This just in from the Obama administration: corruption is bad, m’kay?
No, seriously.
Apparently, President Obama's commitment to fighting corruption is so important that Secretary of State John Kerry actually felt the need to fly to London to reaffirm the United States government isn’t full of dirty rotten scoundrels who are just up to no good.
From the State Department on Thursday:
U.S. Secretary of State Kerry reaffirmed the Administration’s commitment to combating corruption at the Anti-Corruption Summit in London this week. Heads of state from more than forty countries, multinational organizations, and civil society leaders joined together to make a clear statement: corruption drives political instability, erodes trust between citizens and government, cripples basic functions of state like security and justice, fuels violent extremism, and stifles economic prosperity and human rights. That is why the Administration has deepened its commitment to fiscal transparency and is reaffirming the effort to fight corruption at home and abroad.
Corruption is bad? You don’t say!
But, if the administration was going to fly halfway around the world just to tell people that poop stinks, they picked a bad time to do it. What's perhaps most interesting about the Obama State Department’s alleged “commitment to combating corruption” and “transparency” is that these things apparently exist everywhere but in their own house.
Just this week, it was revealed that the White House edited 2013 footage of former State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki basically admitting the administration flat-out lies to the American people, including about the Iran Deal.
The revelation hardly stands alone in the grand scheme(s) of the Obama administration. In a move that was either brazenly bold or inexplicably stupid, the New York Times ran a piece just last week in which White House advisor Ben Rhodes laughingly admitted that the administration hoodwinked the media and the nation into buying into the Iran Deal. And The New York Times laughed right along:
Rhodes’s innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is likely to be a model for how future administrations explain foreign policy to Congress and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.
Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. Obama’s closest advisers always understood him to be eager to do a deal with Iran as far back as 2012, and even since the beginning of his presidency. “It’s the center of the arc,” Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was implemented.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just a few weeks ago, the White House got caught with its proverbial pants around its ankles after shamelessly censoring a video of French President Francois Holland calling out “Islamist terrorism” during a presser with President Obama.
Because God forbid we say a spade is a spade.
Americans long ago ran out of fingers on which to count the number of corrupt scandals this administration has been embroiled in over the last seven-plus years. Fast and Furious. Benghazi. The VA scandal. The IRS’s targeting of conservatives. The Iran Deal. Gitmo prisoners being released without notice. Borders flung wide open to streams of illegal migrants while the government half-heartedly tries to convince us these aren’t the droids we’re looking for.
The list continues, and the administration’s claim of combating corruption would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.