Manufactured GOP scandals falling apart ... All three of them!

Now that "more information" has been brought to light on the three big White House scandals about which we endured so many shrill and hysterical threads this year, it's evident (as it was from the beginning BTW) that the GOP and their ruling faction, the tea party, were simply on a witch hunt.

In other words, every stumble, mistake or Fuckup by government does not constitute a political scandal; nor a breach of the public trust, the oath of office or the fucking constitution, as some (of you howler monkeys) have insisted since President Obama took office.

Here's an excellent update, courtesy of Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:


The Scandals Are Falling Apart
by Ezra Klein

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...falling-apart/

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.
On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.


1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected:
This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:

According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.
White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.

But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.


So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be.


3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There’s no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn’t taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it’s hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies.

Insofar as there’s a “scandal” here, it’s more about what is legal than what isn’t. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens — members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post’s Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It’s likely that the measure’s national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can — and probably should — take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it’s likely to be killed by them again.
The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was “passive.” He seemed to be a “bystander.” His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself.

That perception, too, seems to be changing. Mike Allen’s Playbook, which is ground zero for scandal CW, led Thursday with a squib that says “the West Wing got its mojo back” and is “BACK ON OFFENSE.” Yes, the caps are in the original.

The smarter voices on the right are also beginning to counsel caution. ”While there’s still more information to be gathered and more investigations to be done, all indications are that these decisions – on the AP, on the IRS, on Benghazi – don’t proceed from [Obama],” wrote Ben Domenech in The Transom, his influential conservative morning newsletter. “The talk of impeachment is absurd. The queries of ‘what did the president know and when did he know it’ will probably end up finding out “’just about nothing, and right around the time everyone else found out.’”

I want to emphasize: It’s always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals.
And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501(c)(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn’t get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it’ll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.

As it relates to all of this years scandals fabricated by the GOP, let me remind all of you Far Right Wingers of the famous Wendy's commercial from yesteryear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0

To our Tea Farty Conspiracy Theory contortionists', everything points to the man with the false birth certificate!

Damn the facts!

To our Tea Farty Conspiracy Theory contortionists', everything points to the man with the false birth certificate!

Damn the facts! Originally Posted by WTF

You mean.. sorta like EVERYTHING bad that happened, from 2001 to today, was all due to BUSH? At least according to you liberals? Like that?

Actually, that's not what Im saying. Read closely. This is about manufactured POLITICAL SCANDALS.

It isnt about what US LIBBERLS blame on Bush. And what you don't blame on him.

Woah! I'm glad it was all just a bad dream.

Obamacare isn't real ether, we can all just relax now.

This "GOP Manufactured Scandal" has some legs,

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...s-phone-calls/

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, being able to listen to phone calls would mean the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

But I'm sure you are totally OK with this. Its for our "Safety" after all, right?

This doesn't deal with the NSA deal, CC? But thanks for playing.

I think we are ALL outraged by the NSA deal, which btw was initiated by Bush.

This "GOP Manufactured Scandal" has some legs,

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57...s-phone-calls/


But I'm sure you are totally OK with this. Its for our "Safety" after all, right? Originally Posted by Chica Chaser

Not so fast. From your article....

"James Owens, a spokesman for Nadler, provided a statement on Sunday morning,
a day after this article was published, saying: "I am pleased that the administration
has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content
of Americans' phone calls without a specific warrant."

Wouldn't it be ironic if this part of your article...

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

...was simply Nadler's confusion in having been told that this is what Cheney did, while
his follow up statement is more reflective of what's now going on with Obama in charge?

I refer you back to post #3.

Not so fast. From your article....

"James Owens, a spokesman for Nadler, provided a statement on Sunday morning,
a day after this article was published, saying: "I am pleased that the administration
has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content
of Americans' phone calls without a specific warrant."

Wouldn't it be ironic if this part of your article...

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

...was simply Nadler's confusion in having been told that this is what Cheney did, while
his follow up statement is more reflective of what's now going on with Obama in charge?

I refer you back to post #3. Originally Posted by Doove

nothing like facts to cut off some legs

If you read Nadler's words closely, i think the more likely scenario is that he's simply conflating what's possible (to listen just because some NSA agent "says so") with what is actual policy (to require a warrant).

If you read Nadler's words closely, i think the more likely scenario is that he's simply conflating what's possible (to listen just because some NSA agent "says so") with what is actual policy (to require a warrant). Originally Posted by Doove

God Damn those facts!

If it happens on his watch, it is his fault.....root cause analysis reveals that the stench only tells us there is a problem. Knowing the origin of the stench indicates what needs to be cleaned up.

If it happens on his watch, it is his fault..... Originally Posted by The2Dogs

2Pups, that is 180 degrees opposite from what you said when George W. Bush was POTUS.

You thought I would forget, didn't ya?