Actual Irreconcilable Differences

Divorce became easier with the introduction of the concept of irreconcilable differences – California enacted America’s first purely no-fault divorce law in 1969 by adding that to its divorce petition form. No one has to explain anything. No one has to prove anything. Things just didn’t work out. The whole thing had been a mistake. Oops. Other states use the terms like irremediable breakdown or irretrievable breakdown or incompatibility, but it’s the same sort of thing. The courts won’t play marriage counselor. Saving the marriage is not the government’s job, although some states impose a waiting period or require a formal mutual-consent agreement. All that’s left after that is fighting over child support and custody, if that’s the case, and the bitter fight over who gets what stuff. Out here there was a nasty fight over who would get the massive profits from selling the Los Angeles Dodgers to Magic Johnson and his friends – a long court battle over what was community property and what was not – but most fights over which party gets what are more mundane. The marriage didn’t work. Each party tries to recover as much of what was once legally shared, fifty-fifty, by arguing that this or that really always belonged to them and it should still be theirs, damn it. It’s never pretty. It’s even uglier when the differences, never even explained, are absolutely irreconcilable.

That’s where America finds itself now too. It’s divorce time. The left and right have never been further apart, and do have irreconcilable differences – the time for dialog and compromise is long gone. Henry Clay – the Great Compromiser who headed off the Civil War at least twice – is long gone. Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill no longer sip scotch together in the evenings, at least in this world. What Newt Gingrich started when he was Speaker of the House, and what the Tea Party crowd has perfected, was a statement of irreconcilable differences. What they believe is simply incompatible with what Democrats believe, and these days on most issues with what the majority of the country believes, If America is an uneasy marriage between competing ideas of what should be done then this marriage cannot be saved. There are irreconcilable differences and it’s time to split up the stuff, and they want their country back. They even say just that, which makes politics these days a divorce proceeding. Grab what you can and say it was always yours in the first place.

The Obama scandals, such as they are, only make this worse. There was the massive Benghazi cover-up, where Obama called it an act of terrorism and not a terrorist act, and the IRS scandal, where the IRS seemed to be picking on Tea Party organizations that had claimed they weren’t political at all, and the Associated Press scandal, where, on May 10, the Associated Press received a letter from the Department of Justice informing them that the government had acquired two months of their telephone records, causing quite an uproar. There were scattered calls for Obama’s impeachment, although Andrew Sullivan pointed out the obvious:

Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?

So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.

It doesn’t matter. One doesn’t have to explain the irreconcilable differences. They just are – this guy is a jerk – and now they have him dead to rights, or something. They’ll get their country back now, if they play their cards right, but divorce court isn’t that easy. The problem is the latest CNN poll:

President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady… According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president’s approval rating was at 51% in CNN’s last poll, which was conducted in early April.

Yes, Obama’s approval ratings went up, not down, in spite of the scandals:

More than seven in 10 in the CNN poll say that the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of tea party and other conservative groups that were applying for tax exempt status was unacceptable… But more than six in 10 say that the president’s statements about the IRS scandal are completely or mostly true, with 35% not agreeing with Obama’s characterizations. And 55% say that IRS acted on its own, with 37% saying that White House ordered the IRS to target tea party and other conservative groups.

None of this surprises Andrew Sullivan:

The tone of the CNN piece seems to find this data surprising. It isn’t. It simply reflects the fact that no real connection has been directly made between these scandals and the president. And, I’d say, he’s buoyed somewhat because the economy here is better than any in Europe – and less vulnerable than Japan’s current Keynesian jolt – and because he’s still a broadly liked president. In the post-re-election lull, the press corps needed a storyline, rather than just three stories. But sometimes the line falls apart for lack of evidence (at least among the non-GOP base).

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog is less measured:

Let’s start with the IRS. The message of the right is that Evil All-Powerful Obama used his Nixonian superpowers to crush opposition. But this is a guy who can barely manage to deal out a love tap to his opposition – yeah, he won reelection, but he lost on the sequester and he couldn’t even get approval in the one house of Congress his party controls for a gun control proposal with 90% national support. You and I know his problems with Congress are the result of serious flaws in our system – the filibuster in the Senate, gerrymandering of House districts, an opposition party determined to nullify yet another election, a press that never stops trying to blame both sides equally. But the general public just sees a president who’s not particularly powerful – and can’t square that with the notion of an all-powerful partisan crushing his enemies.

Wingnuts, of course, have no problem holding these two completely contradictory notions in their head simultaneously. That’s just their nature. Obama is horrible in every conceivable way, even in ways that cancel each other out.

Of course one must not forget Benghazi, as CNN also reports this:

Only 42% of the public is satisfied with how the Obama administration has handled the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, which left the US ambassador to that country and three other Americans dead. Fifty-three percent say they are dissatisfied. But those numbers are virtually unchanged from November… 59% now say that the US government could have prevented the attack in Benghazi, up 11 points from last November.

Steve M:

The one argument wingnuts are possibly getting across to the general public is the notion that the four dead in Benghazi could have been saved – note the uptick in the number of people who believe that. But that jibes with the center’s sense of Obama as a guy who often doesn’t get done what he sets out to do. The public doesn’t think he wanted the Benghazi attackers to succeed – only idiot wingnuts would believe that of the guy who ordered bin Laden killed and who sends out all those drones. The public just thinks his administration failed there, and maybe tweaked the narrative at first to downplay the errors made. The non-wingnut population doesn’t see a massive cover-up because Obama doesn’t seem like a powerful evildoer to them. He just seems like a guy with generally good intentions who frequently falls short.

In short, the argument over community property, over who gets to keep America after the divorce, isn’t going well for them, and Digby (Heather Parton) sees it this way:

It’s very important that everyone keep their eye on the prize which is the implication that the White House was petrified of being found out to be the national security blunderers they really are.

I’m sure this is a banal observation but I’ll make it anyway since it’s an important factor in understanding why people drift to modern conservatism: it’s the right that is afraid – of losing its reputation as the military leaders of American culture. It is, after all, at the center of their emotional appeal. That’s why this bizarre Benghazi obsession remains at the center of the Fox News cycle and why they are so excited about it. In their minds, it washes away any Democratic advantage from the killing of bin Laden and puts the Democrats back in the coward corner where they rightfully belong.

They have a deep psychological need to see themselves as the “manly party” protecting the babies from the bad guys. Sure, they hate taxes and love traditional values. These are very important pieces of their philosophy. But at the heart of their self-image is the idea that they are the warriors. If you look at the past 50 years of conservative thought, it’s that which animates their engagement and it’s that which they need to get back in order to feel confident again.

And it all fits together:

The IRS thing speaks specifically to the paranoid, small government, anti-tax, Obamacare hating part of the Republican Party. That part overlaps with the larger macho, military-worshiping, imperial part of the GOP. (Unfortunately, that part also overlaps a big part of the Democratic Party as well …) It’s been neglected since Bush screwed the pooch with Iraq. But they aren’t going to give it up. It’s a major piece of their identity.

They want to save that major piece of the identity in the divorce settlement, but it won’t be easy, and the blogger BooMan frames that problem this way:

If last week was the president’s worst week in office the polls show absolutely no indication of it. Perhaps that is because the president isn’t supposed to interfere in criminal investigations or direct the IRS’s decision-making process on tax-exempt applications. CNN seems somewhat baffled by the results of their polling, which join Gallup in showing a slight uptick in the president’s numbers. But it shouldn’t be that surprising. A majority of the people reelected the president and all they’ve seen since is stupid opposition and stupid reporting.

If this is the worst the media and the Republicans can do, perhaps last week was their worst week of this presidency?

It’s hard to say, but it’s easy to see the irreconcilable differences here. That’s what fascinates the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza:

In one America, the events of the past 10 days have exposed the true colors of President Obama and his administration. From edited talking points about the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, to the secret seizure of phone records of Associated Press reporters to the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups, a single message has emerged: This is the inevitable result of government run amok.

In the other America, this is all much ado over nothing. The death of four Americans at the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi was a tragedy, nothing more. The Justice Department acted legally. And the IRS officials who acted wrongly did so of their own accord and had absolutely no contact with President Obama or senior officials in his administration. …

While there has been some cross-party agreement over the past week – particularly on the IRS where many Democratic members of Congress have voiced their concern with how the agency acted – the general rule of Washington still held: How you think about things depends almost entirely on the party with which you align yourself.

This marriage cannot be saved:

The investigation into what happened in Benghazi is either a “political sideshow,” as Obama said, or a look into the “most egregious cover-up in American history,” according to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla). The series of congressional hearings dedicated to the IRS’s targeting of groups with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names are potentially “partisan fishing expeditions designed to distract from the real issues at hand,” in the words of White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, or a chance to explore the “culture of intimidation” in the Obama administration, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said.

The gap between how the two parties view the world can’t simply be explained away by the exaggerations inherent in political rhetoric. Yes, the principals in both parties are doing their best to highlight the pieces of each story that cast them in the best light and their political opponents in the worst. Nothing new there. But the disagreement goes deeper than that. It’s a belief that the other won’t, and can’t, be right and that facts are things that can be manipulated – or at least interpreted – to achieve a desired end.

The gulf is well illustrated by exit polls over the last few elections. Obama won 92 percent of Democratic voters and just six percent of Republicans in 2012. Four years earlier, he won 89 percent of Democrats and nine percent of Republicans. In 2004, George W. Bush claimed 93 percent of the Republican vote and 11 percent of the Democratic vote. …

Combine the extreme partisanship with a series of politically motivated re-drawings of Congressional district lines over the past few decades and you get two political parties who are largely preaching to their own base – with almost zero political motivation to do anything else. The ends of the political spectrum grow more populated, the middle less so. And nothing gets done – and people lose faith that government can do anything. (Just eight percent of people in the new CNN poll expressed a “great deal” of confidence in the people who run our government.)

The situation is impossible, so of course Cillizza says Obama needs to fix it right now:

Obama needs to find a way to speak to both Americas in a way he hasn’t done so far in his presidency. Economic stimulus and health care – the two big accomplishments of his first term 0 passed on partisan lines. The attempt to change gun laws in his second term failed largely on those same lines.

Obama’s rapid ascent up the political ladder was defined by bridging what were thought to be unbridgeable gaps. The question now is whether there is a ladder big enough to bridge the divide between our two opposing political Americas.

That question has already been answered. The divorce was approved long ago and now it’s just dividing up the stuff, and as for that, Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer and host of Behind the News covered that back in 2010:

The bourgeoisie launched a successful war on a troublesome working class in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That assault – wage-cutting, speedup, deregulation, outsourcing, union-busting, cutbacks in the welfare state, all the familiar stuff gathered under the name of neoliberalism – created a problem for a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption both to maintain aggregate demand and to secure its political legitimacy. Why put up with the volatility and tsurris [Yiddish for trouble or agitation] of American life if there’s no promise of plentiful gadgetry and upward mobility? So the answer was to counter the downdraft of falling wages with rising borrowing, via credit cards and mortgages. That model seemed to hit a wall in the recent economic crisis, but there’s no real recognition of that fact, and no new model for accumulation.

What we got instead, according to Paul Buchheit, is our current Ayn Ryan economy:

Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged” fantasizes a world in which anti-government citizens reject taxes and regulations, and “stop the motor” by withdrawing themselves from the system of production. In a perverse twist on the writer’s theme the prediction is coming true. But instead of productive people rejecting taxes, rejected taxes are shutting down productive people.

Perhaps Ayn Rand never anticipated the impact of unregulated greed on a productive middle class. Perhaps she never understood the fairness of tax money for public research and infrastructure and security, all of which have contributed to the success of big business. She must have known about the inequality of the pre-Depression years. But she couldn’t have foreseen the concurrent rise in technology and globalization that allowed inequality to surge again, more quickly, in a manner that threatens to put the greediest offenders out of our reach.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy suggests that average working people are “takers.” In reality, those in the best position to make money take all they can get, with no scruples about their working-class victims, because taking, in the minds of the rich, serves as a model for success.

Consider the facts:

In the past 20 years, corporate profits have quadrupled while the corporate tax percent has dropped by half. The payroll tax, paid by workers, has doubled.

In effect, corporations have decided to let middle-class workers pay for national investments that have largely benefited businesses over the years. The greater part of basic research, especially for technology and health care, has been conducted with government money. Even today 60% of university research is government-supported. Corporations use highways and shipping lanes and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, and communications towers and satellites to conduct online business.

Yet as corporate profits surge and taxes plummet, our infrastructure is deteriorating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that $3.63 trillion is needed over the next seven years to make the necessary repairs.

This is followed by a lot of tax data and ends with no real Ayn Rand hero in sight:

Only 3 percent of the CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals were entrepreneurs in 2005, even though they made up about 60 percent of the richest 0.1% of Americans. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. Job creators come from the middle class.

So if the super-rich are not holding the world on their shoulders, what do they do with their money? According to both MarketWatch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate.

They’re divorced from the rest of us, and from everyone else. But then this American marriage, between total individual freedom and community effort for the common good, was never going to work. The differences, never really explained, were absolutely irreconcilable from the start. So the divorce finally happened when Obama was elected the first time, and now with these scandals that aren’t really major scandals at all, we’ve come to the division of community property, where it always gets ugly. The next few years won’t be fun.

Waiting for the Iceberg

Another quiet Friday evening on this quiet tree-lined street here in Hollywood, which is the way a week of turmoil should end – with the local classical station finally playing serene music again, after a week of only cheery fund-raising talk about music. It’s as if things are returning to normal, but then there was that brief string quartet by Puccini. He wrote string quartets too? Who knew? Life is full of pleasant surprises.

Unfortunately it’s also full of unpleasant surprises, because this was the end of National Scandal Week in Washington, perhaps the first of many, and scandals are all about surprises. Scandals are all about truth revealed – Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster with her bare hands, and Bill Clinton had been a major drug dealer back in Arkansas. No? Sometimes the truth that’s revealed isn’t exactly the truth. It takes some quiet-time to sort things out. There was the massive Benghazi cover-up, where Obama called it an act of terrorism and not a terrorist act, and the IRS scandal, where the IRS seemed to be picking on Tea Party organizations that had claimed they weren’t political at all, and the Associated Press scandal, where, on May 10, the Associated Press received a letter from the Department of Justice informing them that the government had acquired two months of their telephone records, causing quite an uproar.

All day Friday it was that House panel ripping into the former acting IRS Commissioner Steve Miller – who had already resigned and had little new to say. There were a lot of nasty exchanges, but no one learned much of anything. There were no surprises. It was political theater, for political junkies, although if you lean Republican, it might have been quite satisfying even if there was no real news there. The proper things were said about how everyone is out to get them and big government, or the whole concept of government, is evil. That’s fine, but probably none of this scandal had been kitchen-table talk across America. Some folks in the IRS screwed up. It can be fixed. Republicans have been saying there’s much more to this – this is only the tip of the iceberg – but most of America seems fine with waiting for the full iceberg, if there is one. Republicans have a bad track record when it comes to producing that iceberg. This might be an ice cube bobbing in the water. Here it may take some quiet-time to sort things out, not that there will be much of that.

Slate’s Jacob Weisberg explains why:

Washington’s need for periodic scandal is almost biological. For legislators, it’s an opportunity to strut on the national stage. For the party out of power, it is politics by other means. For the press, it’s an escape from the boredom and frustration of a second term. Scandal means a break in the routine, a thrilling emergency. At some level, the whole political class loves it.

Of course he’s not saying scandals are never real:

Watergate was real. The Whitewater affair was not real but managed to be quite damaging to the Clinton administration anyway. Iran-Contra was real, but not damaging enough to turn Republicans out of office in 1988. Plamegate, which began with the question of who leaked the name of a clandestine CIA agent to a reporter, wasn’t real or damaging, though it did result in Dick Cheney and George W. Bush not speaking anymore.

The problem is that there are criteria for real scandals, and this one just won’t do at all:

What a scandal needs to count as real is an underlying crime. What it needs to be damaging is a strong story line. The Benghazi business falls short on both counts. This investigation posits that the top administration officials conspired to hide the truth about the September attack on an American consulate that resulted in the death of four diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Republican accusations about Benghazi derailed the nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

The charge against Rice was essentially that she delivered distorted political spin by calling the attacks spontaneous riots rather than a planned act of terrorism – the theory being that before the 2012 election, the Obama administration didn’t want to tarnish its success against al-Qaida. It emerged yesterday that Rice’s much-parsed Sunday television talking points were prepared not by the State Department but by the more politically independent CIA.

There was no iceberg, only claims of one:

In less tendentious perspective, Benghazi was a tragedy, a chain of errors that left a diplomatic outpost vulnerable. Even clearer is the political motivation behind that investigation, which is to embarrass Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination. When Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina fulminates that Benghazi is “every bit as damaging as Watergate,” the most accurate translation is, “I am facing a Republican primary challenge.” Last week, Graham survived that challenge and may now begin to calm down.

Lindsey Graham should calm down, because there’s something else going on, an iceberg of a different sort. Earlier there was ABC News’ Jonathan Karl with his big scoop – the amazing revelation of the White House’s direct role in twelve revisions to the Benghazi talking points, all made to make Obama and Hillary Clinton look competent just before the last election. The only problem was CNN’s Jake Tapper – his big scoop was that what the emails actually said wasn’t what ABC News had reported. Someone had lied to Karl, whose report implied that he was quoting actual emails between the State Department, the CIA, and the White House. Nope, they were actually summaries written by Republican congressional staffers who were allowed to read and take notes on the emails earlier this year. Their notes were not transcripts. ABC News had been burned – and then the White House released a hundred pages of the actual emails, to prove it. The whole sad story is covered in excruciating detail at Talking Points Memo – line by line and phrase by phrase if you like that sort of thing.

That turns one of the three scandals on its head. The Atlantic Wire summarizes who the bad guys really are in this scandal:

On February 15, the general counsel for the national intelligence director’s office briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee, leadership, and staff on the emails, according to the Associated Press. On March 19, there was a similar briefing in the House. Karl reports that included the members of the House Intelligence Committee, their staff, and a senior aide to Speaker John Boehner. (Boehner was invited, but sent an aide instead.) That’s a lot of people, though a lot less than all Republicans on Capitol Hill. It was 12 senators, plus the staffers who attended the meetings, and 12 representatives, plus Boehner’s aide.

And we can probably narrow the source even further, to just the House. A report by five House Republican committeemen made claims that seem based on the inaccurate summaries of the emails.

The House Republicans were messing with us all, which is a different iceberg entirely. They were also messing with ABC News, an issue which Michael Tomasky explores:

We know now that someone, shall we say, inaccurately described a key Benghazi-related email to Jonathan Karl of ABC. And that Karl didn’t represent his findings in a completely transparent way last week. I’m not going to go down deep into the weeds of all the details here. … I’ll just remind you of the context.

Remember, Karl’s scoop last week, timed to the testimony of the three consular aides, set off an earthquake. It appeared to show that the administration was chiefly concerned with how the State Department would look, and with doctoring the talking points to minimize political damage. That’s pretty damning stuff. It’s why a number of commentators who had theretofore said Benghazi was nothing was now something. It’s why a lot of people said Jay Carney had lied about the talking points.

But now it turns out, beyond argument, that Karl didn’t see the emails, and that portions were read to him and were fabricated. Karl put those fabrications inside quote marks.

That makes this a journalism scandal, and Jonathan Karl has a problem:

He trusted a source, and that source fucked him. What should he and ABC do? Do you stand by sources who you know lied to you? There are certain circumstances when “burning” a source is considered permissible. Suppose you were a journalist and a source told you someone had committed a felony but that person had not. Do you have to protect that source? No.

ABC News, if you ask me, has had a worse week than Obama, not that as many people are paying attention. But consider. CNN and Jake Tapper got the actual emails, proving beyond a doubt that ABC and Karl were wrong.

It only got worse, as Tomasky links to something extraordinary – on CBS, Scott Pelley and Major Garrett basically calling their ABC colleagues liars – which may be bad form, but the news is a competitive business.

Still, Tomasky returns to what actually matters:

The bigger issue here of course is not a media issue, but what in fact happened. What the emails show is awfully boring and un-juicy. They show government employees trying to be careful about jumping to conclusions – not in an attempt to cover ass, but so as not to prejudice an ongoing investigation. Victoria Nuland [of the State Department] didn’t want members of Congress to be out there blaming Ansar al-Sharia for the attack not out of any concern for Hillary Clinton, but for the basic reason that the investigation wasn’t complete and there was no proof of the group’s involvement.

There’s no scandal here:

The GOP’s main political charge here is that the administration covered up Benghazi because it was an election year. But on September 20, the president’s official mouthpiece (Carney) acknowledged that it was a terrorist attack, so Republicans had about 46 days in which to make political hay of that admission. Nobody hid anything.

Yes, mistakes were made at State – and remember, three people did lose their jobs. The record up to today suggests that the government is a good measure more trustworthy than ABC News – and, don’t forget, than whoever it was (surely a GOP source of some kind) who lied to Karl in the first place.

That’s a new scandal, not the original one – it’s a different iceberg entirely. Some Republican aide may be fired over this – that very thing has happened before – and ABC News will sooner or later have to say something, Life is full of surprises.

As for the IRS scandal, Jacob Weisberg offers this:

What actually seems to have happened is this: In 2010, a spate of conservative groups was applying for tax-exempt status. This designation is available to organizations whose main activity is not political, so most of the groups were running a kind of scam by asking for it. Low-level employees in a Cincinnati field office thought they could create a shortcut by watching out for red-flag political terms like “patriots” and “9/12″ on the applications. The IRS inspector general has persuasively concluded that this was an instance of bureaucratic overzealousness meeting a vague standard, not politically motivated, and not criminal.

But this kind of scandal can succeed even where it fails the reality test, thanks to bipartisan cowardice. No politician wants to defend the IRS. So President Obama has done his best to appear furious about what happened, and the Justice Department has announced a criminal investigation, and the Treasury has forced the IRS acting commissioner, who may or may not have done anything wrong, to resign.

Feeding the wolves in this way is a bad idea; they know where their next meal is to be had. As the fever takes hold, any additional controversy – such as the Justice Department’s subpoena of Associated Press phone records in pursuit of a leak – is accorded scandal status. The administration is officially “beset” and “besieged.”

That seems to be the case:

On Thursday, during a joint press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, Obama signaled to two Marines and asked them to protect him and his guest from the rain.

“I am going to go ahead and ask folks – why don’t we get a couple of Marines, they’re going to look good next to us. Just because I’ve got a change of suits, but I don’t know about our prime minister.” Gesturing to the unprotected press, he added, “You guys, I’m sorry about…”

That was a bad move, as male Marines are not allowed to use umbrellas while in uniform, and the reaction was immediate:

The conservative Daily Caller wrote up the incident with the headline, “Obama breaches Marine umbrella protocol.”

“Mr. President, when it rains it pours, but most Americans hold their own umbrellas,” former Alaska governor Sarah Palin tweeted.

“These guys aren’t valets,” one conservative blogger wrote, though he also guessed that previous presidents had done the same thing “because the optics are sufficiently bad that Team O wouldn’t have tried it without precedent to cite in its defense.”

There were also the internet comments like these:

Just another occasion where Obama shows his “superiority” to any and everyone around him! Shameful!

Just another example of the illegitimate Kenyan illegal alien’s arrogance, ignorance, and contempt for the military – and the Marine Corps in particular.

Next they’ll be carrying shopping bags for Michelle as she strolls ‘Miracle Mile’ looking for a bargain.

I would roll that umbrella up and shove it where the sun don’t shine. Kenyan Fraud!

Yes, it was the Great Umbrella Scandal. Someone really does need some quiet-time to sort things out. The Marines weren’t upset at all. That wasn’t the tip of any iceberg.

These excitable people may have a point with the IRS scandal however, but David Weigel explains, the iceberg, of which they see the tip, isn’t quite what they think:

In theory, the civil-servant structure should make an organization less prone to an eruption of bias or of hive-mind behavior. But that’s not how it works. Liberals are more likely to enter the civil service, and to stick to it, than conservatives are. And why not? Conservatives want to shrink the size of government; Republicans have negotiated deals federally, and in the states, that slashed or froze the size of the bureaucracies.

Weigel’s point is that the public sector is no place for a libertarian:

Every single number proves this. Tim Carney has collected the campaign finance figures for IRS employees nationally and in the Cincinnati office. In the past three election cycles, IRS workers donated $247,000 to Democrats and $145,000 to Republicans. In Ohio, the number was skewed even further – 75 percent to Democrats. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, around 40 percent of unionized federal employees identified as Democrats; only 27 percent identified as Republicans. State and local government employees are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

If you check the timing of that poll, you realize something about how obvious this all is. Gallup went into the field to quiz bureaucrats because Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was rolling back collective bargaining rights for state employees. Doing so, as Republicans knew, would weaken a constituency that was inclined to vote for Democrats after filling their campaign accounts.

In short, these guys are in government because they believe in government. What did the Tea Party Crowd expect?

Weigel is careful to say that’s not an excuse for what they did, but it is an explanation:

In the Inspector General’s report, you encounter bureaucrats presented with a challenge – “some organizations were classified as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations but operated like political organizations” – and responded by drafting a “Be on the Look-Out” (or BOLO) memo with some anthropological advice about conservatives. Any application with “Tea Party” or “Patriots,” or “9/12 Project” in the name was flagged, as was referring to “government spending, government debt or taxes.” …

Based on what we know about the sort of people who aspire to become IRS commissioners, how much direct knowledge did they probably have about the conservative movement? How much did they fear it? So far in this story, Republicans have raced to find answers tying low-level IRS behavior to directives from the Obama administration, or table-pounding from Democrats who were worried about 501s like American Crossroads or Americans for Prosperity. But you don’t need to make that leap to explain why civil servants working for a tax-collection agency – the very heart of the Leviathan – might have been extra-skeptical of conservative groups.

That would mean that if the Republicans insist that heads should roll – that there be mass firings – then those who apply for the now-vacant positions will be exactly the same sort of folks, those who believe in government. Their kind of folks won’t apply – they hate the work itself. Actually they hate that such work even exists. That also means there really were no directives from the Obama administration in this whole mess. This happened spontaneously and inevitably. The Republicans see the tip of an iceberg they really don’t understand at all – and the idea that they seek tax breaks from the government they think should be shrunk so small it can finally be drown in the bathtub is more than ironic. Perhaps the actual thing that scandalizes them is that some people still think government is useful.

It doesn’t matter. This is only the tip of the iceberg? Most folks would just as soon wait for the iceberg itself:

A majority of Americans are following both the controversy over the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi and the brewing IRS scandal – but at levels below historic averages, according to a new poll.

Fifty-four percent said they are closely following the story of how the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups, according to the Gallup survey on Thursday, and 53 percent are closely following Benghazi. For both stories, 22 percent were following “not too closely” and 24 weren’t following at all.

“The level of attention being paid to each is below the average 60 percent of Americans who have closely followed more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured over the past several decades,” Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the poll.

Of course this is what one would expect:

Republicans are more likely to be paying attention to both controversies. Two-thirds of the GOP says they are following both scandals. Only 40 percent of Democrats are following the IRS story, with 45 percent keeping a close eye on Benghazi.

While 74 percent of Americans believe the IRS scandal should be investigated and 79 percent said the same of Benghazi, there are large partisan differences. Seventy-six percent of Republicans “strongly agree” Benghazi should be probed, compared to only 27 percent of Democrats.

It may have been National Scandal Week in Washington, but not elsewhere. Elsewhere it was a quiet evening at the end of a week of far too much nonsense. But Puccini helps.

Puritan Politics

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It’s a wonder I can think at all,
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none,
I can read the writing on the wall…

That’s from Paul Simon’s song Kodachrome – released in May of 1973 and not the sort of thing you want running through your head when you’re about to become a high school English teacher. Or maybe it was just the thing. It was easy to remember how stultifying high school English was in the early sixties. There was The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne showing how the Puritans were hopeless and hypocritical and really mean people, out to suppress what really couldn’t be suppressed. That’s fine, but the agonies of guilt are boring, and talk of the nature of sin even more so. Then there was The Crucible – Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem Witch Trials, or, if you like, about the McCarthy Hearings. Yes, there were big issues – something about groupthink and mass hysteria, but Tina Fey covered much of the same ground in her 2004 movie Mean Girls – and that was a comedy. Still, that was the curriculum, and it was dismal. Sure, think back on all the crap you learned in high school – you learned that there are a lot of self-righteous people in the world making things miserable for everyone else. So what? Teenagers already know that – and sin and redemption are what adults talk about, which is what makes them so absurd. So it would be no Hawthorne and Miller for the kids in the late seventies. Great Expectations and Hamlet would do just fine – something they could relate to, as they say.

That may have been a mistake. If you want to understand America you need to understand its prissy holier-than-thou Puritan heritage. Yes, people who think that all of life is a morality play are infinitely irritating, but they’re still with us. There’s Rick Santorum and just about everyone on the evangelical right – the social conservatives. Mitt Romney also liked to say that eliminating the federal deficit was a moral issue, as it is immoral to force our grandkids to pay off the massive debt from our profligate and selfish spending – assuming the economy never grows again of course. That was a Puritan argument about sin, perhaps, but it never gained much traction. It was just a throwaway line for the remaining hard-ass Puritans among us, the holier-than-thou Tea Party crowd and those who like to talk about that angry Jesus who hated abortion and Obamacare and taxing the very wealthy a bit more in hard times, and who wanted us to go to war everywhere, right now.

There’s nothing new here. That’s part of what we are as a nation, but that seventeenth-century Puritanism is only part of the story. Back in high school there was usually a course in American Government or Civics or whatever, where you learned about what happened here in the following century. The Age of Reason gave us the Enlightenment – the idea that most of life could be figured out empirically. There was no need to bring God into mundane things, like the operation of the government, and thus God was excluded from the Constitution – there would be no religious test for office and the government would never do anything that even hinted at establishing any particular religion. The Constitution was the answer to Puritanism. Talk all you want about God and sin and all the rest, but do that elsewhere. We can reason out, all on our own, how best to govern ourselves.

The neo-Puritans never liked that much and do twist themselves into knots claiming the Constitution is really based on the Bible, and all that stuff about the separation of church and state isn’t really there, in spite of what the text says. Antonin Scalia says just that and so does Michele Bachmann – which is a bit of an attack on reason as a tool for figuring out the world. Then there was that woman on Fox News attacking reason directly:

You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history are what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.

The Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave us the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. That’s the whole concept behind all of it – we, the people, can work out what’s best to do – but she’s the CEO of Concerned Women for America and was upset that Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx had proclaimed May 2, 2013, as a Day of Reason – when everyone knew that was the National Day of Prayer, damn it. The whole crew at Fox and Friends nodded in agreement, a little sadly. Puritans do that when anyone talks about reason. It was just another day on Fox News, but then it was also just another day in America.

That’s odd. It seems that what you learned in high school wasn’t crap. In English class you learned about how we are, at heart, prissy Puritans, for better or worse, and in American Government you learned that we stepped away from that, for a time – and we never resolved the conflict between the two. That basic conflict plays out every day in our politics – the holier-than-thou party wants to talk about good and evil and sin and God, and the empirical party wants to talk about what policies are best for the greatest number of us, given the available facts. They talk about God in church, but at present the neo-Puritan party is obsessed with the Obama scandals – Benghazi and the IRS picking on the Tea Party and the Department of Justice tracking Associated Press telephone records trying to find who leaked secret stuff and screwed up our efforts against al-Qaeda – none of which has a damned thing to do about policy.

It’s a morality play, and it’s not going well. See Ezra Klein explaining how the scandals are falling apart – there’s nothing much there. And see Chris Cillizza on how Republican consultants are telling every Republican in sight to back down – this is going to blow up in their faces. But the pull is irresistible. It has to be a morality play, about the biggest scandals ever, and Andrew Sullivan hammers Peggy Noonan with this:

Has this president broken the law, lied under oath, or authorized war crimes? Has he traded arms for hostages with Iran? Has he knowingly sent his cabinet out to tell lies about his sex life? Has he sat by idly as an American city was destroyed by a hurricane? Has he started a war with no planning for an occupation? Has he started a war based on a lie, and destroyed the US’ credibility and moral standing while he was at it, leaving nothing but a smoldering and now rekindled civil sectarian war?

So far as I can tell, this president has done nothing illegal, unethical or even wrong.

Ah well, maybe he should wear a scarlet letter. That might satisfy them.

As for that giant immoral federal deficit, which we are passing off to our poor little grandchild, yet to be born, Daniel Gross explains that’s not going well either:

On Tuesday, Washington was consumed with a series of scandals, non-scandals, and tail-eating – Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service, the AP. So much so that the biggest policy and political story of the day was largely ignored. You could search in vain on Politico’s front page for articles about the Congressional Budget Office’s bombshell report that the fiscal 2013 deficit would come in at $642 billion – $200 billion smaller than its February estimate, and down a stunning $447 billion, or 41 percent, from last year.

This is a big deal, and should change everything:

For much of the past two years, deficits, debts, revenues, and spending were all elite Washington (and New York) wanted to talk about. Endless pixels were spilled on the maneuverings surrounding the debt-limit negotiations, the various commissions and efforts to forge a grand bargain, the approach of the fiscal cliff, and the brutal logic of the Sequester. Because debt, budget, and spending issues were one of the few cudgels Republicans could wield against Obama, attention was paid 24-7. But the interest was always more in process and politics than policy: Who would be the vital dealmaker? Would we have a grand bargain to raise some taxes and rein in the growth of Medicare and Social Security? Could the establishment save America from becoming the next Greece?

As we’ve been noting, a funny thing has happened on the way to America’s becoming the next Greece. Even as Washington failed – again, and again, and again – to strike a grand bargain or engage in rational policymaking, there has been immense, unprecedented progress in reducing the short-term deficit. It turns out the miracle cures for deficits aren’t grand bargains. Rather, the cures are sustained growth and willingness to tax income and investments at higher rates. And the miracle cure for reducing the growth rate of entitlements may well be the unipartisan Affordable Care Act, not some bipartisan commission.

The economy is recovering – there’s more tax revenue – and Obamacare is doing what Obama said it would do – slowing the growth of healthcare costs:

Through the first seven months of fiscal 2012, which started last October, revenues are up 16 percent from the year before, while spending is off about two percent. Several factors are at work. More people are working, at slightly higher wages, and are paying higher payroll taxes. Rich people, who took huge capital gains and dividend payments in late 2012 in anticipation of higher taxes, were forced to pay taxes on that income in the first few months of 2013. Spending is falling, thanks in part to the Sequester, and thanks in part to lower spending on defense and unemployment benefits. And so in the first seven months of the fiscal year, the deficit came in at $489 billion, off about 31 percent from the first seven months of fiscal 2012. As of last week, it was looking like the deficit for the full fiscal year might come in at about $800 billion. That would represent fantastic progress.

But wait, said the CBO on Tuesday. There’s more! Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-owned mortgage agencies, have been minting money and turning it over to Treasury. Tax revenues are continuing to rise, and spending is muted. So when CBO updated projections for this fiscal year and the next 10 fiscal years on Tuesday, it said the fiscal 2013 deficit would come in at $642 billion – or about 4 percent of GDP. That’s astonishing, especially given that in fiscal 2009 the deficit was $1.4 trillion, or more than 10 percent of GDP. Like I said, this is the Golden Age of Deficit Reduction.

The New York Times reviews all the studies on healthcare costs dropping, but no one seems to have noticed any of this, as none of this has a thing to do with big issues of good and evil. It’s just basic economics, so Gross adds this:

The press prefers covering dysfunction and controversy to covering policy. For much of the last two years, fiscal issues were dangerous, all-consuming controversies. The inability of Washington to create a rational budget deal was an obvious sign of dysfunction. But with the fiscal cliff behind us, the Republicans reluctant to play chicken with the debt limit and the deficit melting away, fiscal issues aren’t nearly as controversial.

That doesn’t mean the numbers should be ignored. If a grand bargain had been achieved, and CBO was reporting these sharply lower numbers on short-term and long-term deficits, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson would be the grand marshals of a ticker-tape parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. The irony is that we have achieved a good chunk of the professed goals of the professional deficit hawks and the Republicans – just without their active participation.

Yes, but Jonathan Chait notes this:

The general conservative response to date has involved ignoring the trend, or perhaps dismissing it as a temporary, recession-induced dip likely to reverse itself. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial page offered up what may be the new conservative fallback position: Okay, healthcare costs are slowing down, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the huge new health-care reform law. “It increasingly looks as if ObamaCare passed amid a national correction in the health markets,” the Journal now asserts, “that no one in Congress or the White House understood.” It’s another one of those huge, crazy coincidences!

They prefer coincidence to reason:

Of course, it’s not just that the Journal didn’t predict the health-care cost slowdown. The Journal insisted it couldn’t possibly happen. Indeed, it insisted that Obamacare would destroy – was already destroying – any possible hope for a health-care cost correction, and would instead necessarily lead to a massive increase in healthcare inflation.

It seems they were wrong. Reject reason and that does happen now and then, and Kevin Drum chimes in:

The medium-term national debt has stabilized. Hooray!

You might still not be happy about this. Maybe you won’t be happy until debt drops back down to Carter-era levels. That’s fine. It’s a free country, after all. But for the next decade, at least, the trendlines are no longer shooting upward, and if the economy continues to improve the trendlines will look even better. So no more screaming about how the country is going bankrupt, okay?

Drum underestimates Puritans’ ongoing need for self-righteous screaming, or the milder form, sermons with moral stories. They are an austere bunch, and in the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman tries to explain the Puritan psychology that leads them to believe that austerity is the cure for economic recessions:

Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning.

When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it – and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process… By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play – that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that “we have magneto trouble” – i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem.

Krugman has been beating this same drum for quite some time, but here he hints at our Puritan traditions:

I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter.

Scarlet letters and witch-hunts were emotionally satisfying too. They, like austerity economics, were also based on what was never real.

Kevin Drum isn’t buying this argument:

I think Krugman is subtly wrong here. Or maybe not all that subtly. In the United States, at least, I’d argue that plenty of ordinary people view the economy the way he describes it here. They think of the macro-economy as merely a jumbo version of a household economy, and they know that when a household economy overspends and goes into debt, it really does have to pay a price. It has to cut back on consumption and start paying down its debt. The moral conclusions from this are both obvious and justifiable, and they figure the same thing is true of the national economy.

But is this what elites believe? Some do, probably. But I think for most of them, austerity is just a convenient facade. Their real motivation is simpler: they want to cut spending on the poor. Unfortunately, they’ve learned that this appeals only to voters who are already hardcore conservatives. To win over a broader audience, they need to appeal to the conventional view that a high debt level betrays a lack of national discipline and needs to be corrected at a national level. Like a household that spent too much redecorating its kitchen with a home equity loan, the country has spent too much and now needs to cut back. For most people, this argument is far more palatable than a simple appeal to cut spending.

Their real motivation is that they want to cut spending on the poor – but of course that’s another morality play. The poor are unworthy sinners – it’s that Calvinist notion that the sign of God’s grace is prosperity. The good folks, the chosen, are the rich folks. God hates laziness and bad luck too, apparently:

So yes: a lot of people view the economy as a morality play. But among conservative elites, I suspect there’s less of this than you might think. Rather, it’s used primarily as a cynical way of getting the spending cuts they want without overtly bashing the poor.

Drum, however, has no idea why liberal elites buy into this nonsense:

Beats me, but if I had to guess I’d say that too many of them were burned by the 70s and have remained in a fetal crouch ever since. For them, every recession is a rerun of the 70s and needs the same kind of medicine if we want to recover. It’s kind of sad, really.

We never escaped our Puritanism, perhaps, and Michael Kinsley certainly hasn’t:

I don’t think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be. And future sufferers are not necessarily different people than the past and present sinners. That’s too easy. Sure let’s raise taxes on the rich. But that’s not going to solve the problem. The problem is the great, deluded middle class – subsidized by government and coddled by politicians. In other words, they are you and me. If you make less than $250,000 a year, Obama has assured us, you are officially entitled to feel put-upon and resentful. And to be immune from further imposition.

Damn – everything’s a morality play. What about policy – jobs – fixing the economy – that sort of thing? There are reasonable things to do about that stuff. We could do something logical.

Oh never mind. There are too many Puritans still around. They were really irritating in that crap you had to read in high school, and they still are.

The New Old Story

Who, what, when, where, how, and why. That’s what a news story is supposed to provide, except that last thing, the why, can be problematic. The party in question may not provide any statement of motivation, so a good reporter does some digging. The corrupt politician might have had financial problems, or the mass-murderer had an unfortunate childhood or a mental illness – interview a few experts on that sort of thing and enlighten the readers. Of course every war, large or small, has a back-story – append a history lesson of the Balkans or of the sectarian divisions in Islam, or how the Irish had once really preferred James II to William and Mary. Maybe we really went to war in Iraq because George Bush needed to prove something to his father – it was no more than an in-your-face insult to the old man who was always picking on him – or maybe Dick Cheney just lost it. There are lots of back-stories, and most of them are nonsense, but one must explain the why, even if no one knows why yet, or may never know why. Readers don’t want to be told the event was random – hey, shit happens. They don’t want the news, what happened, they want news stories. There has to be a narrative, like in a Dickens novel or blockbuster Hollywood movie – bad guys and good guys and conflict and crises and an inevitable denouement. We explain the world to ourselves, and to other, through stories.

Now it’s time to explain how Obama blew it, with three scandals erupting – the massive Benghazi cover-up, where Obama called it an act of terrorism and not a terrorist act, and the IRS scandal, where the IRS seemed to be picking on Tea Party organizations that had claimed they weren’t political at all, and now the Associated Press scandal, where, on May 10, the Associated Press received a letter from the Department of Justice informing them that the government had acquired two months of their telephone records, causing quite an uproar. All this is big news, or it isn’t, as Kevin Drum notes:

I’m terminally bored with our current scandal hat trick, which in record time has reached the meta-stage where it produces no actual fresh news, just a steady flow of lazy thumbsuckers about how President Obama is now inundated with scandals. This despite the fact that Benghazi is still the nothingburger it’s always been, and everyone knows it; the DOJ episode is a policy debate, not a scandal; and it’s vanishingly unlikely that Obama had even the most tenuous connection to the IRS targeting of tea party groups, the only genuine scandal in the bunch.

The only genuine scandal in the bunch is now being neutered:

President Obama announced Wednesday night that the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service had been ousted after disclosures that the agency gave special scrutiny to conservative groups. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., meanwhile, warned top IRS officials that a Justice Department inquiry would examine any false statements to see if they constituted a crime.

Speaking in the White House’s formal East Room, Mr. Obama said Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew had asked for and accepted the resignation of the acting commissioner, Steven Miller, who as deputy commissioner was aware of the agency’s efforts to demand more information from conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status in early 2012.

“Americans have a right to be angry about it, and I’m angry about it,” Mr. Obama said. “It should not matter what political stripe you’re from. The fact of the matter is the IRS has to operate with absolute integrity.”

Obama came out on the side of the Tea Party – he’s outraged too. The AP phone thing is a bit harder to deal with, as Republicans have always supported the law that allows the Department of Justice to do this very thing, but there’s a fix for that too:

Under fire over the Justice Department’s use of a broad subpoena to obtain calling records of Associated Press reporters in connection with a leak investigation, the Obama administration sought on Wednesday to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters in keeping their sources and communications confidential.

President Obama’s Senate liaison, Ed Pagano, on Wednesday morning called the office of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and asked him to reintroduce a version of a bill that he had pushed in 2009 called the Free Flow of Information Act, a White House official said.

The bill would create a federal media shield law akin to ones most states already have, giving journalists some protections from penalties for refusing to identify confidential sources in federal law enforcement proceedings, and generally enabling journalists to ask a federal judge to quash subpoenas for their phone records.

Kevin Drum is amused by the move:

Substantively, Obama is making the point that legislation has been introduced before, and can be introduced again, that would restrict DOJ’s ability to target the phone records of media organizations. In 2010, such legislation was introduced, and died when it was filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. More generally, media organizations have been lobbying for a federal shield law for decades, and Congress has been resolutely unwilling to pass one, even though nearly every state has a shield law of one sort or another.

Politically, Obama is basically daring Republicans to put their money where their mouths are. You want to make the DOJ leak investigation into an issue of executive overreach? Fine. Then rein it in. Pass a law making it clear what DOJ can and can’t do in leak investigations.

This is a win-win for me. If Republicans take Obama up on his offer, then we get a law I approve of. If they don’t, then they need to shut up. What’s not to like?

And late in the day the Obama administration released a hundred or more pages of emails on Benghazi – and it seems that no one was nefariously misleading the public on the events. It was just interagency feuding that produced those initial talking points that didn’t say much of anything. It really is boring stuff, but the Republicans got what they wanted – the full story. It’s too bad there’s no smoking-gun in there, but sometimes what seems to be evil is just tedious nonsense.

That should be the end of it, but it cannot be. There has to be an overarching narrative about Obama’s woes, and Alexander Burns and John Harris at Politico give it a go:

No contemporary American politician has benefited more from the power of good storytelling than Barack Obama. He vaulted from obscurity to the presidency on the power of narrative – invoking his biography and personal values to make a larger point about how he would lead the nation.

So presumably no one understands more vividly than Obama and his close aides just how toxic and potentially paralyzing his situation has become this spring, as four distinct ethical and policy controversies have simultaneously converged.

Obama’s critics now have a narrative – a way of connecting four discrete episodes to a larger point about this president’s leadership style and values. In other words, they didn’t merely happen on his watch but were in important ways caused by his watch.

And for the first time, this anti-Obama storyline is being presented in a way that might seem reasonable to people who are not already rabid anti-Obama partisans.

Burns and Harris don’t say what the forth scandal is – they assume we know – but it doesn’t matter. The narrative has changed:

The narrative is personal. The uproars over alleged politicization of the IRS and far-reaching attempts to monitor journalists and their sources have not been linked directly to Obama. But it does not strain credulity to suggest that Obama’s well-known intolerance for leaks, and his regular condemnations of conservative dark-money groups, could have filtered down to subordinates.

The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview…

In Obama’s case, the narrative emerging from this tumultuous week goes something like this: None of these messes would have happened under a president less obsessed with politics, less insulated within his own White House and less trusting of government as an institution.

The blogger BooMan is having none of this:

I don’t know whose narrative this is supposed to belong to. I don’t think the Republicans are going to argue that the problem is that Obama is too trusting in government as an institution. They are going to argue that he’s a fascist dictator who sics the IRS on his political opponents and tramples on the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment, and the 10th, and any other amendments they can think of. And rather than offer a little balance to that unhinged talk, organizations like Politico will write that the president handed them the ammo even though he wasn’t directly responsible for any of it.

How’d he hand them the ammo? He criticized the Citizens United ruling and all the dark money in politics. He didn’t invite enough Washingtonians to dinner. He trusted that the government could do things like expand access to health care and remove some injustices from the system. He agreed with the Republicans that national security leaks should be aggressively investigated.

Such narratives are nonsense, but narratives are what the news folks provide:

As a political writer, I was about ready to hang myself if I had to write one more article about sequestration and the budget. So, I get it. Now we all have something to write about again. I don’t think the general public really understands how important it is that writing be fun. They know that writers are after page-views, but trust me when I say that writing for page-views isn’t fun. What’s fun is writing about stuff that you can get energized about, and that has a lot of carry-over to what people want to read. The damage being done by the Sequester is the most important domestic story in the country right now, along with the cause of the Sequester, which is the total radicalization of the Republican Party. But writing about the closing of health clinics and day care centers and access to cancer treatment and closed airports cannot compare to writing about a BIG SCANDAL.

Also, much like Congress was fine with sequestration until it threatened to delay their flights home, the press has been largely complacent about the growing surveillance powers of the state until it wound up impacting them directly. Now they have a bee in their bonnet.

So, this is how it is going to be now. We’re going to have a brawl about competing narratives, where an unhinged lunatic party accuses the Democrats of fascist socialism and the Democrats try to prevent the defenestration of the federal government.

That’s about it, along with the narratives about Obama’s personal failings, as Politico’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen report on how DC has turned on Obama:

The town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House….

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked together to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system…

That’s their story and they’re sticking to it, which may seem to be partisan gloating, but Ed Kilgore explains that:

This open partisanship is excused by the fact that in “this town” (among the “Establishment Democrats” who are a “D.C. Stakeholder”) Democrats aren’t bothering to defend Obama. Which Democrats are we talking about here?

Ah, Politico says who, that Anonymous Insider Democrat:

One Democrat who likes Obama and has been around town for many years said elected officials in his own party are no different than Republicans: They think the president is distant and unapproachable.

“He has never taken the Democratic chairs up to Camp David to have a drink or to have a discussion,” the longtime Washingtonian said. “You gotta stroke people and talk to them. It’s like courting: You have to send flowers and candy and have surprises. It’s a constant process. Now they’re saying, ‘He never talked to me in the good times.’”

Kilgore:

Just a week ago, we were all mocking this sort of talk about Obama not having the viciousness or seductiveness to be an effective president. But the new “narrative” of Obama being on the ropes is bringing back all sorts of stupid and discredited criticisms. “This town” has turned on him!

Kilgore simply sighs:

Harris and VandeHei come so close to self-parody that every sentence is like a piñata you could hit from any direction. But make no mistake: this is a declaration of war by elements of the Beltway Media who are determined to show us all they still have the power to “bring down a president,” as they arrogantly used to say about Watergate, and that not only the GOP but the Breitbartian wingnuts have a new ally in the “Vetting” of Barack Obama.

Yeah, they love the new narrative, but there’s the 1998 Sally Quinn original:

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president’s behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal… people want some formal acknowledgment that the president’s behavior has been unacceptable…

THIS IS THEIR HOME. This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.

“It’s much more personal here,” says pollster Geoff Garin. “This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work… Clinton’s behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern.”

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”

Steve M at No More Mister Nice blog found that and added this:

The irony of the Quinn piece is that the two living Americans most admired for their work in DC politics are both named… Clinton. If we extend the definition of “DC politics” to include DC political journalism, that’s still true. …

At this moment, it’s hard to imagine that Barack Obama will leave office as widely admired as Bill did in 2001 and Hillary did earlier this year. But I hope it happens, just so Allen and VandeHei can choke on it.

That’s unlikely, as now MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has turned:

President Obama “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” Chris Matthews said tonight.

Yes, you read that right: The MSNBC host who in 2008 felt a “thrill going up my leg” after hearing Obama speak has grown disenchanted. Tonight’s episode of Hardball saw Matthews delivering a rare, unforgiving grilling of the president as severe as anything that might appear on Fox News.

“What part of the presidency does Obama like? He doesn’t like dealing with other politicians – that means his own cabinet – that means members of the congress, either party. He doesn’t particularly like the press…. He likes to write the speeches, likes to rewrite what Favreau and the others wrote for the first draft,” Matthews said.

“So what part does he like? He likes going on the road, campaigning, visiting businesses like he does every couple days somewhere in Ohio or somewhere,” Matthews continued. “But what part does he like? He doesn’t like lobbying for the bills he cares about. He doesn’t like selling to the press. He doesn’t like giving orders or giving somebody the power to give orders. He doesn’t seem to like being an executive.”

That’s the new narrative, but then Matthews is an excitable fellow, and that report is also from Politico, who should probably copyright this new narrative. But then Dana Milbank of the Washington Post offers Obama, The Uninterested President:

Nixon was a control freak. Obama seems to be the opposite: He wants no control over the actions of his administration. As the president distances himself from the actions of “independent” figures within his administration, he’s creating a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes. Certainly, a president can’t know what everybody in his administration is up to – but he can take responsibility, he can fire people and he can call a stop to foolish actions such as wholesale snooping into reporters’ phone calls.

There’s something in the air – a new narrative explaining everything. Matthews had Milbank on his program to confirm that. It’s the new story, although Daniel McCarthy at the American Conservative adds this twist:

The most basic criticism of Obama turns out to be the truest. A one-term Senator doesn’t have much preparation for governing anything – yes, a risk that Republicans will have to keep in mind with Marco Rubio and Rand Paul – and government under Obama often seems to be run by functionaries. It’s all too plausible that Obama didn’t know, or care to know, about the IRS applying discriminatory standards against right-leaning 501(c)(4) groups, and his attitude toward Eric Holder’s Justice Department grabbing Associated Press phone records appears similarly blasé.

This is rather unlike the disgraced president to whom many Republicans want to compare the incumbent.

It seems that we’re supposed to miss the Nixon fellow now, but then Jean Mackenzie calls this Obama’s Nixon Moment:

As recently as last week the Republicans were intent on portraying Benghazi as a scandal on the scale of Watergate.

Indeed, comparisons with the incident that ultimately drove President Richard Nixon from office have been cropping up more and more frequently.

George Will wrote in the Washington Post that the IRS scandal had “echoes of Watergate,” and hinted that it should have the same outcome:

“Forty years ago this week … the Senate Watergate hearings began exploring the nature of Richard Nixon’s administration. Now the nature of Barack Obama’s administration is being clarified as revelations about IRS targeting of conservative groups merge with myriad Benghazi mendacities,” he wrote.

He was not the only one.

She has the list. Obama, like Nixon, will fall, even if they’re completely different? Sometimes likely narratives collide, and coming out at the end of the month is the new Ruth O’Brien book Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition:

Bearing traces of Baruch Spinoza, John Dewey, and Saul Alinsky, Obama’s progressivism embraces the ideas of mutual reliance and collective responsibility, and adopts an interconnected view of the individual and the state. So, while Obama might emphasize difference, he rejects identity politics, which can create permanent minorities and diminish individual agency. Analyzing Obama’s major legislative victories – financial regulation, healthcare, and the stimulus package – O’Brien shows how they reflect a stakeholder society that neither regulates in the manner of the New Deal nor deregulates. Instead, Obama focuses on negotiated rule making and allows executive branch agencies to fill in the details when dealing with a deadlocked Congress. Similarly, his commitment to difference and his resistance to universal mandates underlie his reluctance to advocate for human rights as much as many on the Democratic left had hoped.

Huh? Spinoza? Mark Schmitt reviews the book and offers this way of seeing the possible narrative here:

Obama’s presidency has been the first real test of a politics focused on reform and democratic participation rather than traditional bipartisan bargaining – and it has failed. Over the last four years, American politics split sharply into the two primary traditions: the first a sort of hyper-Lockeanism represented not just by the Tea Party but even by Mitt Romney’s division of the country into “makers and takers,” the second a demand – driven by circumstances and crisis – for a much more active, expansive government role in the economy. Economic issues, once a natural zone of compromise, began to seem more like social issues, matters of irreconcilable absolutes. There wasn’t much room in the middle, and for a period, Obama’s discursive strategy seemed wholly irrelevant.

Obama tried a new narrative. It didn’t work, and now everyone seems to have reverted to an old narrative that’s comfortable – the second term president is brought down by massive scandals, as people find out, finally, that he had been a jerk all along. Obama will soon be defiantly proclaiming “I am not a crook!”

It’s the new old story. It’s useful, if you don’t think too hard about things. It’s the easy way to make sense of the random, and if everyone agrees on the story, that’s the news, even if it isn’t.

And Then There Were Three

Three is a nice number. It provides a sense of completion – whatever bold thing you do is done on the count of three after all, and all writers know to group things in threes. Martin Luther King would speak of “insult, injustice and exploitation” followed by “justice, good will and brotherhood” – and George Wallace got the message and called for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” around the same time. One makes one’s point in threes, as Dickens did with those three ghosts in his Scrooge story. And there are the Three Stooges and the Three Little Pigs – obviously the right number. Things just sound better in threes, like in the West Point motto – Duty, Honor, Country.

Maybe it’s a magic number. All sorts of people believe celebrities die in threes. In June 2009, Michael Jackson’s died the same day as Farrah Fawcett, that morning, and Ed McMahon died the night before. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the “Big Bopper” all died together in a plane crash in 1959, and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all died in late 1970 within a few days of each other. Hey, one drops, so two more are soon to drop too – which is, of course, nonsense. There’s no magic, just coincidence. Such notions only persist because three is such a powerful number. There are only three primary colors after all, and three blind mice.

That’s why there had to be three Obama scandals – the massive Benghazi cover-up, where Obama’s called it an act of terrorism and not a terrorist act, and the IRS scandal, where the IRS seemed to be picking on Tea Party organizations that had claimed they weren’t political at all, and now the Associated Press scandal, where, on May 10, the Associated Press received a letter from the Department of Justice informing them that the government had acquired two months of their telephone records – the incoming number, the outgoing number, and the call duration – but they hadn’t listened to any of the conversations. Still this was twenty of their phone lines – the Associated Press offices, the personal lines for reporters, and their phone in the House press gallery. This was mighty odd, and had the media up in arms. What was Obama up to? Was he shutting down the free press through some sort of intimidation? Why not go after Fox News? It made no sense.

The Atlantic Wire takes it from there:

The letter the AP received has not been made public, but it apparently provided no reason for the seizure. According to an article published by the AP, it may relate to its May 2012 article revealing an Al-Qaeda bomb plot. That plot, originating in Yemen, was targeted for the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, but was foiled when the device was given to a CIA double agent. The AP broke the story, holding it for several days at the request of the White House. According to the AP, the reporters on that story owned numbers that were among those subpoenaed, indicating that Justice may be trying to identify the source of the leak.

The problem then was operational security – some asshole had blabbed to the Associated Press about our having really cool CIA double agents embedded in al-Qaeda and that kind of leak could ruin everything. Anyone the bad guys suspected of being a double agent would be executed and we’d never be able to insert another one again, ever. The Department of Justice was looking for that asshole, but this became a freedom of the press issue:

Gary Pruitt, the president and CEO of the AP, sent a scathing letter in response to the revelations. Calling it a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” that is “a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights,” Pruitt writes:

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news-gathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

The AP demanded that the department to return the data to the AP and destroy its records.

Hey, you can’t gather news if all your sources know who is calling whom and when and how long the conversations last. You’d lose all your sources. You’d be out of business.

There’s just one problem here. These guys can do that:

According to Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl, the most likely mechanism for Justice acquiring the information was a grand jury subpoena. (The Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly pointed to the form that Justice’s attorney would have had to complete for a “Media Subpoena Request.”) While the process is more involved for media organizations than for other witnesses in criminal cases – for example, the Attorney General must personally approve it – Opsahl told us that he considered it the most likely route. If the government had employed a more exotic form of request, such as a national security letter, it’s likely the AP still wouldn’t know that data had been collected. In the case of a grand jury subpoena, the government must notify the party that it has collected the information.

It seems they had a grand jury subpoena, so the AP is shit-out-of-luck, or maybe not:

If such a subpoena was the mechanism used, the AP may have two grounds to take issue. The first, as Opsahl notes, is that the information request should according to the statute be “as narrowly drawn as possible.” In this case, it appears to have been remarkably broad – as is noted in the AP’s response letter. The second is that the subject of the subpoena must be notified of the subpoena within 90 days. While it’s not clear when the subpoena was issued, the data collection likely covers a period from last May.

That’s the bare-bones of the scandal, but then, as the Washing Post reports, things got even more interesting:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Tuesday that he recused himself from involvement in a Justice Department leak investigation that secretly acquired telephone records of Associated Press journalists.

But in response to questions at a news conference, he defended the department’s conduct in probing what he described as one of the most damaging leaks he has seen.

In a letter to Holder and his deputy Tuesday, a media coalition rejected what it called “an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials,” demanded that the Justice Department destroy the phone records and called on Congress to pass a federal shield law. The Washington Post joined more than 50 other news organizations in endorsing the letter.

Holder said he testified in June 2012 that he was interviewed by the FBI in connection with the probe into a leak of classified information to the AP. “To avoid any potential appearance of a conflict of interest,” he said, “I recused myself from this matter.”

Since then, he said, the investigation has been conducted by the FBI under the direction of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and the supervision of the deputy attorney general, James M. Cole.

“The decision to seek media toll records in this investigation was made by the Deputy Attorney General consistent with Department regulations and policies,” the Justice Department said in a statement shortly before Holder made his remarks.

None knew quite what to make of all that. It smelled fishy, and this didn’t help:

Cole, the deputy attorney general supervising the probe, said the Justice Department seeks news organizations’ phone records only when there are “reasonable grounds to believe that a federal crime has been committed and that the information sought by the subpoena is essential to a successful investigation.” He said such records are subpoenaed “only after all other reasonable alternative investigative steps have been taken,” which in this case included “conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents.”

Cole also said the department “did not seek the content of any calls.”

The media coalition, headed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and including major U.S. newspapers and television networks, responded that its members were “stunned” to learn of the Justice Department’s action.

“In the thirty years since the Department issued guidelines governing its subpoena practice as it relates to phone records from journalists, none of us can remember an instance where such an overreaching dragnet for newsgathering materials was deployed by the Department, particularly without notice to the affected reporters or an opportunity to seek judicial review,” the letter said. It charged that Justice “appears to have ignored or brushed aside almost every aspect” of its own guidelines governing subpoenas of the news media for testimony and evidence.

The signatories also called on the department to “explain how government lawyers overreached so egregiously in this matter” and describe what it would do “to mitigate the impact of these actions.” And it said Justice “should announce whether it has served any other pending news media-related subpoenas that have not yet been disclosed.”

How did government lawyers overreach so egregiously in this matter? Think back to the Patriot Act. That’s what we do. That’s what everyone endorses. There’s freedom of the press, and there’s the war on terror. Everything is a threat, and always will be. You do what’s necessary. The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, as everyone on the right used to say in the Bush years. Whining about your rights is un-American, or maybe that’s changed now. Now this is a scandal, but the Republicans started it:

The inquiry is one of two leak investigations ordered last June by Holder. The second involves a New York Times report about the Stuxnet computer worm, which was developed jointly by the United States and Israel to damage nuclear centrifuges at Iran’s main uranium-enrichment plant.

The two leak inquiries were started after Republicans in Congress accused the Obama administration of orchestrating news stories intended to demonstrate the president’s toughness on terrorism and improve his chance for reelection. The Republicans sought a special prosecutor, but Holder instead named two veteran prosecutors to handle the inquiries.

In the AP case, the news organization and its reporters and editors are not the likely targets of the investigation. Rather, the inquiry is probably aimed at current or former government officials who divulged classified information.

So, go after the New York Times, but not the Associated Press – or something. Still, there’s no arguing:

The office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia on Monday released a statement saying it is not required to notify a media organization in advance of issuing such subpoenas if doing so “would pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation.”

“We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations,” said a statement from Bill Miller, spokesman for the office. “Those regulations require us to make every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means before even considering a subpoena for the phone records of a member of the media.”

Justice Department guidelines require that subpoenas of records from news organizations must be approved personally by the attorney general. Holder’s office did not reply Monday to repeated requests for comment.

Ah, but there was arguing:

Republicans quickly condemned the targeting of journalists and sought to portray the Justice Department’s actions as part of a pattern of Obama administration overreach, noting that the Internal Revenue Service was already enmeshed in a scandal over the reported targeting of conservative groups.

“Coming within a week of revelations that the White House lied to the American people about the Benghazi attacks and the IRS targeted conservative Americans for their political beliefs, Americans should take notice that top Obama administration officials increasingly see themselves as above the law and emboldened by the belief that they don’t have to answer to anyone,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

This was scandal number three, the magic number in all arguments, although Kevin Drum puts this in perspective:

This is a policy scandal, perhaps, but not an abuse of power or example of corruption. As near as I can tell, the Justice Department followed the law scrupulously here, obtaining a warrant for the records and then informing AP of the warrant afterwards. Lots of people, including me, happen to think the law that allows this is a bad one, but that’s an argument about the PATRIOT Act and its follow-ups. From a political point of view, Republicans are going to have a hard time making much hay with this because (a) most of them support the law that allows DOJ to do this, and (b) the American public doesn’t think very highly of the press and probably isn’t very outraged that they can have their phone records collected just like anyone else.

As for the first two scandals, Drum offers this:

Benghazi. The truth is that this is no more of a scandal than it’s ever been. Right now Republicans are doing their best to keep this carnival act going, but President Obama was pretty much right yesterday when he said there’s no “there” there. That remains true even if Jay Carney was a little less than candid last November about the editing process of the infamous talking points. This whole thing is basically a fever dream invention of the right, and the public doesn’t seem any more interested in it today than it ever has been.

IRS targeting of Tea Party groups – this one is a genuine scandal, and it’s one that plays right into Republican hands. It’s also one that will resonate with the public. Politically, the question is whether the president can get out ahead of it. If he’s found to have had no hand in the original targeting, and is perceived as being sufficiently zealous in cracking down on it, it might not hurt him much. We’ll see.

But Drum also adds this:

There’s one wild card in all this: the media. They finally got personally annoyed over Benghazi when the spotlight turned to things that Jay Carney had told them personally, and the AP warrant also directly affects them. If this third episode feeds into further media disenchantment with Obama, that could affect his press coverage going forward. In the end, that could end up being the worst fallout of all from this stuff.

Yes, and it all started with Benghazi, which Paul Waldman finds odd:

In case you didn’t notice, over the last few days we entered a new phase in the Obama presidency: the scandal phase. What happened? It wasn’t evidence of a crime being unearthed, or a confession from a conspirator. There was no sudden revelation, no arrests, no cancer on the presidency. Indeed, just a few days ago it looked for all the world like Benghazi would take its place with Solyndra and “Fast and Furious” as one more wished-for scandal that, despite the best efforts of Republicans, failed to take flight. Yet all it took was ABC News getting passed some emails between the CIA, the State Department, and the White House detailing how the administration argued over how exactly to talk about the attack in Benghazi to get things underway, and now we have calls for special committees and ramped-up coverage. There may not be anything particularly shocking in those emails – just the time-honored tradition of people trying to cover their asses – but internal deliberations being revealed, no matter what they contain, has given the media enough of a prod to start that scandal train moving, and before you know it everyone’s going to jump onboard.

So suddenly it looks like this isn’t going away, not because there was appalling malfeasance (or any malfeasance at all), but because once the train is moving, it’s almost impossible to stop. Put together the right’s desperate longing for an Obama scandal – turn on Fox News or listen to conservative radio, and you’ll see eyelids fluttering in ecstasy as this story gains momentum – with congressional Republicans’ helplessness in the face of pressure from their base, and the media’s inability to resist a presidential scandal story, and this whole thing might not end unless and until Barack Obama is impeached.

That is quite possible:

“But that’s crazy,” you may say. And yes, it is. Furthermore, it would be unbelievably stupid of Republicans to push it that far, just from the perspective of their own political self-interest. But that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. It’s a little glib to say that they’d do it because they’re nuts, but the truth is that impeachment could well become the inevitable end point of a process that has nothing to do with the actual facts, with all the different parts of the conservative machine feeding coal into the boiler as the train gets faster and faster.

Now we’ve also reached the magic number three too, even if, like that thing with celebrities dying in threes, it’s nonsense:

There are scandals, and then there are scandals. For instance, the Valerie Plame scandal, in which members of the Bush administration revealed the identity of an undercover CIA operative in order to discredit her husband, an administration critic, was a serious matter. But it wasn’t nearly as important as, say, the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration sold arms to terrorists, then used the profits to fund the right-wing group of Nicaraguan exiles it had established in an attempt to overthrow the government there, which was a direct violation of a law passed by Congress. And even that was a step down from Watergate, in which Richard Nixon and people working for him committed a whole series of crimes. Lest we forget (and believe me, people have), the President of the United States was on tape ordering crimes to be committed, and in the end his Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, and his chief domestic policy advisor all went to jail, along with a couple of dozen other people.

Those were real scandals, not to mention the one 15 years ago that was the most lurid of all, despite featuring so little actual criminality. Maybe this time around we’ll discover something no one has even contemplated – say, that Hillary Clinton discovered a low-level State Department functionary who was about to blow the whistle on her secret romance with a Mexican drug lord, whereupon she killed him with her bare hands.

That may not be likely, but one never knows, and we have the magic three scandals now anyway, so Waldman provides the likely scenario here:

There will be more hearings, each one hyped by Republicans as the one that will “blow the lid off” this whole thing. They will fail to deliver much that’s actually revelatory. Nevertheless, the volume of discussion and speculation will rise inexorably. Republicans will begin calling for President Obama’s impeachment; first it’ll be a few nutbar Tea Partiers, then it will spread to some of the seemingly more sane ones, and finally the desire for impeachment will be nearly universal on the right. John Boehner will know in his heart that it’s a terrible idea, but he may be confronted with a rebellion: schedule an impeachment vote, or face a leadership vote. Boehner’s choice could be between impeachment and seeing Eric Cantor take his job (whereupon there’d be an impeachment vote anyway). Don’t forget that impeachment only requires a simple majority in the House to trigger a trial in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to convict.

The Republicans won’t get that two-thirds majority in the Senate, so the whole thing would be a colossal waste of time. They’ll look increasingly unhinged as they beg for the president they hate so fiercely to be tossed from office, knowing all the time their crusade is doomed. And just like in 1998, they’ll probably suffer losses in the 2014 mid-term elections, after the voters grow disgusted with the whole affair.

Yeah, impeaching the guy over the creation of misleading talking points is a loser for the Republicans. The IRS Tea Party spat is also odd, because Obama has come out on the side of the Tea Party – he’s outraged too. The AP phone thing is also curious – the Republicans have always supported the law that allows the Department of Justice to do this very thing. That’s a bit awkward, but Waldman ends with this:

The train is moving, and there may be no way to stop it.

Yes it is moving. It’s that magic number. One, two, three – go!

But where are we going? There are other matters that Congress could be addressing. There are recent college graduates now living at home, working at McDonalds flipping burgers, with a hundred grand in student loans they have to pay off. There are millions of former professionals who have given up looking for work, and who lost their homes long ago. The roads and bridges are crumbling. The climate is collapsing – more massive storms and the worst drought in our history. Our education system now seems to rank somewhere above Albania and below Paraguay and we have the worst infant mortality rate in the developed world. It’s not like there’s nothing better to do.

Ah well, if only all those things came in threes, like scandals. Three really is a magic number.

When There’s Nothing There

Everyone leaves Pittsburgh. It’s a town where you’re from. Gene Kelly and Oscar Levant ended up out here in Hollywood, Andy Warhol ended up in the scruffy parts of lower Manhattan, and Gertrude Stein ended up in Paris – but she made a few stops in between. In 1878 the family settled up in Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco – so her formative years were spent there. She wasn’t impressed with the place. Few can make heads or tails of her writing – the literary equivalent of Cubism perhaps, where you get a quite vivid impression of reality but never the thing itself, on purpose – but everyone remembers what she said about Oakland. She said there’s no there there – which has become the ultimate put-down, and perhaps the only quote from her that people remember. A rose is a rose is rose? In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is? No, those won’t do – but someone is always telling you there’s something there when you know full well there’s nothing there. That’s when you quote Gertrude Stein.

That’s what President Obama did. He just quoted Gertrude Stein:

President Obama, facing re-energized Republican adversaries and new questions about the administration’s conduct, on Monday dismissed a furor over the handling of last year’s attacks in Benghazi, Libya, as a political “sideshow” but joined a bipartisan chorus of outrage over disclosures that the Internal Revenue Service had singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny.

Mr. Obama called the IRS reports “outrageous” and “contrary to our traditions,” adding his voice to those of Republicans and isolating the agency as the House scheduled a hearing on Friday in what is likely to be an extensive Congressional review of the agency’s actions.

“I’ve got no patience with it,” Mr. Obama said during a joint news conference at the White House with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. “I will not tolerate it. And we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this.”

Then he offered the Stein quote:

On Benghazi, he seemed exasperated and angry to be facing a continuing barrage of accusations that he deemed recycled and partisan.

“We don’t have time to be playing these kinds of political games here in Washington,” Mr. Obama said, saying any inquiry should be focused on the four people who died in Libya and how to prevent future attacks. “We dishonor them when we turn things like this into a political circus.”

“Suddenly, three days ago,” he added, “this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no ‘there’ there.”

Yeah, nothing has changed since last September, but now we have a scandal, or something:

The furor over the Benghazi attack showed few signs of abating. Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he was seeking testimony from Thomas R. Pickering, a former United States ambassador, and former Adm. Mike Mullen, the authors of report by a panel known as an accountability review board.

In a letter to the two, Mr. Issa cited accusations that their review was “incomplete” and “flawed.” Republicans in Congress have seized on testimony from senior State Department employees in Libya to raise new questions about the administration’s decisions before the attack and their explanations afterward. …

“The president may want Americans to believe there’s no ‘there’ there,’ but he can’t hide from the facts,” said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John A. Boehner. “After four Americans died at the hands of terrorists, the administration was less than upfront about how it happened, and they continue to deny requests for further disclosures.”

But everything has been disclosed, and all recommendations acted upon:

Since then, Congress has approved $1.4 billion to carry out the changes, which include hiring hundreds of additional diplomatic security agents and Marine guards at embassies, improving training for employees assigned to dangerous posts, and revamping deployment procedures to increase the number of experienced and well-trained people serving in high-risk posts.

Responding to Republican accusations that the administration had tried to cover up the fact that the Benghazi attacks were linked to terrorism, Mr. Obama noted that he sent the head of the National Counterterrorism Center to brief lawmakers three days after Susan Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on Sunday-morning talk shows.

“Who executes some sort of cover-up or effort to tamp things down for three days?” he said. “This whole thing defies logic.”

That’s when you quote Gertrude Stein. At least she could leave for Paris and spend the rest of her life there. Obviously that’s not an option for Obama. He has to deal with this. It’s like being stuck in Oakland.

James Warren offers up this perspective on “Benghazi!” and the death of Ambassador Stevens and the end of Susan Rice’s career:

Though Stevens was an admired former [Senator Richard] Lugar staffer, Lugar has neither condoned nor condemned U.S. actions in response to the Benghazi attack. And a former Republican staffer on that committee underscored his own bottom line: “This is not Iran-Contra,” he said, alluding to the bona fide Reagan era scandal in which secret arms sales to Iran were used to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.

“These were people here in a dangerous position trying to do the best they could,” said the former staffer. “There were probably real communications issues. Rice knew when going on air this all didn’t add up. In retrospect she should have simply said, ‘It simply wasn’t clear what was happening.’ That would have taken care of it.”

Team Obama fumbled. And Republicans saw an opportunity to diminish Obama and Clinton. It was a twofer, with Benghazi serving as a potential real-time version of the nastily effective “Swift Boat” attacks on Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004.

But it’s not having that same impact, and thus it’s folly to think this hurts Clinton’s chances if she chooses to run. Tom Bowen, a shrewd Democratic consultant in Chicago, says, “The idea that one of the most popular secretaries of state to serve this country will be damaged by revisions of ‘talking points’ is foolhardy.”

Yes, four Americans killed in a terrorist attack is nothing to be flip about. But voters by and large understand that the world is a dangerous place – and there are plenty of narratives that fall far short of being deemed Nixonian.

People see this as Nixonian, or some do, given the most recent polling:

While voters overall may think Congress’ focus should be elsewhere there’s no doubt about how mad Republicans are about Benghazi. 41% say they consider this to be the biggest political scandal in American history to only 43% who disagree with that sentiment. Only 10% of Democrats and 20% of independents share that feeling. Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate, by a 74/12 margin that it’s worse than Teapot Dome, and by a 70/20 margin that it’s worse than Iran Contra.

Yes, to some this is the worst scandal in American history, but there’s this:

One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

Where is this “there” of which they speak? They don’t know, and it may not matter:

At any rate what we’re finding about last week’s Benghazi focus so far is that Republicans couldn’t be much madder about it, voters overall think Congress should be focused on other key issues, and Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers aren’t declining on account of it.

That’s why Obama quoted Stein, although Darrell Issa, chairman of the Republicans’ Benghazi Oversight Committee has a new theory:

They began being attacked, and were attacked for more than seven hours and we’re to believe that no response could even be started that could have helped them seven hours later? Quite frankly, you can take off from Washington, DC on a commercial flight and practically be in Benghazi by the end of seven hours. You certainly can take off from areas in the Mediterranean and bring at least some support in less than seven hours.

George W. Bush’s (and Obama’s) former secretary of defense called this a “cartoon fantasy” of course:

I listened to the testimony of – both Secretary Panetta and General Dempsey. And – and frankly had I been in the job at the time – I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were. We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East. Despite all the turmoil that’s going on, with planes on strip alert, troops ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. And so getting somebody there in a timely way – would have been very difficult, if not impossible. And frankly, I’ve heard “Well, why didn’t you just fly a fighter jet over and try and scare ‘em with the noise or something?” Well, given the number of surface to air missiles that have disappeared from Qaddafi’s arsenals, I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft over Benghazi under those circumstances. And – and with respect to sending in special forces or a small group of people to try and provide help, based on everything I have read, people really didn’t know what was going on in Benghazi contemporaneously. And to send some small number of Special Forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on, on the ground, I think, would have been very dangerous. And personally, I would not have approved that because we just don’t it’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces. The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way. And there just wasn’t time to do that.

Oh well – there’s always something else:

House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) responded to President Obama’s forceful condemnation of the GOP’s effort to portray his administration’s response to the attacks on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya as a cover-up on Monday, suggesting that the president sought to downplay the severity of the incident by describing the killings of four Americans as an “act of terror” rather than a “terrorist attack.”

In the day following the Benghazi attacks, Obama appeared at the White House Rose Garden alongside then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In his remarks, Obama referred to the incident as an “act of terror” and used the phrase again at a campaign rally the day after in Denver, CO. “I want people around the world to hear me: To all those who would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished,” he said.

But Issa claimed that Obama relied on the “act of terror” formulation to dissuade Americans from thinking it was a terror attack, thus improving his chances of re-election.

Marc Ambinder explained here that Benghazi has now become “a debate about post-tragedy diction” – which was bound to happen when there’s nothing there. Ambinder later added this – “The Diction Debates aren’t real because the opponent insists he/she knows about the motivation for using/ not using certain key words” – which led to this from Steve Benen:

All of this serves to remind us that the political world has defined “scandal” down to a meaningless level. Watergate dealt with crimes committed by a president. Iran-Contra dealt with a White House that sold arms to a sworn enemy to finance an illegal war. The Plame Affair, the U.S. Attorney purge, and illegal warrantless wiretaps dealt with systemic wrongdoing at the highest levels.

In 2013, though, we’re apparently stuck with, “An act of terror is different than a terrorist attack.”

It will have to do. It’s all they’ve got. And see this – “John Boehner’s staff was already briefed by the White House on the now-controversial Benghazi emails and talking points back in March, but judging by their lack of public statements about them, saw nothing amiss” – so this is all nonsense. On the other hand, Ed Kilgore notes this was inevitable:

I don’t get the sense… that too many Republicans are thinking there’s a downside to going scandal-crazy. If anything, going into a “base-dominated” midterm election with a party that refuses to get anything done in Congress requiring compromise and that isn’t real flush with policy ideas, Republicans are going to be sorely tempted not to talk about anything but scandals (and perhaps Obamacare, which they are already treating as a “scandal” in itself) for the next year-and-a-half.

So for Democrats: the bad news is that today’s “stories” could persist with mind-numbing repetition until you are about to bleed from your eyes and ears. The good news is that if you make at least a minimum effort to create some other stories that involve real life, you may not have much competition.

Good luck with that, as Digby (Heather Parton) wrote this back in 2007:

These are patented “smell test” stories. They are based on complicated details that make the casual reader’s eyes glaze over and about which the subject has to issue long confusing explanations in return… No single story will bring down a candidate because they have no substance to them. It’s the combined effect they are looking for to build a sense overall sleaziness. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire”, right?

The major media has never copped to their role in the tabloid sideshow that politics in the 90s became. They have never copped to their part in elevating Bush to the status of demigod and running beside him like a bunch of eunuchs waving palm fronds during the lead-up to the war. Even today we see them pooh-poohing the significance of a federal trial that exposes them for whores to Republican power.

But it happened and it will happen again. They have learned nothing and feel they have nothing to answer for.

Her point now:

The right sees these contretemps as vehicles for creating an atmosphere of scandal. And the press, caught up in the daily churn of information, fails to see the forest for the trees every time.

Salon’s Joan Walsh adds this:

The National Journal’s Ron Fournier tweeted “Welcome to the 90s” with no apparent irony or self-awareness about the role of the media in ginning up that decade of phony scandals that paralyzed our last popular second-term Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

In fact, Fournier contends Benghazi will hurt Clinton and President Obama, even though he acknowledges the GOP’s claims are overblown. ”If nothing else, Benghazi is a blow to the credibility of the president and his potential successor, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. This could be big … Credibility is Clinton’s vulnerability, dating to the unjustified financial accusations that triggered the Whitewater investigation. Doubts persisted about her veracity and authenticity throughout the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Read that again: “Credibility is Clinton’s vulnerability, dating to the unjustified financial accusations that triggered the Whitewater investigation.” The accusations were unjustified, Fournier admits, but they hurt Clinton anyway. Why? Because reporters continued to act like they were justified, even in the face of contrary evidence.

And so it goes with Benghazi. Welcome to the ’90s!

Or welcome to Oakland.

As for that other matter, the IRS scandal, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas say the obvious about the Internal Revenue Service’s real problem:

The IRS does need some kind of test that helps them weed out political organizations attempting to register as tax-exempt 501(c)4 social welfare groups. But that test has to be studiously, unquestionably neutral.

Yep, if there’s a “there” there one must determine just what it is, but as Bloomberg’s Josh Barro explains, that’s not all that easy, or maybe it’s impossible:

The IRS didn’t make this mess because its employees are stupid or because they have a political vendetta. It’s because they’ve been given an impossible task: figure out which organizations have missions that are “primarily political” – and come up with definitions for “primarily” and “political” that are neither vague nor politically charged.

Note, when we talk about these groups as “tax-exempt” all that means is they don’t pay tax on their own income. A 501(c)4 group can’t accept tax-deductible donations because it’s not a charity (those are 501(c)3 groups). Instead, a 501(c)4 is a “social welfare” organization: That is, it is supposed to produce benefits that are broadly enjoyed, rather than producing private profits for its funders. By law, (c)4 groups are free to lobby without limitation and also may engage in electoral activities so long as that is not their primary purpose. The main reason political donors want to channel their funds through (c)4s rather than other independent expenditure vehicles isn’t a tax advantage; it’s that (c)4 organizations are not required to disclose their donors.

It’s a scam, created by the Citizens United ruling, and what the IRS tried was only logical:

Their first idea was to look for key words like “Tea Party” in organization names. Realizing this would show unfair political bias, they switched to focusing on statements about orientation (“political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government”).

Realizing these approaches were both subject to accusations of political bias, in 2012 the IRS traded them for one that meets Ezra’s neutrality test: The IRS will closely examine “organizations with indicators of significant amounts of political campaign intervention.” But this standard is too vague to be useful.

Sure, but that was useless:

Carolyn Duornio, a Pittsburgh-based partner in Reed Smith’s tax-exempt organizations practice, notes that some people do apply for (c)4 status and say upfront that their intended purpose is electioneering. Those applications can be rejected.

But in the political gray areas where many c(4) organizations operate, seeking to promote an ideology rather than the election of specific candidates, she argues that the IRS has no good choice but to approve applications and examine behavior after the fact.

“If what they’re saying is that they’re promoting ideas, and they are promoting ideas, then you have to let it go,” says Duornio.

I asked Duornio if there’s a good way to separate (c)4 organizations that are too political from those that are not. Her answer: “Not really.”

Barro can only offer this:

So what should the IRS do about these groups and their proliferation of untraceable political money? My inclination is to say there is no good way to stop (c)4 political activity and instead Congress should seek to require more disclosure of donor information. If a (c)4 had to disclose its donors, it wouldn’t be particularly advantageous over other vehicles for independent political spending.

That’s a possible way out of the woods here, but it’s a long-term solution. The Tea Party crowd is saying there’s a “there” there – they are social welfare groups and not political. The IRS says prove it, and the Tea Party groups say we don’t have to, and by the way, define your terms, like “primarily” political. That’s impossible – all political activity is nominally for the social good – so anonymous donors will continue to spend millions on Obamacare is Evil and Obama Murdered Our Diplomats ads. A rose is a rose is a rose, or something. In this case there really is no “there” there.

Gertrude Stein moved to Paris in 1903 – she never came back. “America is my country, and Paris is my home town.” She may have been onto something. Most evenings, at 27 rue de Fleurus, it was Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, chatting about art and real life. Back here we’re still chatting about nothing at all. And she was right about Oakland too. In the United States there really is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.

Impeachment Time

The late Rollo May was an existential psychologist – whatever that means. It was May and Viktor Frankl saying all inner conflict within a person is due to that individual’s confrontation with the givens of existence. Life’s a bitch and it really can get to you, so it’s not your fault. Inner conflict might be appropriate. May was also a close friend of the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich – so add God to the mix. It’s damned hard to figure out what’s going on and what it all means, and God isn’t saying much – so you’re on your own. Call it freedom. Choose what you choose to believe, and what you choose to do – but choose carefully. Rollo May defined our odd freedom this way – “Human freedom involves our capacity to pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.”

The two key elements here are our capacity to pause, to step back or step away from what everyone else says is urgent and the most important thing ever, and our response – a decision to throw our weight behind something or other, but framed as a wish, a sort of whim perhaps. Yes, but you cannot make that decision with that all-important pause – that’s the only freedom anyone has these days. Don’t get caught up in the current urgency. That probably means avoiding Fox News.

Pausing is easier said than done. Sometimes it has to be done for you, and here that meant stepping back from these daily columns, as a rather stupid injury needed attention. On the other hand that “twilight” anesthesia was mighty fine. Perhaps the surgery went well, but it’s hard to tell when you’re elsewhere, so to speak. Cool – and what everyone else was saying is urgent and the most important thing ever was also elsewhere. Step back or step away and none of it may seem all that urgent. The only thing to do is step back in and take a look. Maybe the truly urgent can be separated from posturing about nothing much at all.

That wasn’t to be, as Slate’s John Dickerson explains here:

In the past couple weeks in interviews with House and Senate staffers for the Republican leadership, there has been a depressing message: Nothing is going to get done for the next four years. Again and again, the same mantra could be heard. Partisanship and election jockeying for 2014 and 2016 is going to keep everything locked up.

Watching the live feed from the White House on Friday it became hard to argue otherwise. President Obama held an event with mothers defending the Affordable Care Act, the start of a month’s long effort to protect his signature achievement, which Republicans have promised to fight all the way to the 2014 elections and beyond. Then, shortly thereafter, White House press secretary Jay Carney jumped between answering questions about the administration’s response to the attacks in Benghazi to the Internal Revenue Service targeting the Tea Party and other conservative political groups for audits.

It’s going to take some time to get to the bottom of these controversies, but we can conclude the pessimists are probably right. Nothing is going to get done in this siege environment.

So repealing Obamacare is the most urgent thing in the world, or revisiting that Benghazi business once again, for the fortieth time or so, and the IRS has been picking on the Tea Party, which is the outrage of all outrages. It doesn’t seem so after a week of dealing with doctors and nurses and one really cool x-ray technician who blasted Miles Davis recordings as he took the images. Dickerson sums up the political world that’s still there, now made worse by the new Benghazi hearings and that IRS mess.

As for Obamacare, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell announced that Republicans would not be naming any members to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the IPAB, that fifteen-member agency created in 2010 by the Affordable Care Act, charged with making recommendations for ways to cut the cost of Medicare. They won’t participate in death panels, or something, and at the National Review, Wesley Smith was in seventh heaven:

Way to go! The next step is to use Senate confirmation hearings to educate the American people about why the IPAB is un-American and shatters representative democracy. Pound it, pound it, pound it! Then, Republicans and commonsense Democrats in the Senate should refuse to confirm any nominated members to the board, using a filibuster if necessary. After that, defunding and eventual repeal!

Kevin Drum is a bit amazed:

It’s now un-American for a government agency to be tasked with controlling costs in a government program. Is this because controlling costs is un-American? Is this because appointed commissions are un-American? Smith doesn’t say. But apparently it’s now conservative dogma that the only patriotic way Medicare costs can be reined in is by voucherizing the program. Nothing else is tolerable.

Of course, as a number of people have pointed out, this move doesn’t prevent IPAB from working. If the Senate doesn’t confirm anyone to the board, it just means that the HHS secretary has to make cost-cutting proposals on her own if Medicare grows faster than allowed. So what’s the point? Pretty obviously, it’s to make sure that if Medicare is cut in any way, Republicans can blame it solely and completely on Democrats.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your fiscally responsible Republican Party. Keep all this in mind the next time you hear them yammering on about how critical entitlement reform is and how our spiraling deficits are imperiling the country.

Add to that the fact that the Affordable Care Act is now law – passed by both the House and Senate and signed by Obama, and declared quite constitutional by the Supreme Court, almost three years ago. These guys lost. What’s the point of all this?

As for the IRS audits, that was a local mess:

Organizations were singled out because they included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups…”That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review,” Lerner said at a conference sponsored by the American Bar Association.

“The IRS would like to apologize for that,” she added.

Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. After her talk, she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. She did not say when they found out. About 75 groups were inappropriately targeted. None had their tax-exempt status revoked, Lerner said.

No one was harmed, except for having to submit extra paperwork – they all got their tax-exempt status, and it really was a Cincinnati problem, as Drum notes here:

Roughly speaking, what seems to have happened is that three years ago the IRS was facing an explosion of newly formed 501(c)4 groups claiming tax exempt status, something that’s legal only for groups that are primarily engaged in promoting education or social welfare, not electioneering. So some folks in the Cincinnati office tried to come up with a quick filter to flag groups that deserved extra scrutiny. But what should that flag be? Well, three years ago the explosion happened to be among tea party groups, so they began searching their database ”for applications with ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriots,’ or ’9/12′ in the organization’s name as well as other ‘political-sounding’ names.” This was dumb, and when senior leaders found out about it, they put a quick stop to it.

Drum argues that was the wrong thing to do:

The problem is that the explosion of 501(c)4 groups is a genuine problem: they really have grown like kudzu, lots of them really are used primarily as electioneering vehicles, and the IRS has been either unwilling or unable to regulate them properly. So the fact that some of the folks responsible for processing these applications were looking for a way to flag potentially dubious groups is sort of understandable.

But understandable or not, they bungled it horribly, leaving themselves open to equally understandable charges of politicizing the IRS. Conservative groups are as outraged as liberals would be if the Bush-era IRS were flagging groups with “environment” or “progressive” in their names. So even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn’t matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation. They suspect there might be more to it, and so would I if the shoe were on the other foot. We need to find out for sure whether this episode was just moronic, or if it had some kind of partisan motivation.

What’s really unfortunate about all this is that it will probably put an end to any scrutiny of 501(c)4 groups, and that’s a shame. The IRS should be scrutinizing them, and it should be doing it on an ongoing basis.

Was this the outrage of all outrages, or just a logical but misguided attempt at filtering data? Let us pause and then choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight.

As for Benghazi, ABC News now has a complete set of drafts of those damning “talking points” that were prepared in the days following the Benghazi attacks. Kevin Drum also summarizes them:

From the very start, the talking points say that the attacks were “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo” and then “evolved” into the assaults on the two compounds in Benghazi.

The first draft included references to “Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida.” This was eventually sanded down to “extremists” after the State Department pointed out that they had been deliberately withholding this information because “we don’t want to prejudice the investigation.” This is the same thing that David Petraeus told Congress last November.

The third draft included an ass-covering paragraph from the CIA making sure everyone knew they had produced “numerous pieces” on possible threats to Benghazi in the previous few months, with the obvious implication that the State Department had ignored them. Unsurprisingly, the State Department’s spokesman, Victoria Nuland, objected to this gratuitous display of bureaucratic point scoring. It was removed in the final draft.

Drum adds this:

I’m really, really trying to find anything scandalous here. I know I’m biased. But on a scale of 1 to 10, this is about a 1.5. It’s a little bit of unseemly bureaucratic squabbling combined with the usual mushiness that you get when an interagency process produces a series of drafts of sensitive information for public consumption. But I’m sure it calls for impeachment hearings to begin anyway.

Glenn Kessler adds the detail:

This basically was a bureaucratic knife fight, pitting the State Department against the CIA. …

First, some important context: Although the ambassador was killed, the Benghazi “consulate” was not a consulate at all but basically a secret CIA operation which included an effort to round up shoulder-launched missiles. In fact, only seven of the 30 Americans evacuated from Benghazi had any connection to the State Department; the rest were affiliated with the CIA… So, from the State Department perspective, this was an attack on a CIA operation.

The talking points were originally developed by the CIA… that State screwed up, even though internally, it was known that this was a CIA operation. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland especially objects to the reference to previous warnings, saying it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings.” …

The final version of the talking points shows what happened: Just about everything was cut, leaving virtually nothing. The reference to “consulate” was also deleted, replaced by “diplomatic post.” From a bureaucratic perspective, it may have seemed like the best possible solution at the time. From a political perspective, it turned out to be a disaster.

So the CIA tried to add a paragraph that deflected blame for the mess elsewhere and State objected since they considered this a CIA operation in the first place. That’s bureaucratic infighting, not a scandal, although David Corn has another take on this – “This is not much of cover-up. There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi… But the White House has indeed been caught not telling the full story.”

Should impeachment hearings begin now? Michael Tomasky sees them coming:

There is utterly no proof that the President Obama even knew anything directly about the shifting Benghazi responses, let alone did something about them (yes, folks; under the Constitution, the President must do something). And as for the Internal Revenue Service story, from what we now know, those transgressions were committed by IRS staffers in Cincinnati who have never been closer to Obama than their television sets. … The idea that Obama has any direct culpability in either of these matters is, given what we know today, utter madness. Okay?

But this is my point: utter madness is what today’s Republicans do. You can present to me every logical argument you desire. Benghazi at the end of the day was a terrible tragedy in which mistakes, bad mistakes, were certainly made, and in which confusion and the CYA reflex led to some bad information going out to the public initially, but none of this remotely rises to the level of high crime. The IRS cock-up was just that, a mistake by a regional office. I get all this, and I agree with you.

But what we think doesn’t matter. I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit. Most Republican members of the House live in districts where it is a given (among the white constituents, anyway) that Obama is a socialist; that’s he bent on bringing the United States of America down, or at least that he definitely doesn’t love the country and the Constitution (nudge nudge) the way they do; that he’s not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office to start with. At the time he was sworn in to his second term, 64 percent of Republicans agreed that Obama was “hiding important information” about his background. Half thought in December 2012 that he stole the election.

Tomasky sees the inevitable:

At this point some of you may be protesting: but at least Clinton did commit a crime, however lame a crime it was. Obama has done no such thing. Again, in reality-land, no, he hasn’t. In their land, however, he has committed a string of them; he just hasn’t been caught yet. And that’s what Darrell Issa and his committee are there to unearth. Besides, he need commit no conventional crime. A high crime or misdemeanor is whatever the House majority decides it is. Remember, in January 1998, impeachment talk started before Clinton had perjured himself.

There is no end to it. And there is no end to Republican figures – and to a distressing extent, the mainstream media – feeding the crazy. When Lindsey Graham calls Benghazi “Obama’s Watergate,” he knows exactly what he’s saying, and so do Republicans in South Carolina, and across the country. And observe over the next few days – it’s already happening – how quickly journalistic shorthand, certainly in the right-wing media, converts the Cincinnati IRS office into “Obama’s IRS,” as if he were sitting around like Nixon personally targeting these groups. You and I know that’s absurd. But on the right, it’s a given that he was doing exactly that.

Tomasky then reviews public opinion at the time of Clinton’s impeachment – support for his impeachment ran between seventeen and twenty-six percent, with one outlier, once, at forty percent. Tomasky notes that the public hated the whole idea, not that it mattered:

Did that stop anyone? No. And it won’t stop them now. They do their base’s bidding, not America’s. How many times do you need to see them do this before you accept that it is the reality? And now there’s an added element. They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.

Thus, a warning:

I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. It might crescendo right up to his very last day in office. And yes, a lot of this Benghazi stuff is about Hillary Clinton – but not all of it. And the IRS thing, which Drudge led with for two days in a row and may yet be bigger than Benghazi, isn’t about her at all. If my worst fears are never realized – well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do.

The blogger BooMan is more direct:

Given the slightest pretext, the House Republicans will certainly begin drafting articles of impeachment. How can we really know where the fine line might be drawn between something that is merely a crazy conspiracy theory and an insane decision to impeach the president over it?

Still, as worked up as the right has become over Benghazi and as frothy as they’re likely to get over any scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, there still has to be something more directly tied to the president for the GOP to start the impeachment hearings.

They won’t try to impeach the president over anything that is in the news right now. They will talk about it, but they won’t do it.

The thing is, if they ever find something (no matter how flimsy) that really reflects quite badly on the president, they will impeach him for it. They won’t care if only fifteen percent of the public agrees with them. They won’t care if the offense is the farthest thing imaginable from a high crime. They’ll do it because they have lizard brains and they act like lizard people.

Ah but there’s this headline – McCain Defends Obama against Impeachment for Benghazi, Will ‘Give President Benefit Of The Doubt’ – but ask any Republican. McCain never really was one. Nothing changed after the pause. Let us pause and then choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. If only it were that simple.

Now back to the madness.