Maureen Dowd, "The Spies Who Didn’t Love Her": Obama's Worst Tuesday

“And this mess is so big
And so deep and so tall,
We cannot pick it up.
There is no way at all!”

― Dr. Seuss, "The Cat in the Hat"

It was quite the Tuesday for the beleaguered Obama administration.

Obama and friends were forced to acknowledge that Obamacare February sign-up numbers were far below those needed to attain the administration's target of 6 million enrolled people by the end of March. As reported by Sandhya Somashekhar and Amy Goldstein in a Washington Post article entitled "Pace of health exchange enrollment slows in February, figures show" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/pace-of-health-exchange-enrollment-slows-in-february-figures-show/2014/03/11/6eb32e16-a93d-11e3-8d62-419db477a0e6_story.html?hpid=z3):

"The Obama administration said 943,000 Americans selected health plans, compared to 1.2 million in January. Overall, enrollment stood at 4.2 million as of the end of last month.

Contrary to the Obama administration’s expectations, fewer people chose health plans last month than in either January or December. And the proportion of young adults — a critical demographic if the marketplaces are to function well — did not increase compared with January."

But wait, there's more. As acknowledged by Maureen Dowd in her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "The Spies Who Didn’t Love Her" (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/12/opinion/dowd-the-spies-who-didnt-love-her.html?smid=tw-NYTimesDowd&seid=auto&_r=0), there is a new scandal engulfing the Obama administration, which involves alleged CIA hacking of Senate computers and removal of documents. Dowd writes:

"In June, [CIA Director John] Brennan had issued a 122-page classified rebuttal to the still-classified $40 million, 6,300-page Senate report. But [Dianne] Feinstein said on the floor that she found the C.I.A. riposte 'puzzling,' given that the Panetta internal review admitted to what the C.I.A.’s rebuttal objected to. Given the C.I.A.’s 2005 destruction of videotapes showing the torture of two Al Qaeda operatives, Feinstein said she has now locked up in the committee vault in the Hart Office Building the parts of the Panetta review that her staff had printed out before it disappeared. She has also requested in writing that Brennan turn over a complete version of the review to the committee.

She said she has received no answers from Brennan, who is no fan of Congress or the media, to her formal questions about the agency’s actions and no response to her request for an apology."

Yup, this time it's 80-year-old Democratic Senator Feinstein making the accusations and demanding an apology, and it's going to be a bit harder for Barack and friends to assert that partisan politics are the basis for the brouhaha.

Brennan? Nominated by Obama to succeed David Petraeus as director of the CIA, he was approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2013. Brennan and the CIA report to the Director of National Intelligence, who reports to the president.

Obama's excuse this time? Did he also read about it in the newspapers like the rest of us? Will he refuse to fire Brennan, in much the same way that he has failed to lay a finger on Secretary of Health Kathleen Sebelius?

It's all out of control.

A silver lining to the story? Always! Obama's inept response to Putin's invasion of Crimea is now fast fading into the past . . .