex-secrétaire d’État Hillary Clinton, reprochent à l’Administration d’avoir voulu taire le caractère «terroriste» de cette attaque pour ne pas plomber la campagne présidentielle d’Obama avant le vote de novembre 2012.
Rapports et auditions à l’appui, les républicains dénoncent les failles du dispositif de sécurité, tandis que des courriels révélés vendredi par la chaîne ABC semblent aussi indiquer que l’Administration est intervenue pour supprimer une référence à al-Qaida dans un document sur lequel devait s’appuyer Susan Rice, ambassadrice à l’ONU, pour rendre compte à la télévision des débuts de l’enquête. Dans l’un de ces messages, Victoria Nuland, alors porte-parole du département d’État, s’oppose à ce qu’on fasse état d’informations préalables de la CIA sur une menace islamiste dans l’est de la Libye «car cela pourrait être utilisé par des membres du Congrès pour attaquer le département d’État en l’accusant d’avoir ignoré les mises en garde».
Depuis des mois, l’équipe Obama tente de se justifier. «Le lendemain de cette attaque, j’avais reconnu qu’il s’agissait d’un acte terroriste», a encore déclaré le président américain lundi. «Le fait qu’on continue à en parler, franchement, a beaucoup à voir avec des motivations politiques.»
(Avec agences)
Voir également:
L’élan de Barack Obama brisé par les scandales
Laure Mandeville
Le Figaro
Quatre ans après une élection historique et six mois après une réélection sans réserve, le président américain donne l’impression d’être un observateur frustré et fatigué, plutôt qu’un président en charge.
De notre correspondante à Washington
À regarder Barack Obama donner une laborieuse conférence de presse en compagnie de son hôte turc Erdogan, ce jeudi dans le jardin aux Roses, sous un parapluie tenu au-dessus de sa tête par un marine à l’immobilité impeccable, on avait l’impression pénible d’une métaphore de l’état de sa présidence. Celle d’une Maison-Blanche qui prend l’eau. Quatre ans après une élection historique et six mois après une réélection sans réserve, il n’y a déjà plus d’élan à Washington. Juste un président fatigué aux cheveux blanchis par les soucis, qui tente tant bien que mal de reprendre l’initiative après une semaine émaillée de scandales.
Certes, Obama a promis de remettre de l’ordre avec vigueur dans les affaires du fisc américain, qui a clairement commis des abus de pouvoir. Pris à partie sur sa gestion politique de la crise de Benghazi, le chef de l’État a là encore choisi de faire publier tous les e-mails internes relatifs à l’affaire et appeler le Congrès à voter le renforcement des dispositifs de sécurité des ambassades. Au nom de «la sécurité nationale», Obama a également défendu l’action du ministère de la Justice, qui avait procédé à une surveillance de journalistes de l’agence Associated Press.
La pression des lobbys
Dans les trois cas, sa position est plutôt sensée et rationnelle, en tout cas défendable. Contrairement à Richard Nixon pendant le Watergate, ou à Clinton pendant l’affaire Lewinsky, Obama n’est pas personnellement éclaboussé par ces trois affaires, contrairement à ce que veut faire croire une armée de blogs conservateurs attirés par l’«odeur du sang». Mais ce qui manquait ce jeudi dans le jardin aux Roses, c’était l’étincelle. La force de conviction. Cette communion avec un homme qui avait fait croire à l’Amérique qu’il pourrait réformer Wall Street, fermer Guantanamo, réparer Washington, unifier la nation et réconcilier le monde d’un coup de baguette magique. Bref, marcher sur l’eau.
Si le président paraît désemparé, c’est qu’il réalise qu’il n’y a pas de grâce en politique, pas de place pour la grande transformation structurelle qu’il avait rêvée. Les trois ans et demi à venir s’annoncent comme un cheminement laborieux et cruel dans la boue des attaques, la pression des lobbys et l’affrontement permanent avec un Congrès divisé et paralysant, pour un résultat incertain. Patauger dans les batailles politiciennes, ce n’est pas vraiment la spécialité d’Obama, qui se pense comme un visionnaire et se passionne pour les dossiers techniques. Ses tentatives répétées d’ouverture vers les républicains, lors de dîners privés destinés à susciter des compromis sur le budget ou le contrôle des armes, ont échoué. Seule une victoire, très improbable, aux élections de mi-mandat, pourrait encore sauver ses plans. Du coup, Obama donne l’impression d’être un observateur frustré plutôt qu’un président en charge.
Crucifixion quotidienne
Le pays, qui a la mémoire courte, a oublié que cette «crucifixion» quotidienne a été le lot de tous ses prédécesseurs. Clinton a été honni et traîné dans la boue avant de devenir le sage dont chacun à droite comme à gauche loue «l’intelligence politique». Raillé, mis à l’index par les libéraux et déstabilisé par le scandale des contras, Reagan a dû mourir pour devenir une statue du commandeur tutélaire. Même chose pour Harry Truman, à la présidence semée de scandales. Au fond, Barack Obama vit un destin présidentiel normal. Il est juste parti de très haut, donnant du coup l’impression d’une chute irrémédiable. Ses hésitations à agir en Syrie – même si elles révèlent une prudence louable et peut-être salutaire – accroissent le sentiment d’un capitaine à la main défaillante.
Est-ce définitif? Sans doute pas. Dans le monde versatile du XXIe siècle, un drame en chasse un autre et c’est la chance d’Obama. S’il parvient à arracher une loi sur l’immigration par exemple, la planète médiatique se remettra à le louer, avec la même force qu’elle l’enterre. S’il réussit à démontrer les excès grotesques des critiques républicaines, qui l’accusent de vouloir transformer l’État en «Big Brother» dangereux, il pourrait rassurer un pays de plus en plus fatigué de la propagande et de la paralysie. Bref, le verre de la présidence Obama est toujours à moitié plein, même s’il se vide.
Reste toutefois une ombre de taille au tableau. Celle que la faiblesse politique d’Obama projette sur le pouvoir américain et ses limites. En regardant le président sous son parapluie appeler à s’en remettre à «la communauté internationale» pour régler le problème syrien, on ne peut s’empêcher d’y lire aussi une métaphore de la nouvelle impuissance américaine. Certains, à l’étranger, s’empresseront de l’exploiter.
Voir encore:
If the President doesn’t run the government, then who does?
The Wall Street Journal
May 22, 2013
Every day brings new revelations about who knew what about the IRS targeting conservative groups during President Obama’s re-election campaign, but the overall impression is of a vast federal bureaucracy run amok. While the White House continues to peddle the story of a driverless train wreck, taxpayers are being treated to a demonstration of the dangers of an unwieldy and unaccountable administrative state. Look, Ma, no hands!
In his press events, Mr. Obama has said that while he learned about the Cincinnati rogues on the news, he plans to "hold accountable those who have taken these outrageous actions." But the White House began its response by pushing the line that the IRS is an "independent agency," and Mr. Obama has since given the impression that he sits atop a federal government which he does not, and could not possibly, control.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfieffer encouraged that fable on this Sunday’s news shows, implying that the Treasury’s internal process for handling the unfair treatment of political targets trumped the President’s right to know. When CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley asked Mr. Pfieffer why the White House and top Treasury officials weren’t notified, he explained that Treasury’s investigation was ongoing and "Here’s the cardinal rule: You do not interfere in an independent investigation."
Now there’s a false choice. The Treasury Inspector General’s report, for starters, was an audit, not an inviolable independent investigation. He lacked subpoena power and could bring no criminal charges. Having the President know of the IRS’s mistakes so that he could act to correct the problem was not a bridge too far or even clouding the purity of the process. Those things could have been done simultaneously without compromising Treasury’s investigation.
At Darrell Issa’s House oversight hearing on Wednesday, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George was criticized for not notifying Congress of the IRS wrongdoing when he became aware of it in July 2012. Emails between the IG’s office and committee staff show the IG’s office repeatedly evaded Congressional inquiries on the progress of the investigation.
All IGs appear before Congress, but they are really answerable to the President who is responsible for what goes on in the IRS and what the agency actually does. If the IRS is not operating in a way that treats taxpayers evenhandedly and in accordance with its guidelines and mission, it is up to him to change the personnel and make any other corrections so that the taxing power of the federal government is legal and fair. If that isn’t the case, voters deserve to know exactly who is accountable for the decisions of the agency that takes a healthy fraction of their income every year.
Mr. Obama’s lesson in lack of political accountability also seems to be trickling down: Lois Lerner was in charge of the IRS division that discriminated against conservative groups. But rather than take responsibility, Ms. Lerner on Wednesday invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify at the House hearing, though not before she read a statement saying that she had "not done anything wrong."
Asked by Texas Senator John Cornyn at a Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday whether he owed conservative groups an apology, former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said that he was "certainly not personally responsible for creating a list that had inappropriate criteria on it" though he was sorry that it had happened on his watch.
There’s a certain infantilization of the federal government here that should be especially alarming to taxpayers who have ever crossed paths with the IRS. The agency has the power to make citizens lives miserable, ruin their businesses and garnish their wages. Anyone facing an audit is unlikely to get away with the evasions now in display in the federal bureaucracy.
If the scandal is showing anything, it is that the White House has a bizarre notion of accountability in the federal government. President Obama’s former senior adviser, David Axelrod, told MSNBC recently that his guy was off the hook on the IRS scandal because "part of being President is there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast."
In other words, the bigger the federal government grows, the less the President is responsible for it. Mr. Axelrod’s remarkable admission, and the liberal media defenses of Mr. Obama’s lack of responsibility, prove the tea party’s point that an ever larger government has become all but impossible to govern. They also show once again that liberals are good at promising the blessings of government largesse but they leave its messes for others to clean up.
***
Alexander Hamilton and America’s Founders designed the unitary executive for the purpose of political accountability. It is one of the Constitution’s main virtues. Unlike grunts in Cincinnati, Presidents must face the voters. That accountability was designed to extend not only to the President’s inner circle but over the entire branch of government whose leaders he chooses and whose policies bear his signature.
If the President isn’t accountable, then we really have the tea party nightmare of the runaway administrative state accountable to no one. If Mr. Obama and his aides are to be taken at their word, that is exactly what we have.
Voir de même:
Scandal forces the president to drop the pose of omnicompetent know-it-all.
Jonah Goldberg
National review
May 22, 2013
Although there’s still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama’s bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency.
“We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.” So far, this is the administration’s best defense.
It was offered to CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House’s disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.
Well-intentioned human error rarely gets the credit it deserves. People want to connect the dots, but that’s only possible when you assume that all events were deliberately orchestrated by human will. This is the delusion at the heart of all conspiracy theorists, from Kennedy assassination crackpots to 9/11 “truthers.”
Behind all such delusions is the assumption that government officials we don’t like are omnicompetent and entirely malevolent. The truth is closer to the opposite. They mean well but can’t do very much very well.
This brings us to the flip side of the conspiracy theory — call it the redeemer fantasy: If only we had the right kind of government with the right kind of leaders, there’d be nothing we couldn’t do.
It’s been a while since we had a self-styled redeemer president. John F. Kennedy surely dabbled in the myth that experts could solve all of our problems, though much of JFK’s messianic status was imposed on him posthumously by the media and intellectuals. You really have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson to find a president who pushed the salvific powers of politics as much as Barack Obama.
His presidency has been grounded in the fantasy that there’s “nothing we can’t do” through government action if we just put all our faith in it — and, by extension, in him. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, he tells us, and if we just give over to a post-political spirit, where we put aside our differences, the way America (allegedly) did during other “Sputnik moments” (one of his favorite phrases), we can give “jobs to the jobless,” heal the planet, even “create a kingdom [of heaven] right here on Earth.”
For Obama, the only things separating America from redemption are politics, specifically obstruction from unhinged Republicans and others clinging to outdated and vaguely illegitimate motives. Opposition to gun control is irrational because the “government is us.” Reject warnings “that tyranny is always lurking,” he told the graduating class at Ohio State, because a self-governing people cannot tyrannize themselves.
But, suddenly, when the administration finds itself ensnared by errors of its own making, the curtain is drawn back on the cult of expertise and the fantasy of statist redemption. Early on in the IRS scandal, before the agency’s initial lies were exposed, David Axelrod defended the administration on the grounds that the “government is so vast” the president “can’t know” what’s going on “underneath” him. Of course, it was Obama who once said, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.”
That is, when things are going relatively well. When scandal hits the fan, he goes from the “government is us” to talking of his own agencies the way a czar might dismiss an injustice in some Siberian backwater. The hubris of omnicompetence gives way to “lighten up, we’re idiots.”
Many of his defenders now rush to insist that it’s unfair to hold him to too high a standard. He’s just a man, just a politician. Well, duh.
Meanwhile, Obama insists that he is outraged. And, if sincere, that’s nice. But so what? What the president seems to have never fully understood is that the Founders were smarter than he is or that the American people aren’t as dumb as he thinks we are. His outrage is beside the point.
A free people will have legitimate differences on questions of policy. A government as vast as ours is — never mind as vast Obama wants it to be — is destined to abuse its power, particularly in a climate where a savior-president is incessantly delegitimizing dissent (and journalistic scrutiny). Government officials will behave like idiots sometimes, not because they are individually dumb but because a government that takes on too much will make an idiot out of anyone who thinks there’s no limit to what it can do. That alone is good reason to fear tyranny. Indeed, it would be idiotic not to.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback.
Voir aussi:
Big Government’s Abuses of Power
Monitoring AP but not detaining Tamerlan Tsarnaev — there is a common theme.
Victor Davis Hanson
National review
May 22, 2013
Government is now so huge, powerful, and callous that citizens risk becoming virtual serfs, lacking the freedoms guaranteed by the Founders.
Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the current news.
We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exemption policies on politics. It inordinately denied tax exemption to groups considered conservative or otherwise antagonistic to the president’s agenda.
If the supposedly nonpartisan IRS is perceived as skewing our taxes on the basis of our politics, then the entire system of trust in self-reporting is rendered null and void. Worse still, the bureaucratic overseer at the center of the controversy, Sarah Hall Ingram, now runs the IRS division charged with enforcing compliance with the new Obamacare requirements.
It was also before the 2012 election that some reporters at the Associated Press had their private and work phone records monitored by the government, supposedly because of fear about national-security leaks. The Justice Department gave the AP no chance, as it usually would, first to question its own journalists. The AP had run a story in May 2012 about the success of a double agent working in Yemen before the administration itself could brag about it.
In fact, the Obama White House has been accused of leaking classified information favorable to the administration — top-secret details concerning the Stuxnet computer virus used against Iran, the specifics of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, and the decision-making behind the drone program — often to favored journalists. The message is clear: A reporter may have his most intimate work and private correspondence turned over to the government — Fox News’s James Rosen had his e-mail account tapped into — on the mere allegation that he might have tried to do what his own government had in fact already done.
Now the civil-rights divisions of the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have issued new speech codes for campuses, focusing on supposed gender insensitivities. The result is that federal bureaucrats can restrict the constitutionally protected rights of free speech for millions of American college students — including during routine classroom discussions.
Eight months after the Benghazi mess, Americans only now are discovering that the Obama administration, for political reasons, failed to beef up security at our Libyan consulate or send it help when under attack. It also lied in blaming the violence on a spontaneous demonstration prompted by an Internet video. That pre-election narrative was known to be untrue when the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney all peddled it.
The problem with a powerful rogue government is not just that it becomes quite adept at doing what it should not. Increasingly, it also cannot even do what it should.
Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell may well turn out to be the most lethal serial killer in U.S. history. His recent murder conviction gave only a glimpse of his carnage at the end of a career that spanned more than three decades. Yet Gosnell operated with impunity right under the noses of Pennsylvania health and legal authorities for years, without routine government health-code and licensing oversight.
In the case of Boston terrorist bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, his loud jihadist activity had earned him a visit from the FBI and the attention of both the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. But all that government monitoring was for naught. Tsarnaev was not detained, but allowed to visit Dagestan and Chechnya — both located in the supposedly dangerous region that prompted his family’s flight to the U.S. in the first place.
In all of these abuses and laxities there is one common theme. Bureaucrats, political appointees, regulators, intelligence officials, and law-enforcement personnel wanted to fall in line with the perceived politically correct agenda of the day. Right now, that party line seems to include protecting the progressive interests of the Obama administration, going after its critics, turning a blind eye toward illegal abortions, ignoring warnings about radical Islam, and restricting the right to free speech in order to curtail language declared potentially hurtful.
Conspiracists, left and right, are sometimes understandably derided as paranoids for alleging that Big Government steadily absorbs the private sector, violates private communications, targets tax filers it doesn’t like, and lies to the people about what it is up to. The only missing theme of such classic paranoia is the perennial worry over the right to bear arms.
I went to several sporting-goods stores recently to buy commonplace rifle shells. For the first time in my life, there were none to be found. Can widespread shortages of ammunition be attributed to panic buying or to production shortfalls caused by inexplicably massive purchases by the Department of Homeland Security at a time of acrimonious debate over the Second Amendment?
Who knows, but yesterday’s wacky conspiracist may become today’s Nostradamus.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book, The Savior Generals, is just out from Bloomsbury Press.
Voir enfin:
Not quite, but he sure is quacking like one.
Peggy Noonan
WSJ
May 3, 2013
I think we’re all agreed the president is fading—failing to lead, to break through, to show he’s not at the mercy of events but, to some degree at least, in command of them. He couldn’t get a win on gun control with 90% public support. When he speaks on immigration reform you get the sense he’s setting it back. He’s floundering on Syria. The looming crisis on implementation of ObamaCare has begun to fill the news. Even his allies are using the term "train wreck." ObamaCare is not only the most slovenly written major law in modern American history, it is full of sneaked-in surprises people are just discovering. The Democrats of Washington took advantage of the country’s now-habitual distractedness: The country, now seeing what’s coming in terms of taxes and fees, will not be amused. Mr. Obama’s brilliant sequester strategy—scare the American public into supporting me—flopped. Congress is about to hold hearings on Boston and how the brothers Tsarnaev slipped through our huge law-enforcement and immigration systems. Benghazi and what appear to be its coverups drags on and will not go away; press secretary Jay Carney was reduced to saying it happened "a long time ago." It happened in September. The economy is stuck in low-growth, employment in no-growth. The president has about a month to gather himself together on the budget, tax reform and an immigration deal before Congress goes into recess. What are the odds?
Republicans don’t oppose him any less after his re-election, and Democrats don’t seem to support him any more. This week he was reduced to giving a news conference in which he said he’s got juice, reports of his death are greatly exaggerated. It was bad. And he must be frustrated because he thinks he’s trying. He gives speeches, he gives interviews, he says words, but he doesn’t really rally people, doesn’t create a wave that breaks over the top of the Capitol Dome and drowns the opposition, or even dampens it for a moment.
Mr. Obama’s problem isn’t really the Republicans. It’s that he’s supposed to be popular. He’s supposed to have some sway, some pull and force. He was just re-elected. He’s supposed to have troops. "My bill is launched, unleash the hounds of war." But nobody seems to be marching behind him. Why can’t he rally people and get them to press their congressmen and senators? I’m not talking about polls, where he hovers in the middle of the graph, but the ability to wield power.
The president seems incapable of changing anything, even in a crisis. He’s been scored as passive and petulant, but it’s the kind of passivity people fall into when nothing works. "People do what they know how to do," a hardened old pol once said, meaning politicians use whatever talent they have, and when it no longer works they continue using it.
There’s no happy warrior in there, no joy of the battle, just acceptance of what he wearily sees as the landscape. He’d seem hapless if he weren’t so verbally able.
So, the president is stuck. But it’s too early to write him off as a lame duck because history has a way of intervening. A domestic or international crisis that is well-handled, or a Supreme Court appointment, can make a president relevant. There are 44 months left to Mr. Obama’s presidency. He’s not a lame duck, he’s just lame.
***
Which has me thinking of two things that have weakened the Obama presidency and haven’t been noted. One was recent and merely unhelpful. The other goes back, and encouraged a mindset that became an excuse, perhaps a fatal one.
The recent one: In the days after the 2012 election the Democrats bragged about their technological genius and how it turned the election. They told the world about what they’d done—the data mining, the social networking, that allowed them to zero in on Mrs. Humperdink in Ward 5 and get her to the polls. It was quite impressive and changed national politics forever. But I suspect their bragging hurt their president. In 2008 Mr. Obama won by 9.5 million votes. Four years later, with all the whizbang and money, he won by less than five million. When people talk about 2012 they don’t say the president won because the American people endorsed his wonderful leadership, they say he won because his team outcomputerized the laggard Republicans.
This has left him and his people looking more like cold technocrats who know how to campaign than leaders who know how to govern. And it has diminished claims of a popular mandate. The president’s position would be stronger now if more people believed he had one.
What damaged the Obama presidency more, looking back, was, ironically, the trash-talking some Republican leaders indulged in after the 2008 campaign. It entered their heads at the Obama White House and gave them a warped sense of the battlefield.
In a conference call with conservative activists in July 2009, then-Sen. Jim DeMint said of the president’s health-care bill, "If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." Not long after, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was quoted as saying that the GOP’s primary goal was to make Mr. Obama a one-term president.
The press hyped this as if it were something new, a unique and epic level of partisan animus. Members of the administration also thought it was something new. It made them assume no deals with Republicans were possible, and it gave them a handy excuse they still use: "It’s not us, they vowed from the beginning they wouldn’t work with us!"
Peggy Noonan’s Blog
Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.
But none of it was new. The other side always vows to crush you. Anyone who’d been around for a while knew the Republicans were trying to sound tough, using hyperbole to buck up the troops. It’s how they talk when they’re on the ropes. But the president and his staffers hadn’t been around for a while. They were young. They didn’t understand what they were hearing was par for the course.
Bill Clinton’s foes made fierce vows about him, the enemies of both Bushes did the same. The opposing party always gets on the phone or gathers in what used to be Georgetown dens to denigrate the new guy and vow to fight him to the end. That’s how blowhards blow. When Reagan came in they vowed to take him down, and it was personal. Speaker Tip O’Neill called him "ignorant" and a "disgrace" and said it was "sinful" that he was president. He called Reagan "a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America" and said: "He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood." Chris Matthews, an O’Neill staffer, says he once greeted Reagan in the Capitol with the words: "Mr. President, welcome to the room where we plot against you."
They did. Reagan knew it.
Yet he had no problem dealing successfully with O’Neill. He didn’t moan, "Oh they hate me, it’s no use!"
Note to the next White House: There’s always gambling at Rick’s place. It’s never a shock and not an excuse. It’s business as usual. And if you’re a leader you can lead right past it.
Publié par jcdurbant 
Nous devons les combattre comme ils nous combattent. Oeil pour oeil, dent pour dent. Dépeçeur nigériano-britannique (?)
Je hais, je méprise vos fêtes, Je ne puis sentir vos assemblées. (…) Mais que la droiture soit comme un courant d’eau, Et la justice comme un torrent qui jamais ne tarit. Amos 5: 21-24
Et que servirait-il à un homme de gagner tout le monde, s’il perdait son âme? Jésus (Mattthieu 16: 26)
Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam where they cut off your ear. If they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but, hey, it’s home! 
