Is Your Hair on Fire? Is Obama Jewish?

It's knickers twist time.  The media and some hair-tearing Democrats are wild with the "scandals" befallen Obama.   Three in one week!  Four, if you count the newest stories about really scandalous sexual abuse in the military.  Military out of control?  IRS destroying our country?  AP assaulted by Justice Department subpoenas?  Libya talking points scrubbed?

Golly, it's just so awful.

But is it?  And what does it have to do with Obama?

The answers are "no" and "nothing".  With two caveats, discussed later.

Taking the least first:  Re Libya, no one cares about emails scrubbing talking points except the media and that jerk Congressman Darrell Issa  from California, who has an arrest/accusation record from the 1970s that he would probably like to scrub.  He's a braggart and a bully and a nut case.   But no matter his braggadacio,  the American public doesn't much care about anything to do with Libya, sad as that may seem to hawks and fix-everything-now liberals.  Sure it's sad that our intelligence people may have misread the threat in Libya and thus failed to thwart the attack on our embassy.  Four Americans died, and that's what matters.  But  if you didn't realize our intelligence people quite often misread the opposition threat, you are a dreamer.  Hell, they didn't even realize the Sovet Union was falling apart!  John le Carre knew (read "The Russia House"), but the CIA didn't.  So it's no surprise that no one knew at the time exactly who was attacking the embassy that night last fall.  And recent polls show people are more interested in the three women escaping their Cleveland prison.

Next "scandal":  The Justice Department is destroying the First Amendment?  Assaulting the AP's freedom of the press?  No.  The Justice Department was trying to catch the leaker who endangered our double agent in Yemen, the double agent who had exposed a plot to blow up an airliner that would have been carrying lots of Americans.  As a former journalist, I feel very strongly about freedom of the press.  I also feel very strongly about avoiding having Americans killed and about protecting those who dare give us the information to protect our fellow citizens.  Though it looks as if Justice may have overshot the mark and obtained an excess of records, when you don't know who did something in a huge organization such as AP, where do you draw the line on your search?  As for protecting the "leaker",  I don't get it.  What public purpose is served in this case?  Isn't the leaker here more like a traitor than a whistle blower?

So what about the IRS messing around?  And the military doing likewise?  Only one of these is serious, and you can guess which one.  But the rest of this hair-burning stuff next time.

And a revealing answer to the strange question of "Is Obama Jewish?"

Till then, put the matches away.