Is This A Pattern Or An Isolated Incident?

I have recently reported on the attempted firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin.  What I was unaware of at the time was that he is the third inspector general to be fired or pressured by the Obama administration in the past two weeks.

According to Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com in an article he posted yesterday, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa has started demanding answers as to why these 'watchdogs' who are supposed to operate above politics are being strong armed.  These are the three stories:

"The positions themselves indicate where the White House wants to go with its efforts.  Barofsky ruffled feathers in April when his watchdog report showed that the Obama administration had placed insufficient safeguards on Porkulus spending.   This later caused Joe Biden to shrug and tell the media, "Some people are being scammed already," as if it wasn't the job of the administration to stop it from happening.  Barofsky now has a leash around his neck, with the White House insisting that he answers only to Treasury."...

"(Gerald) Walpin stands between the White House and their desire to use AmeriCorps as a reward system for their political allies and to use government money for the kind of "community organizing" that put Obama in the White House. His report to Congress made that difficult in Sacramento, where Mayor Johnson had been blocked from receiving federal grant money for his admitted earlier fraud. Walpin's independence had to be removed, and in this case, Walpin had to be smeared to make it stick.

"The third incident came last week at the International Trade Commission, where Judith Gwynne worked independent of the White House, and which will be a critical position as Obama reshapes trade arrangements around the world. An ITC employee earlier this year "forcibly removed" paperwork from Gwynne. Rather than back the IG after Grassley wrote a letter demanding answers, the political appointees at the ITC dumped her."

It looks as if we have a group of thugs running this administration.  I hope the Congress has enough backbone to rein them in.