Nixon Resigned
Reagan and Iran-Contra
Clinton Impeached Not Removed
Many Got Jail Time in that Era
Many Resigned Not Much Touched Obama
Scandals have consumed the
final four years of every two-term president in modern history ― George W.
Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, except Barack Obama:
Barack Obama: His administration is the exception. While there were
some minor scandals and resignations during Obama’s eight years in office.
It’s not an accident that
Obama’s presidency was largely scandal-free. His former ethics adviser, Norm
Eisen, began to craft an ethics plan for the administration months before the
2008 election. The plan required every Obama administration official and
employee to sign an ethics pledge that included bans on accepting certain gifts
and revolving-door rules that barred former staffers from lobbying the
administration until Obama’s term ended. Officials leaving for other lines of
work were banned from contacting their former agency for two years.
By no means did the Obama
administration thwart the power of special interests and big money in
Washington. But the administration did avoid major scandals, which Eisen attributed
to the “tone at the top,” adding: “Everyone knows the president himself is a
man of great integrity. He cares about this, he talks about it.”
There were wrongdoing that led to resignations under
Obama:
2. Officials also resigned over the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups for tax scrutiny, overspending on conferences at the GSA, and hacking that exposed employee records at OPM.
3. The years-long investigations into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s response to the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi revealed that she kept a private email server. While that did not lead to any charges or convictions, it may have contributed to her election defeat.
4. Everything the Obama administration and W/H did was not perfect, but he cannot be compared those to the major scandals that have afflicted previous White Houses, where people have gone to jail - nothing like happened under Obama.
5. Wrongdoing never occupied his presidency. Nothing touched the White House. There were no grand jury investigations. There were no impeachments. No W/H staff convictions, no pardons for officials.
My Insert –
which I plucked from
the American Conservative – yeah, that piece with this, their “spin and
slant” on Obama, which is rather expected – even SOP as it were:
So we can take the story up to modern times. The Obama administration
did many shameful and illegal things, but the law-enforcement bureaucracy
remained united and largely under control: hence the remarkably few leaks.
1. The media never lost their
uncritical adulation for the president, and were reluctant to cause him any
serious embarrassment.
2. Despite troubling high
unemployment, most Americans had a general sense of improving conditions after
2009.
3. The conditions to generate
scandal did not exist, nor was there a mass audience receptive to such claims.
So yes, Obama really did run a scandal-free administration.
What you need for an apocalyptic scandal is a set of conditions roughly
as follows: a deeply divided and restive set of bureaucrats and law-enforcement
officials, a mass media at war with the administration, and a horrible economic
crisis.
Under Trump, the first two conditions assuredly exist already. If
economic disaster is added to the mix, history suggests that something like a
second Watergate meltdown is close to inevitable.)
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Geo. W. Bush
Convictions and jail time related
to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, in which more than a dozen lobbyists and
government officials went to jail for corruption.
There were also convictions
related to the politically motivated purge of U.S. attorneys and the
retaliatory leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity. Karl Rove, Bush’s top
political adviser, and Lewis Libby, a senior adviser to Vice President Dick
Cheney, both were implicated in leaking Plame’s name to the press, Rove was not
prosecuted, and Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice. Bush later
commuted the sentence.
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Bill Clinton: Clinton
was impeached not removed from office over his affair with intern Monica
Lewinsky.
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Ronald Reagan: Plagued
by corruption investigations ranging from Iran-Contra to Wedtech, a contracting
scandal that led to the resignation of Attorney General Ed Meese.
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Richard Nixon: Resigned before impeachment for his cover in Watergate
plus the convictions of 48 government officials.
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Donald Trump: Now in office with unprecedented conflicts of
interest related to his business empire that still lingers – that has already set
the tone for a very different administration.
He appears to be doing very
little to vet his cabinet appointees (NSC adviser Flynn with Russian ties and
lies lasted only one month).
Even former disgraced Speaker
Newt Gingrich (his ethics violations) called for ethics laws to be loosened for
Trump, and for him to issue preemptive pardons to appointees, so they won’t be
punished for breaking the law in advance.
Trump even looked fill his Cabinet
with one convicted of a crime under Obama: That was former CIA Director David
Petraeus. Ironic!!!
New American standard, new
bar for our president? Wow – Trump is under that by a long shot and cannot even
reach the bar. His son-in-law and daughter and AG and closest advisers and even
personal lawyers and key staffers. Double wow…!!!
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