-By Warner Todd Huston
So, after news first came out that the White House visitors log showed that IRS chief Douglas Shulman visited the White House a whopping 157 times between 2009 and 2012, the left has come out enforce to poo-poo this report saying that the claim is false. Shulman only visited 11 times, they claim.
But wait… isn’t Shulman listed 157 times on the White House visitors log? I mean, did smart people somehow mistake 157 entries for only 11? How is this possible?
Well, no, there was no mistake. Shulman does appear in the log for 157 visits.
OK, you say, so what’s the deal?
After all, we are trusting that Obama is living up to his (mostly absurd) claim to be running the most transparent administration in history, right? Why, he’s voluntarily releasing these visitor records, isn’t he? This is good, right?
So, if his logs say 157 times… why can’t we trust that?
Well, because according to the left, just because someone’s name appears on the log, cleared to attend a meeting, that doesn’t actually mean that said person ever really went to the White House.
Are you confused? Well you should be. As it turns out, the White House visitors log is seemingly useless as a means to determine who has actually visited the White House!
As the Daily Caller recently pointed out,
Some visits by top officials are never even noted in the visitors logs. A comparison of the situation room photo from the night of the bin Laden raid–May 1, 2011–to the visitor logs, for example, shows that several of the officials in the photo never appear in the public access records.
The White House voluntary disclosure policy does reveal that visitor names are often left off the logs for a variety of reasons…
So, new we are back to having no firm idea how many times Shulman visited the White House.
But, even if we accept the left’s claim that it was “only” 11 times, that is still 10 times more than Mark Evans, Bush’s IRS chief visited the White House.
So, like a car mirror, the White House visitor log should have a note on it that says: “Warning. Notations are not as close as they appear.”
Because, transparency. And stuff.
Finally, I want to point out one more fact, here.
The left is again excusing Barack Obama because he is incompetent, this time at his feeble attempts at transparency.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.