"President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency."

"Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality."

So begins George Will's column today, which is headlined "Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s."

"So you dislike Democrats as much as you dislike the GOP?"

Details asks Woody Harrelson (who played Steve Schmidt in that movie about Sarah Palin, "Game Change")"

It's all synchronized swimming to me. They all kneel and kiss the ring. Who's going to take on the oil industry or the medical industry? People compare Obama to Lyndon Johnson, but I think a better comparison is between Obama and Nixon. Because Nixon came into office saying he was going to pull out of Vietnam, and then he escalated the war. A lot of us were led to believe that Obama was the peace president, but there are still, I think, 70,000 troops in Afghanistan. Corporations like Grumman are so powerful that—I don't know, is this the kind of shit we want to talk about? It's making me depressed.

"We know a lot about President Obama, and I think the idea that he would want the IRS used for retribution — we have no evidence of any such thing."

Says Carl Bernstein, declaring that the Obama administration's IRS scandal is not Watergate. 

"In the Nixon White House, we heard the president of the United States on tape saying 'Use the IRS to get back on our enemies."

The link goes to Politico, which doesn't close the quotation marks around "Use the IRS to get back on our enemies," and doesn't link to specific Nixon quotes found on the Watergate tapes. It's strange to put quotes around that if it's not a quote. Here's the Wikipedia article "Nixon's Enemies List," which doesn't quote any Nixon remarks. It does have the truly shocking John Dean memo that asks "how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." Politico needs to close the quotation marks and link to the quote or take away the quotes and add some material about how Nixon never said that and perhaps Bernstein — the wheeled-out old authority on Watergate — meant to say John Dean when he said Nixon.

Now, as to we have any evidence that Obama would want the IRS used for retribution, Obama once joked about using the machinery of the IRS against his enemies:

At his Arizona State University commencement speech [in May 2009], Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU's point by remarking, "I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS."

What did the President know and when did he know it?

An old question. It springs to mind upon reading today's news:

Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner.

Over at the Isthmus forum — a Madison, Wisconsin site, where lefties try to cocoon — a regular commenter who uses the pseudonym Henry Vilas had said: "Sounds like an over-zealot functionary in a local office. While such partisan use of the IRS should be condemned, it's not like a presidential enemies list." And when confronted with the news that senior IRS officials knew, he said: "So did Obama sic the IRS on them, like Nixon did with his enemies list?"

Our own Meade followed the link to the Wikipedia article "Nixon's Enemies List," actually read it, and wrote:

Obamaphiles should hope so:

"On December 20, 1973, the Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation concluded that people on the 'Enemies' list had not been subjected to an unusual number of tax audits."

"I kid you not: The IRS just released a statement on its improper harassment of conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election including the words: 'mistakes were made.'"

Says Instapundit, under the heading "It just gets worse."

I see that "Mistakes were made" has its own Wikipedia page:

The New York Times has called the phrase a "classic Washington linguistic construct." Political consultant William Schneider suggested that this usage be referred to as the "past exonerative" tense, and commentator William Safire has defined the phrase as "[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it." While perhaps most famous in politics, the phrase has also been used in business, sports, and entertainment.

The phrase is most associated with Richard Nixon and his press secretary Ron Ziegler:

U.S. President Richard Nixon used the phrase several times in reference to wrongdoings by his own electoral organization and presidential administration.

On May 1, 1973, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler stated "I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein" (referring to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post). He continued, "We would all have to say that mistakes were made in terms of comments. I was overenthusiastic in my comments about the Post, particularly if you look at them in the context of developments that have taken place." The previous day, White House counsel John Dean and Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman had resigned, as the Watergate scandal progressed.

But it's not as though the association with Nixon has worked over the years to warn off other politicians. As you can see at the Wikipedia page, President Reagan used it in 1987 (about Iran-Contra, President Clinton used it in 1997 (about Democratic Party fundraising scandals. Senator McCain used it in 2005 (about the Iraq war). There are more items on the list, including — I love Wikipedia —today's statement by the IRS.

Under the "see also" heading:

List of political catch phrases
Non-apology apology
Non-denial denial
Spin (public relations)

IN THE COMMENTS: Erich said: "Calls to mind the classic Matt Groening cartoon."

"Strains credulity to think that ice releases thousands of illegals..."

"... and no one there ran it up the food chain. Not even a 'heads up?' Hmmm."

The old buzzword "deniability" popped into my head.

ME (out loud): "Deniability. Who do you associate with that word."

MEADE: "Nixon."

ME (having Googled, reading from Wikipedia): "Kennedy. 'Plausible deniability is a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the withholding of information from senior officials in order to protect them from repercussions in the event that illegal or unpopular activities by the CIA became public knowledge.'"

I love Wikipedia. I love that there's a whole long article on the topic "plausible deniability." The name Nixon comes up — in a list of 6 "major flaws" in the "doctrine." The Nixon-related flaw is:

It rarely worked when invoked; the denials made were rarely plausible and were generally seen through by both the media and the populace. One aspect of the Watergate crisis is the repeated failure of the doctrine of plausible deniability, which the administration repeatedly attempted to use to stop the scandal affecting President Richard Nixon and his aides.

Also at the article, under the heading "other examples":

The Murder of Thomas Becket

King Henry II of England is often said to have stated of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Becket was indeed murdered, although the king denied that his plea was to be taken in such a way.

We don't live in a monarchy, and efforts to insulate a U.S. President from criticism should fail and will fail if we haven't lost track of our role as citizens.

(And, as noted a few posts ago, these Washington writers are nauseatingly dependent on clichés. The food chain, heads up. "Food chain" isn't even the right cliché. Perino meant the chain of command. That other chain. Django Unchained. Chain of Fools. Chains, my baby's got me locked up in chains. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Ball and chain. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Chain smoking. Hey, I'm only yanking your chain.)

Obama, skeet-shooting last August.

The photographic evidence — responding to skepticism — uploaded at the presidential Flickr page today:



IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said: "Cool picture. I want a poster of it to put next to my poster of Nixon bowling."



ADDED: White House coins the term "skeeters" to make fun of people don't believe Obama goes skeet shooting all the time at Camp David.