Daybreak

There are realities that do not depend on politics or elections; laws that are independent of legislation or ratification; powers above the ones we call supreme. The sun rises without permission, darkness falls unbidden to be banished again each morning by the dawn… daybreak serves no earthly master.

There was a storm this week in Texas. Multiple tornados, one a mile wide; death, devastation and loss. The random havoc of nature is not an occurrence we are unfamiliar with, grievous, but a fact of life. Often these storms seem to come in the night time, as this one did, and when they do we all wait with trepidation for daybreak to reveal the extent of the damage.

Natural calamities can happen day or night, but man-caused wickedness seeks out the darkness, the secret places in which to work its mischief. From the revelations in the past several days about Benghazi, the IRS debacle, the AP controversy, and beyond, we appear to have come through a deep dark night; and the long awaited daylight is beginning to show us the scope of the plunder.

The revelations from the shadows are not limited to politics; there were the monstrous activities of Dr. Gosnell revealed after more than 30 years, the Cleveland kidnapping atrocity ended after more than ten years, the stories of three different military officials, whose duties involved dealing with sexual abuse amongst service members, themselves accused of abuse… This is, however, a political blog, so I will restrict the conversation to governmental events. Even there, we do not have only three scandals, we have many. The first glimmer of dawn came with some of the early questions about Benghazi and the Susan Rice talking points, although only a few were awake that early. Then came the sequester exaggerations, the White House tour passive aggression, the mass release of illegals, many serious criminals; the alarm clock was ringing. Then the big ones hit; the Benghazi whistleblowers, the IRS targeting conservative groups, the AP phone records secretly accessed; lost in the glare of these is even more mischief, the Kathleen Sebelius extortion of businesses for Obamacare funding, the revelation that the Affordable Care Act itself is now expected to cost double the initial projections, the EPA discriminating against conservatives in FOIA requests… it just goes on and on.

I am not the first to point out the irony of President Obama’s commencement address where he ridiculed those who warned that “tyranny is always lurking just around the corner”, followed by the revelations that to some extent tyranny is no longer just lurking, nor waiting around any corners. We are apparently supposed to take comfort in the repeated explanations that there was no malice intended in any of these debacles, just stupidity and incompetence. As lawmakers probe for information, the default answer of our leaders seems to be “I don’t know” or “I didn’t know”… (read: “It wasn’t me, you can’t prove anything”). Is anyone in charge?

You know that the White House is frantic. They did a document dump not on a Friday, and a few hours later the President addressed the nation on the IRS scandal. His solution? Request the resignation of the guy who was resigning next month anyway, and who really didn’t have anything to do with what happened. Interestingly, the Q and A that broke the story about the IRS debacle was revealed to have been scripted; that’s right, it was something the IRS wanted to disclose, and they engineered the way it would be revealed, before it could come out in a more damaging way. In a new twist on Rahm Emanuel’s maxim of never letting a crisis go to waste, the administration actually seems to be attempting to use one scandal to divert attention from another. It’s high stakes poker here, but the simpler scandal of the IRS, and to a more limited focus the AP controversy (a revelation also provided by the administration), seem to be the shiny objects being used to divert our attention from Benghazi and the whistleblowers. The talking points being picked up by Democrats across the board seems to be that the IRS scandal is huge, and that the AP issue is troubling, but that Benghazi is nothing. “Nothing to see here… look! look over there!”. How bad is the truth on Benghazi, if they’re willing to take this kind of heat to hide it?

IMHO: We can chew gum and walk; we can multitask; we can deal with one issue without neglecting another. Unlike a flashlight, daylight reveals all shadows. Transgressors always overestimate their ability to keep things hidden, human beings are not particularly good at keeping secrets, and truth, like water, finds its way. If we are, in fact, endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights… life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness… would we really expect the Creator to remain forever neutral when those rights are being attacked? The sun rises, darkness flees; daybreak. If you don’t want to see the truth, you will need to close your eyes. In the words famously sung by Johnny Nash:

“It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day!”