A triple helping of scandals and five years of arrogance on the part of the president and administration are coming together to mark a turning point in relations between this administration and the Washington political establishment. The special protection that Barack Obama has enjoyed for five years may be coming to an end.

Politico:

The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House.

Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.

Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a good old-fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and public scolding to pile up.

Vernon Jordan, a close adviser to President Bill Clinton through his darkest days, told us: “It’s never all right if you’re the president. There is no smooth sailing. So now he has the turbulence, and this is the ultimate test of his leadership.” Jordan says Obama needs to do something dramatic on the IRS, and quick: “He needs to fire somebody. He needs action, not conversation.”

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative, stuff like this consumes you.”

Republican outrage is predictable, maybe even manageable. Democratic outrage is not.

Read the whole thing.

Professor John C. Darnell, former chairman of Yale’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department

John C. Darnell was a romantic figure on campus looked upon as Yale’s own answer to Indiana Jones, as this admiring profile from 2007 attests:

Professor John Darnell, the chair of Yale’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department, has almost as much legend surrounding him as Indiana Jones, and infinitely more credibility. For years, he has brought Egypt to students and, in many cases, students to Egypt. His charisma and quirky teaching style have made him such a Yale character that he has inspired the Facebook group “John C. Darnell: Man, Myth, or Legend?” Given his experiences in Northern Africa, he just might deserve it.

When I first opened the door to Darnell’s office, I was greeted by strains of choral music and the strong scent of sherry. He beckoned me in and shook my hand as a handful of NELC professors left the room. “We were having a faculty meeting,” he said, gesturing towards the wine glasses scattered around the room. With his three-piece-suit, pocket watch, monocle, and supremely erudite sense of academic zeal, Darnell appeared to be exactly what one would expect of a stuffy Ivy League academic chair. Although he looks as though he were plucked from Victorian London, Darnell actually hails from Prattville, Alabama, and is anything but stodgy. …

When Darnell is not moonlighting as a professor, he spends his time wandering the Egyptian desert with his students and colleagues, hunting for archeological clues and combating heat, scorpions, and antiquities thieves along the way. “Let me think of some good stories for you,” he said, then paused for a few moments. “Actually… I’m going to ask Colleen. She’ll be able to think of some.” He banged on the wall of his office to summon Assistant Professor Colleen Manassa, the department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies, into the room. “Some people say I take the ‘assistant’ part of ‘assistant professor’ a little literally,” he said with a smile. Manassa, a sharp young woman with Cleopatra bangs, soon arrived. For the next hour, she provided prompts and offered helpful translations of Darnell’s occasionally labyrinthine digressions. …

[S]tories of baby snakes and broken cars were only the warm-up to the real adventures. Though Darnell is no tomb raider, it turns out that he still has to race against thieves to make it to sites before they do. Often, local tomb raiders will dig right through valuable ancient inscriptions, hoping to find gold hidden in the rocks. “Every time you find a site, you have to act as though it is probably the last time that you will see that site intact,” Darnell said.

Perhaps the most incredible tale Darnell told involved chasing after a cadre of thieves that he, with his team and a group of soldiers, had frightened away from a site. As they drove back from the site, they noticed a large object the size of the house on the horizon. As they neared it, they realized that it was a quarry dump truck, a tall vehicle that requires a ladder to make it up to the driver’s seat. It clearly had no business out on the desert road, and when the vehicles finally neared each other, both stopped.

“At first,” said Darnell, “everyone was frightened, and then we realized, ‘Hey, we’ve got all these AK-47s and other sorts of arms.’” …

[H]is originality shows in the classroom. Ashley Young ’10, a student of his and the creator of the “Man, Myth, or Legend” Facebook group, couldn’t say enough in praise of Darnell’s unusual tactics and striking charisma. “He has such a command of historical knowledge that students can’t help but be in awe of him… He made ancient Egypt come alive in my eyes,” she said. She has particularly fond memories of quirky moments in class, such as when Darnell accidentally took a chunk out of a classroom chair with an ancient sword, or when he taught his students how to send Roman smoke signals to each other.

By the time I left Darnell’s office, I was tempted to join the Facebook group myself. As I walked out, he asked Manassa to bring me a Yale Egyptology T-shirt, and he was as enthusiastic about its hieroglyphic lux et veritas as he was about AK-47s and undiscovered alphabets. Watching him range from his wild adventures to his love of mundane minutiae, I found him about as fascinating and inscrutable as the hieroglyphics he studies. Here is a man who deserves his myth.

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Thursday, January 10, the curse that strikes down those who violate the pharoah’s tomb arrived in full force:

Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Chair John Darnell resigned as chair and agreed to a one-year suspension from the Yale faculty after engaging in several violations of University policy, including maintaining an intimate relationship with a student under his direct supervision, Darnell said in an email sent to the department Tuesday afternoon.

Darnell’s other violations consisted of participating in the review of a faculty member with whom he had an intimate relationship and using his leadership role in Egyptology to cover up his illicit behavior, he wrote in his Tuesday email. Such actions are prohibited by the Yale University Faculty Handbook, which states that professors must avoid sexual relationships with students over whom they have “direct pedagogical or supervisory responsibilities.”

“[I] have violated Yale policies and the trust placed in me as a Yale faculty member,” Darnell wrote. “I have failed the University, my colleagues, and my students, and I am deeply sorry.”

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More details:

[His assistant Colleen] Manassa declined to comment on allegations concerning her relationship with Darnell, and declined to comment on whether she is facing disciplinary action in connection with Darnell’s suspension.

Two sources with close ties to the NELC Department said Manassa and Darnell met when Manassa took a class taught by Darnell as a freshman in 1998 — the year Darnell joined the Yale faculty as an assistant professor. Manassa told the News she completed the requisite 36 course credits to finish her undergraduate degree in three years.

Manassa went on to enroll as a graduate student in the department in 2001, and was appointed an assistant professor in 2006. Three sources close to the department confirmed that John Darnell was head of the search committee that appointed Manassa to an assistant professorship in the department.

Darnell and his wife — Deborah Darnell, an administrator at the Yale Egyptological Institute — have collaborated on several scholarly works, including journal articles published by the Oriental Institute in 1993 and the Journal of Near Eastern Studies in 1997. According to New Haven court records, the Darnells filed for divorce in 2012.

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Backbiting and gossip:

Two sources close to the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department said they approached administrators about a “hostile work environment” in the department as early as 2010, two years before John Darnell resigned as chair of the department and was suspended from the faculty on Jan. 8.

Four sources said Darnell and Colleen Manassa ’01 GRD ’05, a former graduate student and current associate professor who is alleged to have maintained an intimate relationship with Darnell since at least 2000, exhibited psychologically damaging behavior toward students and professors in the department in recent years, such as threatening to revoke funding for individual academic projects. Two individuals with close ties to the department said that when they approached senior University administrators with their concerns beginning in 2010, they were told the University could only launch an investigation if the individuals filed formal complaints before the administration.

The sources said they decided not to pursue a formal complaint — which cannot be filed anonymously — because they feared retaliation from Manassa or Darnell, who held administrative leadership positions in the NELC Department and its Egyptology subdivision. One source said the complaint system engenders “a common culture of fear among the grad students.”

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And who’s left standing?

When John Darnell agreed to a one-year suspension from the Yale faculty following numerous University policy violations, he left the Egyptology division of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department without a chair and with just one full-time faculty member — associate professor Colleen Manassa ’01 GRD ’05, with whom he allegedly had the intimate relationship that led to his suspension.

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Colleen Manassa

Courtesy of Gawker.

I was having trouble following who was doing what with whom under the table, and who all sent which emails to whom, and I still fail to understand what the FBI was doing investigating all this. It is quite clear why the axe falling was postponed until election day, however.

Every American is naturally worried today that the FBI is poring over all his emails, tweets, and social media postings and concerned that the federal SWAT team may be arriving any minute now to knock down his door, search his house for incriminating evidence, and confiscate his PC.

The Borowitz Report offers comforting news that help in determining your personal vulnerability is on the way.

[T]he C.I.A. has published a new informational brochure entitled “How to Tell if You’re Involved in the Petraeus Scandal.”

The C.I.A. rushed to produce the brochure after it became clear that as many as one in three Americans may have some involvement in the Petraeus affair.

And with the scandal widening every day, “a lot of average folks out there are worried that they might somehow be involved in it without knowing,” says Carol Foyler, director of the C.I.A.’s public-information office. “This booklet should clear up a lot misunderstandings.”

The booklet includes a “simple, user-friendly checklist” that should help people determine whether they are at risk for being implicated in the scandal, she says.

“Have you ever met David Petraeus? Have you ever received and/or sent shirtless photos of an F.B.I. agent? Have you ever exchanged e-mails with Jill Kelley? Under five thousand pages of e-mails and you’re probably O.K., but anywhere between ten thousand and fifteen thousand pages of e-mails could potentially mean you’re involved in some way,” she says.

More than 15,700 mostly male & female soldiers from military forces of nations worldwide (I saw Germany, Russia, Spain, Canada, Italy, and Israel in there), who have been joined by some civilians as well, have come to the defense of Britain’s Prince Harry by posting unclothed photos of themselves online via a Facebook group titled: “Support Prince Harry with a naked salute!.”

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One US Navy seal added a particularly nice clothed salute:

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The general sentiment is that the Prince, who served in a combat unit in Afghanistan, is entitled to recreation and privacy in Las Vegas during his off-duty time, just like anybody else.

The Mirror

That sound chap James Delingpole sticks up for Prince Harry’s right to do the sorts of things high-spirited and unmarried young men are wont to do on weekends of leisure at resort locations with like-minded young ladies. The prince will be old and respectable one day.

Anyway, the nude photos of Prince Harry in Vegas cannot be allowed to pass without comment. They have, I note, prompted an outbreak of massive prudery among some of my Telegraph colleagues. And perhaps you feel the same way: that the third in line to the British throne should not be seen cavorting naked with young women in American gambling resorts.

To which I’d reply: are Harry’s critics remotely familiar with British history? This is what young royals do. It’s what they’re supposed to do. Look at the roistering buck that Henry VIII was (before he grew fat and syphilitic); look at the very type of the Regency buck – the Prince Regent (later George IV); look at the playboy Edward VIII (and indeed his grandfather Edward VII); look at Harry’s namesake – Prince Hal – who, if we are to believe Shakespeare, deliberately cultivated an image of debauchery and irresponsibility the better “like bright metal on a sullen ground” to set off the magnitude of his reformation on assuming kingship …

Harry also acts as a very entertaining foil to his more staid elder brother William. I find their evident love for one another one of the most delightful things of all the Royal Family. One of Harry’s functions, I suspect, is to do all the things that William would like to do but can’t being heir to the throne. So Harry acts as his pressure valve, his fantasy alter ego …

Plus, of course, Harry has served his country, on the front line in Afghanistan, so I think deserves to be cut a bit of slack.

Scandalous photos.

detail, former Paterno memorial

John Ziegler described how misreporting and media sensationalism destroyed the reputation of Joe Paterno and the nation’s most admired football program.

Regardless of what the final facts eventually say about what Joe Paterno knew and when he knew it about Jerry Sandusky’s criminal behavior (contrary to what the media has told you, they aren’t in yet and I have confronted very anti-Paterno “reporters” who admit this privately), the media coverage of him has been as unfair as any I have ever seen. In some ways, the media coverage of Joe Paterno has combined some of the worst elements of both the reporting of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 presidential election. …

After the grand jury presentment was made available at a Saturday press conference which announced the Sandusky indictments last November, the initial media coverage was, in retrospect remarkably, and tellingly, rather muted.

ESPN, who would later the next week drive most of the narrative of the overall story, limited most of their coverage over the weekend to a passing news mention and a perfunctory place on the ubiquitous scroll on the bottom of the screen. After all, they had actual college and pro football games to broadcast/cover and no need to interrupt those ratings winners for the story of some guy who hadn’t coached football in over a decade.

The first edition of Sports Illustrated (which went to press about 48 hours after the indictments) after the news broke does not make mention of the Sandusky story in even one news article. Sandusky didn’t even make the “For the Record” section under “Arrests.” The story is only cited in an opinion column on the back page which reads somewhat like the “last word” on a story which is horrible but which may not provide much opportunity to write about in the future.

By the next week, Joe Paterno was somehow on the cover of SI along with multiple banner headlines, including one indicating that this was the biggest scandal in college sports history.

What changed in the ensuing week? Well, Paterno was fired, but not because we learned anything significantly new about the scandal during that time. Instead, what happened was that ESPN, with the help of popular website Deadspin (which was the first outlet to jump all over the story and predict Paterno’s demise), decided that they could change the rules of this game and make what was an otherwise dead sports week into a dramatic, ratings winning, passion play.

The initial take of the mainstream media was that this was not really a Joe Paterno story because, while Sandusky had been his assistant coach and there was a major allegation which occurred on campus, it was after he had already left the program. Paterno had testified but had not been charged. The prosecutors said that Paterno had done what was legally required of him, though they did raise the issue (in the response to a leading question from the media) of whether Paterno had fulfilled his moral responsibility with regard to making sure the allegations were properly followed up.

Seemingly lulled into a false sense of security by the relative rationality of the initial coverage (which was neither as intense nor as insane as it soon would be), Penn State made a couple of critical errors. The first was that they failed to make it clear that when Paterno had made sure the Mike McQueary allegations were reported to Gary Schultz, that he was doing so to the person in charge of the campus police. The media, either out of incompetence, deceitfulness, or both, never made that clear and in fact often reported that Paterno “never went to the police.” This omission created a huge hole in Paterno’s ship, which should have been easily plugged. Instead, it was an unnecessary leak in his story which still exists in public perception today. …

Now the media had what they wanted. They suddenly processed all the excuses they needed to turn a story about a likely child molester who hadn’t coached at Penn State for twelve years, into a tale of whether a legend had failed in his moral responsibility to protect children he may or may not have even known were ever in danger.

The public wouldn’t care much about Sandusky, but everyone knew Joe Paterno. The tearing down of a pious legend makes for incredible copy and it transformed that week from a remarkably slow sports period (the NBA was still on strike, baseball was over, and football was in a midseason lull) into a ratings bonanza.

Now it should be noted that one of the primary weapons which drove the deep passion and anger on this story at the outset was the misuse of one key phrase in the grand jury presentment. The prosecutors brilliantly (though deceitfully) claimed that Mike McQueary had witnessed Sandusky having “anal intercourse” with a ten year old boy in the Penn State showers.

Quite simply, there is very little in the human condition which makes our brains turn off their logic mechanisms faster than the concept of a child being anally raped by an old man. Like the color red to a raging bull, this phrase turned what would have been reasonable outrage into a communal blind fury. It also made it nearly impossible to discuss the actual facts of the matter because people understandably don’t like talking about the subject.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that had the grand jury presentment not used the words “anal intercourse,” that Joe Paterno would not have been fired the way that he was and likely would have coached out the season. I also have little uncertainty that the phrase was purposely misused in the grand jury presentment because prosecutors knew exactly what kind of public reaction it would provoke.

I also believe that part of the reason that the phrase “anal intercourse” was placed in the grand jury presentment was because, at that time, contrary to public perception, the legal case against Jerry Sandusky was actually remarkably weak.

Incredibly, despite a huge civil settlement being there for the taking, somehow there was/is no known victim in the McQueary episode (Don’t tell the media that! They still don’t realize it!), and, though somehow no one knew it at the time, McQueary had inexplicably testified incorrectly about which day, month and year the incident he supposedly witnessed took place.

Few people, and fewer media members, realize that at the time of the indictments there was only one allegation of actual “sex” from a known witness, and that person’s story had been disbelieved by officials at his own school (interestingly that boy’s mom doesn’t blame Paterno or Penn State). The prosecution needed a big explosion in order to blow the case wide open and bring in other accusers they had to be sure were still out there. Their tactic worked perfectly, but it also had the side effect (one with which it seems they weren’t unpleased) of making it impossible for Paterno to get a remotely fair public examination.

As it ultimately turned out, the “hanging” jury in the Jerry Sandusky case actually rightly acquitted him of “anal intercourse” in the McQueary allegation (for the record, I believe the evidence indicates that McQueary did not witness an assault, but rather a botched “grooming”). But by that time it no longer mattered and this inconvenient fact was almost universally ignored by the media.

Read the whole thing.

He has a terrific article which makes vital points on this sad affair. I think it is, however, too long and needed a bit of editing which it did not receive.

Mike McDaniel:

On December 8, 2011, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder baldly asserted that he had no idea who authorized the deadly Fast and Furious debacle and added that he would be “surprised” if any evidence about it could ever be found.

Put aside, for the moment, Holder’s lack of transparency which has become standard operating procedure for the most transparent administration in history, and consider that Mr. Holder is correct for two primary and likely reasons: he knows who is responsible for every facet of Fast and Furious and has no intention of ever revealing that information, and he has the most important, powerful ace any corrupt bureaucrat or politician could possibly have up his sleeve, but more on this later.

According to Fox News, on January 19, Patrick J. Cunningham, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division for Arizona, through his attorneys, has notified Rep. Darrell Issa’s Committee that he will not testify before the committee as requested and that if subpoenaed, will take the Fifth and refuse to testify to avoid incriminating himself.

Thomas Vinciguerra offers an all-purpose statement of personal responsibility merging the expressions of 15 of America’s noblest leaders.

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Mark Steyn puts Weinergate into perspective.

I have minimal expectations of this country’s depraved political class. But if you can’t draw the line at being ruled by creeps with a spambot penis, you can’t draw it anywhere.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Anthony Weiner in full denunciatory mode on the House floor.

Victor Davis Hanson welcomes Anthony Weiner to the ever-lengthening list of fallen liberal moralists.

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state.

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Allahpundit reports that ABC news has been forwarding vindictively to everyone the following video from a little ways back in which Weiner asserts his innocence and defiantly confronts his interviewer. AllahPundit tells us that he himself feels uneasy watching Weiner’s unabashed and brazen dishonesty, that there is about it a disturbing abnormality, a whiff of the Bates Motel… something that makes his skin crawl.

How creepy? Creepy enough that ABC posted this footage (which was recorded a few days ago, of course) just within the past hour and then sent around the link via e-mail. I didn’t go hunting through their archives for it, in other words; they’re pushing it on people tonight themselves because, understandably, they (a) want to atone for having aired this guy’s lies as news last week and (b) presumably want the world to see what an almost pathologically fluid liar he was when cornered. The last 80 seconds of it will have you squirming in your seat — not only the way he claims to be the innocent target of a hoax but his insistence on lecturing the interviewer for assuming the worst, taking care to maintain accusatory eye contact the whole way. It’s genuinely disturbing.

If, like me, you felt bad for him when he choked up at his presser today, spend four minutes watching this. It’ll straighten you right out.

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The New York Post wins the headline-of-the-day award.

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The Anchoress comments on the impact of the Weiner scandal on the press, particularly on Barbara Walters.

To my way of thinking, the saddest part of this story is Barbara Walters devolution; this once-respected newswoman nears the end of her distinguished career by playing as ghastly a non-sequitur as I’ve ever heard, saying (in essence) if Sarah Palin ‘can ride around on her bus,’ Weiner Can Stay in Congress.

When Joy Behar, of all people has to defend Sarah Palin from your bizarrely gratuitous swipe, you know you’ve let your hate lead you too far into Whackyland.

Listen (if you can stand the noise of this show) to Walters talking about how she “knows” Weiner and “knows” his wife, who of course works for Hillary Clinton, whom she also knows.

This is the problem with the mainstream media in a nutshell. They “know” the people they’re supposed to be covering, and they consider themselves “friends” of those people. And it has ruined them. As you listen to Walters, all you see is passionate advocacy; not a newswoman concerned with the truth of a story, but a partisan doing everything she can to divert attention from a story she doesn’t like — even to comparing a private citizen on a bus to a sitting congressman having some sort of cyber-engagement in his office — and championing her “friend.”

This has never been a nice story, which is why I haven’t written about it until now. But I still am less interested in Weiner than in how the press reacted to this story. Some were willing to believe him, simply because he said they should. Some seemed like they didn’t want to believe him, but didn’t want to not believe him, even more. The usual partisans tried to blame and smear the usual partisans.

We don’t actually have a genuine press any more.

Mark Steyn is sharp-tongued as ever on the topic of the week: the latest scandal-mired abrasive, self-righteous, egomanaical, ultra-liberal democrat.

And so it goes after another tumultuous week in American politics. Nearly a third of homeowners are “underwater” – that’s to say, they owe more on their mortgages than the property is worth. Private-sector job growth has all but vanished. The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling.

But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot.

For the benefit of the few remaining American coeds Rep. Weiner isn’t following on Twitter, the congressman’s initial position when his groin Tweet went viral was that his Twitter had been hacked. Could happen to anyone. …

Congressman Weiner then retreated from the sinister hacking line, and protested that all this fuss about a mere “prank” involving a “randy photo” (his words) was an “unfortunate distraction” from real issues like raising the debt ceiling. Like Bill Clinton in the Nineties, Rep. Weiner needs to “get back to work for the American people.”

It’s the political class doing all this relentless “work for the American people” that’s turned this country into the brokest nation in the history of the planet, killed the American Dream and left the American people headed for a future poised somewhere between the Weimar Republic and Mad Max. So, if it’s a choice between politicians getting back to work for the American people or Tweeting their privates round the planet, I say, Tweet on, MacDuff.