President Barack Obama’s decision to exert executive privilege over Fast and Furious documents subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee set the conservative blogosphere ablaze with indignation, as accusations flew that this was a scandal on the scale of Watergate, and that the president’s decision was an act of enormous hypocrisy.
“[T]his could very well be analogous to the Watergate scandal,” writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.
Continue Reading“Having lived through Watergate and Richard Nixon’s cover-up effort to claim executive privilege, President Obama’s claim of executive privilege sounds to me like a desperation move,” wrote Thomas Lifson at the American Thinker.
“Shades of Richard Nixon. Faced with a contempt of Congress citation for failure to produce subpoenaed documents, Attorney General Eric Holder apparently went to his boss, President Obama, and asked for a little cover,” chimed in Phineas at the SisterToldjah blog.
Most conservative bloggers pointed out that as a presidential candidate Obama opposed President George W. Bush’s use of executive privilege during the scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys.
“The obvious charge that President Obama is now embracing the powers of the presidency that he once railed against,” wrote Shannon W. Coffin at the National Review’s The Corner.
“One wonders whether today’s announcement signals that the president has changed his mind on government secrecy and transparency,” muses conservative writer Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard.
The scandal escalated as the White House got more heavily involved in the Fast and Furious investigation by invoking executive privilege, which conservatives took to mean that any further Fast and Furious revelations should be tied to the president.
“Fast and Furious is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the president. No longer is this a merely DOJ problem. The president’s invocation of his privilege makes the problem his own,” wrote Coffin.
“Contempt: It’s what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” wrote Michelle Malkin on her blog, referring to the contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder in the Oversight Committee Wednesday.
“The President now owns the consequences of further stonewalling,” agreed Todd Gaziano, who previously served in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, at the Heritage Foundation blog The Foundry.
But as the Fast and Furious scandal increasingly affects Obama, it also increases demands on his opponent, Mitt Romney, who conservatives are now demanding take a more aggressive stance.
“I want to see a statement by Mitt Romney to the effect that if he becomes President, he’ll appoint a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of this, go where it may,” wrote Rob at the conservative blog JoshuaPundit.
Meanwhile, progressive blogs are noticeably less fired up about the issue than conservatives, and aren’t rushing out with the same enthusiasm that the right is in order to defend Holder or Obama. Most dismissed the Congressional investigation led by Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa as a “witch hunt” and “howling.”
“Issa will not stop until Holder resigns, or is forced to turn some sort of evidence against the President. It’s a massive delusion Issa is under. And now the Republicans will scream DICTATOR for a while, and then this story dies, hopefully. But remember, it’s all about Issa’s lunatic hatred,” argues Zandar at Balloon Juice.
“The right wing blogs are howling in unison like frustrated banshees, of course,” dismisses Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.