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.

Another Brief Pause

Personal matters intrude again. Commentary (and photography too) will resume after the doctors have done their minor repairs. Nothing all that serious – these things happen. One must be careful around the house. Ah well. Sitting quietly and napping off and on will have to do for now – that and rereading Swift and Johnson or something. This century won’t do at all.

Addendum: Surgery on Thursday – minor surgery but the sort of thing that removes you from this planet for a time – so commentary must wait until that “twilight” stuff wears off. Oh hell, the next column may be Friday evening, or maybe it’s best to just write off this week.

Addendum Two: The surgery on my foot (don’t ask) was a bit more extensive than anticipated, but successful. And the post-op drugs are marvelous. But that means the world still seems more than a bit hazy. It’s best to approach the world of politics and society and international relations with a clear head – or maybe not. No one else does. Be that as it may, commentary will resume when it’s just dull pain, not whatever this is now.

When Democracy Interferes with Freedom

No one plans a vacation in Houston – it’s a rather nasty place. There’s a reason their football team is called the Oilers – that’s what the city is about, oil and big money, and it’s hot as hell too. The baseball team is the Astros, named that because NASA put their Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston back in 1961 – but they had to build that Astrodome thing for the baseball team, an air-conditioned indoor stadium. Playing outdoors might kill you, what with all the giant refineries and chemical plants doing what they do. Those explode now and then, and now and then a hurricane barrels in from the Gulf. Then there was Enron, headquartered there. They were not nice people, but it’s a big city of big money, and no one is all that particular about how you make that big money. Lots of corporations are headquartered there and the port is always full of giant tankers – it’s kind of the petrochemical center of the universe. Perhaps that makes Houston the nation’s most important city. A dozen years ago those bad guys flew those airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but that was symbolic. If they wanted to do real damage they would have flown all three down to Houston, the energy capital of America – but three more massive fireballs there wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s that kind of place. It’s even more American than Las Vegas. It’s who we really are.

That’s probably why the National Rifle Association had their big convention there. It’s Texas too, in all its in-your-face George Bush and Rick Perry glory. Don’t mess with Texas. It’s a threat. And the convention was three days of don’t-mess-with-us speeches – that Sandy Hook massacre, and the one in Aurora, and the mass killing that left Gabby Giffords with a big chunk of her brain blown away, and Virginia Tech before that, and Columbine long ago, those don’t mean a thing. Ninety percent of the country wanted to expand background checks so nuts couldn’t buy guns, the families of the victims met with senators and congressmen and were all over the airwaves, the president finally took a stand and said pass this background check bill, and said it over and over, all over the country – and the National Rifle Association stopped the whole thing cold.

It was a celebration. No one was going to push them around – not even the overwhelming majority. Every politician in America was afraid of them. Those politicians all fell in line. Those few who didn’t hated freedom, and freedom is more important than what people want and who and what they vote for. No one would take their guns, and everyone should be armed – no questions asked. How else would anyone ever feel in control of their lives? Patriots believe in freedom, not democracy.

No, that can’t be right. Those two words are supposed to go together. That was the whole problem that the convention tried to work out, so the talk moved to general principles:

A parade of conservative politicians – including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former presidential candidate Rick Santorum and Texas Gov. Rick Perry – assailed Obama and cast the fight over gun control as part of a broader culture war.

“This is about what kind of people we are and what kind of country we want to be,” said Palin, who stood at the podium in a black-and-pink t-shirt featuring moose antlers and the slogan “women hunt.” Cruz bragged about his filibuster of gun legislation and received a standing ovation. Back in the Senate, even his GOP colleagues had urged him and others who joined him not to be too public in their protests.

Sure, but bigger things were afoot. This wasn’t about guns, as the Los Angeles Times’ Robin Abcarian notes here:

The message is: If you feel devastated about the slaughters of Sandy Hook, or Aurora, or Tucson, instead of trying to prevent crazy people from acquiring weapons, you should do something constructive.

Like pray.

“Where we see tragedy,” said NRA chief lobbyist Chris Cox, “Barack Obama and Michael Bloomberg, they see opportunity. While we pray for God to comfort those suffering unimaginable pain, they rush to microphones and cameras, gather in war rooms on Capitol Hill and scheme about how to use that suffering to push their political agenda.”

Yeah, that makes sense.

I can definitely see where praying is much more effective than trying to pass universal background checks for gun purchases, limit the size of magazines or ban assault weapons.

And there was the queen of the convention:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who once sipped on a Big Gulp during a speech to tweak soda-averse New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delighted the NRA crowd when she threatened to open a can of chewing tobacco to protest Bloomberg’s attempts to limit cigarette displays in stores.

“The politics of emotion,” Palin said, are governing current attempts to enact common-sense gun restrictions. “It’s not just self-serving, it’s destructive,” she said. “And it must stop.” …

“Second Amendment rights are personal to me,” said Palin, who explained that her youngest son’s nickname is “Trigger,” her nephew’s middle name is “Remington,” her oldest son is a combat vet. “I could go on and on about the connections there.”

I bet she could.

However, if your first-grader died in a hail of bullets in the classroom, you, and the president who agrees with you about limits on gun ownership, are expected to shut up and grieve in silence.

You can’t be trusted to understand the gun debate.

You’re too emotional.

It was all very odd, and somewhat predictable, as Steve Benen notes:

The NRA presented its familiar faces (Wayne LaPierre), its familiar villains (President Obama, Michael Bloomberg), it’s friends who are struggling to remain relevant (Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin), and a whole bunch of Republicans who are likely to run for president (Santorum, Perry, Walker, and Jindal).

Of course, it also presented a sadly predictable ugly side. One vendor at the convention, for example, sold “life-sized” torsos made to look like the president, which “bleed when you shoot them.” Asked if the Obama likeness was intentional, the vendor told BuzzFeed, “Let’s just say I gave my Republican father one for Christmas.”

Looking ahead, one of the more notable developments for the organization is the election of James Porter, an Alabama attorney, as the group’s new president.

So LaPierre is gone, and David Keene, the former chairman of the American Conservative Union, has served as NRA president, but the new guy, who says this about far more than guns, is something special:

As shown by his “culture war” comment Friday and others in his past, Porter’s style is likely to be one that fans the flames of an emotionally combustible debate.

Porter has called President Barack Obama a “fake president,” Attorney General Eric Holder “rabidly un-American” and the U.S. Civil War the “War of Northern Aggression.” On Friday, he repeated his call for training every U.S. citizen in the use of standard military firearms, to allow them to defend themselves against tyranny.

Benen:

That last point is of particular interest. Our friends at “All In with Chris Hayes” aired a Porter clip on Friday’s show that stood out for me: “Our most greatest [sic] charges that we can have today is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so when they have to fight for their country, they are ready do it. Also, when they are ready to fight tyranny, they are ready to do it. Also, when they are ready to fight tyranny, they have the wherewithal and weapons to do it.”

Porter hasn’t specified who, exactly, the tyrants might be, but it sounds as if he wants American civilians to be trained to use military weapons in case they need to commit acts of violence against the United States.

Ed Kilgore takes it from there:

The National Rifle Association’s new president, James Porter of Birmingham, Alabama, likes to talk about the importance of the Second Amendment as a way to ensure the American people will be able to “resist tyranny” – i.e., shoot and kill law enforcement officers, members of the U.S. armed services, and presumably anyone else (you know, like their neighbors) who might disagree with their definition of their essential “liberties” – at some undefined point in the future. And while I’ve not yet seen evidence of him calling Barack Obama a “tyrant” (though he has called him a “fake president”) I’d be shocked if it doesn’t exist.

So let’s put it this way: Porter seems to be highly representative of the amazingly common type of contemporary “conservatives” who combine extremist language about their political opponents with violent language about their political options – who in effect point their guns at “liberals” while making it known they and they alone will decide what “liberties” to surrender, democracy or laws be damned.

Democracy and freedom somehow got separated along the way, and not nicely:

It makes it worse that Porter is one of the old boys who thinks it hilarious to refer to the American Civil War as the “war of northern aggression” (as “we” put it “down south,” he said to a New York crowd recently). Since that war, whatever else it represented, was without question an armed revolution against the government of the United States, you have to wonder if the Confederacy – or as it was commonly referred to in the north for many decades, “the Rebellion” – is Porter’s model for defense of oneself against “tyranny” (you may recall that John Wilkes Booth shouted “Sic semper tyrannus” – “thus always to tyrants”) after shooting Lincoln.

Am I perhaps being unfair to these people in suggesting that they are behaving like America-haters and are flirting with treason?

That may be unfair, and it’s quite logical too. Earlier, Kilgore had noted about this poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University reporting that 29% of Americans, and 44% of Republicans, think “in the next few years, an armed revolution may be necessary to protect our liberties.” At the time Kilgore said this:

It was taken in the context of understanding the sources of hard-core opposition to gun regulation measures, and sure seemed to indicate a subscription to Second Amendment absolutism that’s deeper than anything we’ve seen before. You can dismiss it for its sample size or its question order or its wording if you want, but I’m sorry: when nearly half the self-identified members of one of our two major political parties in any sample looks benignly on the possibility of “armed revolution” – particularly when it’s the supposedly conservative party – we’ve got real problems.

Kilgore sees trouble ahead:

I’ve preached for a good long while now that the absolute minimum the rest of us can expect from the leaders of the Republican Party and the conservative movement is to spend some serious time declaring anathemas against any talk on the Right of some “right to revolution,” particularly in the context of discussions of the possession of lethal weapons. Combine a “right to revolution” with the belief that most people voting for Barack Obama are baby-killing looters who are revolting against God’s very specific plan for America as laid right out there in the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution, and you could get some unfortunate consequences, beginning, obviously, with a lot of people whose commitment to the rule of law and democratic procedures is perpetually conditional.

We need to get right in the faces of people blandly asserting a “right to revolution” and make sure they explicitly acknowledge that “armed revolution” is not some sort of Independence Day parade, but the very tangible enterprise of taking weapons and spilling the blood and taking the lives of police officers and members of the United States Armed Forces. Even if they continue to maintain that “right” as a remote, 1% contingency if America becomes a very different place, perhaps they’ll be less likely to talk as though it’s a lively proposition that might be triggered by next week’s health care regulations or next year’s adverse election results.

But our main target ought to be the politicians and pundits and bloggers that walk the revolutionary rhetorical road because it’s “entertaining” or it makes them feel all macho (like Grover Norquist swaggering around Washington with a “I’d rather be killing commies” button after one of his trips to Angola in the 1980s), or it’s just useful to have an audience or a political base mobilized to a state of near-violence by images of fire and smoke and iron and blood.

One must be logical about such things:

You can only imagine how these self-appointed guardians of liberty would feel if casual talk of “armed revolution” became widespread on the left or among those people. There should not and cannot be a double standard on this issue.

So please join me in calling on conservatives to cut this crap out and separate themselves from those who believe in vindicating the “original constitution” or defending their property rights or exalting their God or protecting the unborn via armed revolution. If William F. Buckley could ”excommunicate” Robert Welch and the John Birch Society from the conservative movement back in the 1960s, today’s leaders on the Right can certainly do the same to those who not only share many of that Society’s views, but are willing to talk about implementing them by killing cops and soldiers.

That’s not going to happen, and Kilgore now says this:

Porter and those like him could dispel this sort of suspicion instantly, any time they wanted, by just saying: “Let’s be clear: the kind of ‘tyranny’ we are arming ourselves to forestall is something entirely different from anything Americans have experienced since we won our independence – a regime engaged in the active suppression of any sort of dissent, and the closure of any peaceful means for the redress of grievances. We’re not talking about the current administration, or either major political party, as presently representing a threat of tyranny.”

I’m not holding my breath for any statements like that to emerge from the NRA, or indeed, from the contemporary conservative movement. It’s ironic that people who almost certainly think of themselves as patriots – perhaps as super-patriots – are deliberately courting the impression that loyalty to their country is strictly contingent on the maintenance of laws and policies they favor, to be achieved if not by ballots then by bullets. Republican politicians should be repudiating such people instead of celebrating them, accepting their money and support, and even adopting their seditious rhetoric.

Kevin Drum seconds that:

Normally, I’d brush this off as nothing more than a guy blowing off steam in front of a friendly audience. And to a large extent, I do. Still, Ed is right. If an imam in Brooklyn toured the country saying stuff like this, no one would just laugh it off. Ditto for a Black Panther or the head of the American communist party. Fox News would go ballistic.

This kind of stuff has gone well beyond the stage of being a joke or merely a way to rally the troops, and it’s long past time for some of the alleged adults in the conservative movement to rein it in. Enough is enough. Guns have never been a hot button for me in the past, but the NRA is sure working hard to make them into one.

But maybe it’s not guns, as Kilgore wrote this back in 2005:

In the Judeo-Christian tradition one who takes a prophetic stance believes the moral and spiritual conditions of a society have become so depraved that the faithful are obliged to step outside the normal bounds of civility and respect for authority and call down the righteous wrath of God. Taking a prophetic stance is by definition exceptional; occasionally essential, but always spiritually as well as politically dangerous. And that is why true prophets are so greatly honored, and false prophets are so feared and despised.

My guess is that the leaders of the religious right know how perilous their adoption of the prophetic stance truly is. And this knowledge explains, better than any other factor, the remarkable tone of paranoia, self-pity, and even hysteria that has come to characterize their political utterances…

The prophetic stance is rapidly leading the religious right and its political allies into contempt for their own country and their fellow citizens, because, after all, the prophetic stance is implicitly reserved as an extraordinary response to fundamentally wicked societies.

And now Kilgore adds this:

So yes, there is a moral “right to revolution” just as there is a moral obligation to take a “prophetic stance” on extremely rare occasions (particularly in a country like the United States, with its many avenues for free speech and activism). When either becomes just another lever of political or cultural conflict, it quite naturally elevates the stakes to the level of virtual warfare, dehumanizing the “enemy,” and debasing all discourse.

Kilgore is just trying to figure out why revolutionary rhetoric is becoming so routine these days:

Some of it stems from the kind of “constitutional conservatism” that elevates every political or policy dispute to a question of basic patriotism or even obedience to Almighty God. But a big part of it can also be attributed to cynical opportunists who manipulate those fearful (usually without much cause) of tyranny for their own very conventional ends – usually power and money.

Maybe this cannot be stopped, but something can be done:

At a minimum, those who toy with the idea of overthrowing our government to stop Obamacare or prevent gun regulation need to stand up to the charge that they hate America. It will make them crazy to hear it, but it’s the truth.

Yep, it will make then crazy to hear it. They’ll say America is freedom, not democracy – or they’ll try to fudge the issue.

Paul Krugman said this after the Tucson shooting:

I remembered the upsurge in political hatred after Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 – an upsurge that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing. And you could see, just by watching the crowds at McCain-Palin rallies, that it was ready to happen again. The Department of Homeland Security reached the same conclusion: in April 2009 an internal report warned that right-wing extremism was on the rise, with a growing potential for violence.

Conservatives denounced that report. But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.

It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.

Last spring Politico.com reported on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness – but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.

The NRA was toying with their Houston convention, so what Krugman said more than two years ago still applies:

It’s important to be clear here about the nature of our sickness. It’s not a general lack of “civility” – the favorite term of pundits who want to wish away fundamental policy disagreements. Politeness may be a virtue, but there’s a big difference between bad manners and calls, explicit or implicit, for violence; insults aren’t the same as incitement.

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

That was two years ago, and this is now:

Adam Kokesh, 31, is planning a July 4 rally of pro-gun activists openly carrying rifles from Virginia to Washington as an act of “civil disobedience.” The plan, according to his Facebook event page, is to march across Memorial Bridge with rifles loaded and slung across the back “to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated [and] cower in submission to tyranny.”

The invite continues, stating that this “will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent.”

Kokesh writes that if 10,000 attendees RSVP by June 1st, “we have the critical mass necessary to pull this off.” He said he wants to have at least 1,000 actually marching in the event, and as of this writing, more than 1,400 have said they were going.

What could possibly go wrong? They’re simply patriots who believe in freedom, so don’t mess with them or tell them what the so-called “people” want. They’ve got guns.

Don’t mess with them. Don’t mess with Texas. It all fits together. In fact, it all fit together in Houston.

Houston, we’ve got a problem.