"Tricky Dick" to "Slippery ba'Rock"?

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, many true believers on the political right remained in denial that President Richard Nixon — 'Tricky Dick' as he would be remembered — had any knowledge of the illegal activities of his underlings. True believers on the political left are having the same problem today with the multiple scandals swirling around President Barack Obama. Will this president discredit his followers and perhaps be remembered as '"Slippery ba'Rock"?

In "A Crisis of Authority," WSJ's James Taranto writes:

Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left’s response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

Cataloguing several examples of denial and deflection by the political left's true believers, Taranto ponders the deeper meaning behind the Obama scandals:

'Fast and Furious' Story Gets Legs

"Fast and Furious hasn’t been discussed a lot in the mainstream media, which is why the facts can seem so preposterous when you read them for the first time," writes Tim Stanley at the UK Telegraph. "But the story is slowly unraveling and the public is catching up with the madness" following a House Oversight & Government Reform Committee vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for withholding documents and President Obama's 11th hour decision to invoke Executive Privilege on them. Stanley does a masterful job of summarizing the story succinctly:

Here’s what Fast and Furious is all about — and for the uninitiated, be prepared for a shock.

In 2009, the US government instructed Arizona gun sellers illegally to sell arms to suspected criminals. Agents working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) were then ordered not to stop the sales but to allow the arms to “walk” across the border into the arms of Mexican drug-traffickers.