President Obama is in the middle of what amounts to the worst week of his Presidency.  First Benghazi, then the IRS scandal, now reports that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records from the AP.  According to the AP, “records of reporters and editors were secretly obtained in what amounts to a massive and unprecedented intrusion”.  While there are many conservatives who are screaming conspiracy, we should give the President the benefit of the doubt.  After all, he’s innocent until proven guilty. And given the way this President operates, it’s more likely an issue of the President’s weak leadership than scandal.  Being really smart doesn’t necessarily make one a great leader and there’s a huge difference between community organizer and leader of the free world.  One requires incredibly strong leadership, the other requires good intentions and decent organizational skills.  Benghazi is hardly a Watergate scandal, although it has proven to be a pesky problem for Obama as will the IRS targeting of Conservatives.  Add to that a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder and the President is clearly playing defense even as he refers to these issues as a “sideshow”. But they will die slow deaths and Republicans won’t allow them to die at all.  There are only two ways to look at President Obama’s administration at this point, a) he’s not in control of his troops or b) he’s completely in control of his troops, which would be worse.  In terms of the unprecedented confiscation of privileged information, from a news organization, attorneys for the AP said, “the records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery”.  This is particularly damning for the President because he can’t blame this on partisan politics. The AP is an important, and well-respected news organization and Obama must be called to the carpet.  The government won’t say why the AP was targeted but according to the AP, “officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot.”  It continued, “The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaeda plot in the Spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.”  The government will justify this action by claiming “unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information” was leaked to the public.  But isn’t that one of the functions of a free press?  What the government should be asking is who leaked this “dangerous and classified information” internally.  If those inside the government and administration can’t keep classified information classified, that’s a much larger issue.  President Obama needs to right his ship quickly or risk losing some of the 51% who supported him, rendering him impotent. Who would have believed that five months in to his second term, Obama would be looking more like Nixon than Kennedy.