Exactly one week ago, things looked very different. The dead horse issue of Benghazi was brought up with a new push by Republicans armed with leaked emails, they claimed, revealed Obama’s attempts to politicize the Libyan Embassy Attacks, a new scandal claimed the IRS had targeted Tea Party groups and seemingly implicated that the White House was playing rough and corrupt in an election year while another scandal broke as well after the AP released a story about how several of its reporters records were seized in what seemed to be a serious overstep of Executive power over the freedom of the press. “Nixonian” was used many times by Obama’s opponents as well as some allies, as the Administration went into full blown crisis mode. The Republicans were salivating while simultaneously eating a Chick-Fil-A sandwich while gleefully firing off their assault riffles, as suddenly everything they had been claiming seemed justified, for about a minute. Just one week later, much of the promise of the radical right’s latest greatest impeachment charge seems to have lost serious ground, and they have only themselves to blame.
I think the GOP actually gets high on scandals, even with Bush who loved them so much he had at least 10 of them.
Indeed, one week later, the landscape has changed dramatically. The Benghazi “leaks” turned out to be bogus, the AP story is barely on the radar and the Republican witch hunt over the IRS issue has failed to find anything beyond incompetence at the lowest levels. So what happened?
In short, the GOP overreached.
“Restraint”, as a word, has disappeared from the Conservative lexicon, along with “compromise” and “intellectual”. Emboldened by the Tea Party Takeover of 2010, ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ was thrown overboard leading to a party that is radical in nature and seemingly hell bent on making Obama look bad. Rather than compromise and get things passed, they made their sole focus of political existence to ruin Obama and the Democrats by clogging the system, obstructing any laws and denying anything that can be viewed as a victory for ‘Barrack Hussein Obama’, ultimately so he and the party would fail. Then they would bring in a conservative and take over the system, banishing Medicare, Social Security and reduce taxes on the wealthy.
This has become the ideology of the Republican party. For an example of how extreme they have become look to the debt ceiling debacle, which saw conservatives hold the debt ceiling hostage (which, I remind, is not about spending, rather about paying the bills that are already spent mostly by a GOP Congress) to try to cram through a conservative agenda most Americans disagree with (ie: abortion laws, handouts to the oil industry, handouts to Wall Street, etc.). Oh and get ready for another round of that by the way. Even when Obama bent over backwards to give the Republicans most of what they asked for, they turned it down because it wasn’t everything they asked for. No, it’s called a compromise, which is what you do when you control 1/2 the Legislative branch and don’t control the Executive. In other words, this is not a party that understands the finer points of politics.
These people seriously hate Obama, and they have been calling for his impeachment since 2009, literally 100 days into his Presidency, just because they don’t like him. There is little attention paid to the whole “high crimes and misdemeanors” part of the Constitution required for an impeachment.
Now give these same radicals a whiff of a scandal and they get more excited than a cat in a cat-nip factory.
In Benghazi, where lax security and general bureaucratic incompetence led to vulnerabilities at the American embassy in Libya. General confusion existed in the days after the attack, as it was a war zone only a few months prior (ya know, the fog of war). Yet 24 hours later, Mitt Romney, in a desperate attempt to score some points and satisfy his base ridiculed the President for his handling of the situation, even though it is highly unlikely Obama had anything to do with any of it. This set off the whole mess, even though Romney was ridiculed for his handling of it by the press and his poll numbers dropped. When he tried to accuse Obama of not labeling the situation an “act of terror” in the 2nd debate, and was rightfully called on it by Obama and the debate moderator, Romney was humiliated and he gave up the line of attack.
After the election, Conservatives picked it up for some reason, likely due to sour grapes over losing so badly in November, and kept up the line of attacks, calling hearing after hearing, until last week when we witnessed the 11th hearing. For the 11th time nothing substantial came from any of it. It was clear to anyone who is not a Republican that this was a ginned up political maneuver and had little to do with honoring the 4 who died in the attacks including the US Ambassador.
Where were these questions in the Bush years when 54 attacks were staged on the US during that time, according to a University of Maryland study, that resulted in the deaths of 13 Americans? At least 11 of these attacks were widely covered, why wasn’t anyone questioning why US embassy security was so low then? Further more, attacks on US political targets reached on all time high during Bush, no not George W. Bush, his father, and “The Gipper” Reagan saw far more attacks than George W. Bush and especially Obama, ever did. So where was the outrage then?
I can answer that. At one time, we used to see ourselves as a nation and we actually mourned the attacks on an American embassy as an attack on us all. Remember those days? When serious tragedies were not used to score cheap political points? The days before the Tea Party. Remember when the attacks on the US Embassy in Tehran strengthened American resolve? Yet these Tea Baggers can’t remember their history so they saw an opportunity involving an embassy and thought they could hang it around Obama’s neck, even citing Jimmy Carter when they did it. It backfired in the election and has yet to garner them a single political victory.
As they dug and dug for anything they could use, much like the Clinton WhiteWater investigation that ended with a blow job, Benghazi then centered on “talking points”. The GOP claimed that the talking points memo given to State Department spokeswomen and adviser to Hillary Clinton was manipulated for a Sunday talk show to make the White House look better. Imagine that. Remember when Dick Cheney leaked a story to the New York Times about Saddam Hussein having nuclear weapons then went on the Sunday shows citing the “article” in the New York Times about nuclear weapons as proof that they should invade Iraq? Remember the “mushroom cloud threat”. I do.
My how our standards for a scandal have fallen.
Then last week, a mysterious leak came from Republican sources who claimed that White House emails revealed evidence that the incident was air brushed over to reflect better on the State Department. 4 days later, the actual emails were released. They did not match the leak! Did Republicans change the emails in an attempt to make Obama look bad? Maybe we should have an investigation on this because that is far more substantial than anything that has come from the Benghazi investigations. At least there is motive and opportunity here!
To top it off, guys like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld started grandstanding and going after Obama for allowing the US to be attacked, allegedly lying to the American public and using war for political means. The irony was stunning.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of the Neo-Conservative gang has no place talking about military action, terrorism or any kind of scandal.
To make matters worse for the GOP, Obama himself began pressing the fact that the House Republicans stripped money out of US Embassy security months before the attack in Benghazi. Would it have made a difference? Probably not, though it does drive home the fact that Republicans seemed little concerned about protecting our service personnel until it became politically useful to them.
By the end of the week, Benghazi had run out of gas as a major scandal, but that won’t stop the Republicans. They will keep up the charge and continue to ask “questions”, even when they keep getting those questions answered, over and over again ad nausea. They seem to think that if you don’t like the answers, ask the question again and pretend it’s never been answered. That works for a time yet usually backfires in the end when the average person starts to look at your unrelentless focus on a single issue with nothing to show for it and ask questions of their own like: “What’s your problem?” This often leads to conclusions like” “Get over it!”
As for the AP scandal, this is tricky. It flies in the face of what liberals in Obama’s base believe strongly in, a free press. It also resembles what George W. Bush did do to intimidate his opponents, albeit this is far less malicious. Apparently there was some kind of government leak that the Justice Department was intent on stopping and obtained the phone records of AP reporters involved in the story. While it appears to be technically legal, this is somewhat debatable and falls into the gray area of constant struggle of government and journalism.
One problem though, it involved stopping a major terrorist attack. Even though this is, by far, a legitimate concern, the Republicans have had a tough time with this argument because they don’t want to give Obama credit for stopping a major terror attack.
When the stopped terror plot was leaked out last year, Republicans banked everything on Obama purposefully leaking the info so he could look strong on terror. Today, that allegation sounds ridiculous, because why would he leak the documents to the press and risk a backlash in the press by rigorously crossing questionable lines just to prove a point? It makes no sense.
Yet In order to push the scandal, Republicans would be forced to remind everyone that Obama was tough on Terror.
The hearings that Issa held on this topic also went nowhere and contained only one serious media byte, where Attorney General Eric Holder slammed Darryl Issa as being shameful for the way he conducts himself. He accused the modern day McCarthy of acting poorly as a US Representative, as a cocky and unlikable Issa hid behind the Committee Chairman and red tape rules. The little smirk on his face did serious damage to his trumped up charges, and by the end of the day, the public eye had begun to lose interest.
Holder smacked down Darryl Issa.
Then the White House went on the offensive, calling on Congress to pass the Media Shield Law that would make what the Justice Department did illegal, further calling attention to the fact that what was done was legal and dividing Republicans who tend to hate the Lamestream Media and don’t want to give them more power.
So much for that scandal.
Finally, the IRS issue. Nobody likes the IRS. Nobody likes paying taxes (or any bill for that matter), so when news broke that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups, the anti-government Tea-Baggers went guano. Here the IRS comes out and tells the world that conservative groups were being targeted in the run up to an election to boot! Sounds like a serious line being crossed by the government, singling out groups based on their political leanings and a violation of the Hatch Act.
Only one problem. These conservative groups were not being bullied by the IRS to pay more taxes, these groups were being questioned as to their application for TAX EXEMPT status, only to see every single of the supposed bullied groups ultimately get their TAX EXEMPT status.
Wait a second!
Q. Why are these conservative groups allowed to avoid paying their taxes?
A. Because they claim to be a social welfare group?
Q.Why do Social Welfare groups get to avoid paying taxes?
A. Thanks to the highly conservative Citizen’s United decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that allowed billionaires to spend unlimited money on politics and political candidates as long as a huge percentage is paid toward causes that help society, as in social welfare.
Q.Social welfare? Tea Party groups hate both of those things? This sounds suspicious.
A. It did to the IRS too.
Gee, you think Republicans have a problem taking anyone else’s beliefs seriously?
To make matters worse, a tiny office of 200 employees in Cincinnati was forced to handle the sudden rush of 501(c)(4) groups applying, thanks to the Citizen United decision, more than 70,000 of them. They used criteria they felt would streamline the work. It seems, in retrospect, that these criteria were very unwise and in some cases downright incompetent, however would Obama use a Bush appointee Douglas Shulman, who was head of the IRS until November 2012 to do his dirty work? Furthermore, while there are reports that conservative groups were asked tough and even inappropriate questions, all of the groups that applied got their tax exempt status and they were little inconvenienced on their way to not only sheltering billions of dollars from the IRS, they were able to use that money to lobby Congress to get tax breaks on the rest of their income.
Tea Baggers have called it a “nightmare”, though very few of my bad dreams result in me getting to avoid paying my taxes thanks to a conservative decision by the Supreme Court! More importantly, where was the outrage from such conservatives when Bush was going after the NAACP and a liberal church as well?
Liberals, Progressives and Moderate Democrats closed ranks as the divisive tone of the Republicans made the issue partisan rather than an investigation to find out what happened.
Obama let current head of the IRS go right before he faced the witch trials in the US House of Representatives. Would he spill the beans? He’s got nothing to lose.
Yet Republicans failed to get Steven Miller to say little more than a public apology, as he bravely claimed the responsibility for issues that were well beneath his pay-grade and happened before he even took office! Here the sharp attacks by the radical Right, like Paul Ryan, led to Democrats siding with the President and closing the door on any bi-partisan investigation.
The hearing ended as all the Republican hearing do, with no evidence of anything remotely illegal or anywhere near the White House lawn, let alone the Oval Office.
By the end of the week the breaks were on full stop. GOP Chairman Rhince Prebius cautioned against calls for impeachment and even Newt Gingrich was warning Republicans not to overreach on the scandals. Yes, I said the man who impeached Clinton for getting a blow job is warning the Republican party about the perils of overreaching!
And the week started off so well for them too!
This GOP doesn’t understand the meaning of overreach. To them, waiting 24 hours to capitalize on an embassy bombing, as Mitt Romney did, is appropriate behavior. The Republicans managed to know what was going on before any US Personnel in Libya did. How do you think they managed that?
They have overreached on the debt ceiling, repealing Obamacare, attacking immigrants with racial profiling bills, standing against Gay rights, anti-abortion and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, defining “legitimate” rape.
Why would anyone think they suddenly found restraint?
This is why the GOP will fail to bring down Obama. While getting all 3 scandals to break at once was either very clever or very lucky, they are their own worst enemies and have sabotaged their own efforts to do what they want to do more than anything else in the world, get Obama.
Issa is too partisan for his own and the country’s good.
While the scandals don’t help Obama, at all, it likely will be just another blip in the road, like the 10+ scandals that Bush faced, from Abu Ghraib, to starting the Iraq War, to allowing 9-11 to happen despite adequate warning, to outing a CIA agent named Valerie Plane for political revenge and, my personal favorite, the Mineral Management Service Scandal where the agency in charge of regulating oil companies was having huge sex parties and snorting crystal meth off of toaster ovens with the very oil company executives they were supposed to regulate, which makes the whole charges of graft story so much more interesting than the usual bribery scandal.
The Bureaucracy is large and, like the private sector, eventually someone somewhere will do something stupid (ask Rupert Murdoch, who’s own son almost got them both thrown in jail), sometimes, in Bush’s case, it can be someone in your own office. Yet he didn’t go down, and neither will Obama if not for any of the reasons mentioned, for one reason above all else:
People simply aren’t paying any attention! They don’t understand politics and they understand political scandals. The Beltway pundits and junkies like us may follow this crap, but most of America has better things to worry about.
Just yesterday I was talking to someone who brought up the IRS scandal who didn’t understand the scandal or politics at all. His conclusion was to blame the Republicans!
That is why so many scandals from Iran-Contra to Tom Delay’s GOPAC scandal go largely misunderstood. Why would three “scandals” that aren’t even worthy of the, now mandatory for any scandal “gate” addition, be any different?
While anything can happen and the scandal could bust wide open on some crazy wild evidence tomorrow that implicates everyone in the Oval Office, the simple and most likely answer to that question is that it won’t.
Oh yeah, the issues, remember those?
As I told a Republican I was arguing with the other day, the scandals will pass, as nothing new comes to the fore and more interesting things happen that will easily eclipse the GOP’s latest Whining Point (TM). It happens all the time when a bully suddenly becomes the victim, people have a hard time feeling sympathy for them and quickly move on.
A new poll released today proves it with Obama’s approval rating actually up from a few months ago, at a safe 53%!
It really goes to show that despite how much the two sides do battle, most of the country is working too hard to keep their heads above water to really care. They think all these phony scandals just waste time as the real work of governing gets tabled.
I couldn’t agree more myself!