“To Boycott Or Not Boycott”: Why Should Democrats Participate In The Ridiculous Republican Benghazi Charade?
House Republicans, as expected, are moving forward with yet another committee to investigate the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi in September 2012, intended to complement the seven other congressional committees that have already held hearings on the attack. For House Democrats, there’s a straightforward question: is there any point in participating?
The answer isn’t necessarily obvious.
Objective observers can probably agree in advance that the new “select” committee is intended to serve a political, not a fact-finding, purpose. If the goal were to simply get objective information, lawmakers could rely on the existing congressional process and consider the independent, comprehensive reports that have already been published. After 13 hearings, 50 briefings, and 25,000 produced documents, the official record is already quite complete.
But since the available information doesn’t tell far-right conspiracy theorists what they wanted to hear, conspiracy theorists demanded a select committee, which in turn suggests this new investigation will be a partisan exercise – Republicans are starting with the answer they want, working backwards to find evidence to bolster the agreed-upon conclusion.
Why should Democrats participate in this ridiculous charade? Some are arguing that they shouldn’t – let Republicans play their election-year games, the argument goes, exploiting a terrorist attack for electoral gain, but let them do it alone.
For that matter, even if Dems do participate, is there any credible chance they’ll be treated fairly as part of a respectful and responsible analysis of the events in Benghazi? I suspect even many Republicans would find the very idea amusing.
Democrats could boycott the scheme and let the GOP committee members do what they intend to do anyway: keep the fundraising machine humming, give allied media outlets fodder, and use the process to keep the Republican base agitated in an election year. Why legitimize a probe with a fraudulent foundation? Why lend credence to an endeavor that appears to be scripted by Fox News producers?
There is, however, a flip side to this.
Greg Sargent had an interesting chat with Norm Ornstein.
In purely political terms, this isn’t necessarily an easy call for Dems, because there is some benefit in participating, even if the committee is constructed in a ridiculously partisan fashion. “Some of these hearings are going to be televised,” Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein tells me. “The question is, does it make more sense to be in there, participating in the process and pointing out Republican overkill again and again, or does it make more sense to further destroy the image of the committee by staying out of it?”
Of course, the question of how to construct the committee also presents Republicans with a dilemma. “The more the committee overreaches and tries to find a big scandal where there is none, the more Republicans run the risk of the American people seeing the Congress they run as utterly unconcerned about the things that matter to them,” Ornstein says.
If Dems are in the room, they can at least occasionally highlight facts for anyone watching the process unfold. During testimony, Fox will probably break for commercials whenever Democrats ask questions of witnesses, but for anyone else paying attention, at least a little pushback during the hearings might at least add some variety to the charade.
I’ll confess that I’m torn, and if I were in Democratic leaders’ shoes, I’m not sure what I’d do. Keep in mind, however, that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argued today that Dems could participate, and in the interest of fairness, she called for parity – Pelosi suggested the committee, if it’s serious about getting at the truth, could be split evenly between Republican and Democratic members, who would share resources and information. If it’s not a political scam, she said, it should be a bipartisan, cooperative process.
Republicans are already poised to reject Pelosi’s idea.
Imagine that.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 6, 2014
“An Election-Year ‘Hustle The-Base’ Strategy”: Democrats Should Boycott Latest Benghazi Charade
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is trying to make the GOP’s latest Benghazi theater more than partisan drama by asking Speaker John Boehner to appoint an equal number of Democrats and Republicans to the new “investigative” panel he’s convening. The speaker is unlikely to do that, so Democrats should boycott this latest GOP fundraising stunt.
Five House committees have already investigated the Benghazi tragedy and issued biased reports; there have been two Senate committee reports plus the Accountability Review Board’s findings. The bipartisan reports found errors on the part of State Department personnel and recommended staffing and other changes. But because none of the investigations were able to charge then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with incompetence, or prove that President Obama tried to cover up the truth to get re-elected, Republicans won’t believe them, and insist there’s more to “investigate.”
Thus we have the latest House Benghazi stunt – and Democrats should stay away from it. There’s precedent for boycotting such a panel: Dems did so in 2005, when Republicans organized a sham “investigation” into how President Bush handled the Katrina catastrophe, when it became clear the effort was meant to be a whitewash, not a thorough probe.
I admit, Benghazi is to progressives what climate change is to conservatives: No matter how much the right wing shrieks about it, and purports to have new evidence of wrongdoing, we don’t believe it. The difference is, progressives are right. The notion that a newly uncovered email from national security communications staffer Ben Rhodes “necessitated” this latest investigation is another partisan cover story.
On one level, the new committee is actually a rebuke to histrionic House Oversight Committee chair Darrell Issa, whose many forays into the swamp of Benghazi conspiracy theories uncovered nothing to hurt Democrats, not even the Rhodes email. As ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings has pointed out, Issa denied Democratic members the most basic tools with which to participate in his committee’s sham investigation:
Over the past year, House Republicans have conducted their Benghazi investigation in a completely partisan manner by denying access to hearing witnesses, leaking cherry-picked excerpts to create a false narrative, issuing unilateral subpoenas without Committee votes, releasing multiple partisan staff reports, excluding Democratic Members from fact-finding delegations to Libya in violation of the Speaker’s own rules, and launching unsubstantiated accusations that turn out to be completely false. So I do not have much faith that a new select committee will be any different.
The new committee won’t have any more power than Issa’s did. And there’s no reason to believe chairman Trey Gowdy will be smarter or fairer than Issa (check out Simon Moloy’s profile here.) Gowdy is the Oversight Committee member who has set his hectoring of witnesses to action-movie music and posted it to You Tube. He is likely to out-Issa Darrell Issa.
There’s possible political risk in boycotting the Gowdy charade. “Some of these hearings are going to be televised,” political scientist Norman Ornstein told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “The question is, does it make more sense to be in there, participating in the process and pointing out Republican overkill again and again, or does it make more sense to further destroy the image of the committee by staying out of it?”
It’s true that as the Oversight Committee’s leading Democrat, Cummings has been able to regularly thwart Issa and counter the chair’s allegations in the media. But he did so at a constant disadvantage, since he was shut out of the investigative process by Issa. There’s no reason to expect Gowdy to treat Democrats any differently. (Cummings’ office says he has not yet taken a position on the boycott idea.)
Gowdy’s committee is best understood as as a base-energizing fundraising tool for the GOP, part of what Politico’s Michael Hirsch calls “the Benghazi industrial complex,” engineered to damage Clinton so much she either can’t run for president or decides it’s not worth the pain. Of course, Benghazi fever hasn’t spread beyond the fever swamps of Obama hatred that afflict the GOP’s far-right base. But that’s enough to keep it alive, and potentially make it a potent midterm-election organizing tool. House Democrats should make that role clear by boycotting it.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 6, 2014
“Inventing A Failure”: Republican Lies, Damned Lies And In This Case, Bogus Statistics
Last week, House Republicans released a deliberately misleading report on the status of health reform, crudely rigging the numbers to sustain the illusion of failure in the face of unexpected success. Are you shocked?
You aren’t, but you should be. Mainstream politicians didn’t always try to advance their agenda through lies, damned lies and — in this case — bogus statistics. And the fact that this has become standard operating procedure for a major party bodes ill for America’s future.
About that report: The really big policy news of 2014, at least so far, is the spectacular recovery of the Affordable Care Act from its stumbling start, thanks to an extraordinary late surge that took enrollment beyond early projections. The age mix of enrollees has improved; insurance companies are broadly satisfied with the risk pool. Multiple independent surveys confirm that the percentage of Americans without health insurance has already declined substantially, and there’s every reason to believe that over the next two years the act will meet its overall goals, except in states that refuse to expand Medicaid.
This is a problem for Republicans, who have bet the ranch on the proposition that health reform is an unfixable failure. “Nobody can make Obamacare work,” declared Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, a couple of weeks ago (when it was already obvious that it was working pretty well). How can they respond to good news?
Well, they could graciously admit that they were wrong, and offer constructive suggestions about how to make the law work even better. Oh, sorry — I forgot that I wasn’t writing jokes for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
No, they have in fact continued to do what they’ve been doing ever since the news on Obamacare started turning positive: sling as much mud as possible at health reform, in the hope that some of it sticks. Premiums were soaring, they declared, when they have actually come in below projections. Millions of people were losing coverage, they insisted, when the great bulk of those whose policies were canceled simply replaced them with new policies. The Obama administration was cooking the books, they cried (projection, anyone?). And, of course, they keep peddling horror stories about people suffering terribly from Obamacare, not one of which has actually withstood scrutiny.
Now comes the latest claim — that many of the people who signed up for insurance aren’t actually paying their premiums. Obviously this claim is part of a continuing pattern. It also, however, involves a change in tactics. Previous attacks on Obamacare were pretty much fact-free; this time the claim was backed by an actual survey purporting to show that a third of enrollees hadn’t paid their first premium.
But the survey was rigged. (Are you surprised?) It asked insurers how many enrollees had paid their first premium; it ignored the fact that the first premium wasn’t even due for the millions of people who signed up for insurance after March 15.
And the fact that the survey was so transparently rigged is a smoking gun, proving that the attacks on Obamacare aren’t just bogus; they’re deliberately bogus. The staffers who set up that survey knew enough about the numbers to skew them, which meant that they have to have known that Obamacare is actually doing O.K.
So why are Republicans doing this? Sad to say, there’s method in their fraudulence.
First of all, it fires up the base. After this latest exercise in deception, we can be fairly sure that Republican leaders know perfectly well that Obamacare has failed to fail. But the party faithful don’t. Like anyone who writes about these issues, I get vast amounts of mail from people who know, just know, that insurance premiums are skyrocketing, that far more people have lost insurance because of Obummercare than have gained it, that all the horror stories are real, and that anyone who says otherwise is just a liberal shill.
Beyond that, the constant harping on alleged failure works as innuendo even if each individual claim collapses in the face of evidence. A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans know that more than eight million people enrolled in health exchanges; but it also found a majority of respondents believing that this was below expectations, and that the law was working badly.
So Republicans are spreading disinformation about health reform because it works, and because they can — there is no sign that they pay any political price when their accusations are proved false.
And that observation should scare you. What happens to the Congressional Budget Office if a party that has learned that lying about numbers works takes full control of Congress? What happens if it regains the White House, too? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 4, 2014
“Scandal Envy Is An Ugly Thing”: Republicans Have Prioritized Keeping The Far-Right Base In A State Of Perpetual Rage
It’s been a few days since House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced that what Benghazi conspiracy theorists really need is yet another committee to complement the seven other congressional committees that have already investigated the deadly 2012 attack. This time, however, it’ll be special select committee, which will presumably do what’s already repeatedly been done.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a House Intelligence Committee member, appeared on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday to dismiss the Republican obsession and to make a little news. “I don’t think it makes sense, really, for Democrats to participate” in this latest investigation, Schiff said. “I think it’s a tremendous red herring and a waste of taxpayer resources.”
That’s a fair assessment, though this election year, red herrings and wasting taxpayer resources on discredited conspiracy theories appear to be high on the House Republicans’ list of priorities.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., announced that the House will vote on May 7 on whether to ask Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to appoint a special counsel to look into allegations the IRS illegally targeted conservative organizations for extra scrutiny.
The action comes the same day House Republicans announced that Secretary of State John Kerry has been subpoenaed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to testify on the 2012 Benghazi attack and Speaker John A. Boehner said he plans to call for a select committee to begin a new probe into how the administration handled the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack.
As a matter of substance, we appear to be quickly approaching a point of genuine partisan madness. As the Benghazi conspiracy theory evaporates, House Republicans create a select committee for no particular reason. As the IRS conspiracy theory unravels, House Republicans demand a special prosecutor for imaginary reasons.
But as a political matter, the fact that GOP lawmakers are going all in – embracing a self-indulgent, all-conspiracy-all-the-time agenda with reckless enthusiasm – tells us something important about how Republicans perceive the state of play against the White House.
For example, the focus on the Affordable Care Act and the economy has obviously shifted. Indeed, the very idea of House Republicans legislating has become something of a punch-line – the GOP-led House won’t pass immigration reform, won’t come up with a health care plan, won’t consider a credible jobs bill, won’t raise the minimum wage, won’t consider background checks, won’t touch pay equity, won’t vote on ENDA, won’t create infrastructure jobs, and won’t extend unemployment benefits, but by golly, they still love their discredited conspiracy theories.
And at first blush, we know why: this election year, Republicans have prioritized keeping the GOP’s far-right base in a state of perpetual rage for the next five-and-a-half months. This is what they’ve come up with. I guess it beats governing.
But taking a step further, it’s important to remember a phenomenon Paul Waldman once labeled “scandal envy.”
It must be incredibly frustrating for the right that after five years, the near-constant search for a legitimate White House scandal has produced bupkis. Of all the various incidents that have popped up, the only thing that arguably rises to the level of a real controversy is NSA surveillance, but on this, the program started under Bush/Cheney and most Republicans like the administration’s policies and whine incessantly when the president even talks about scaling back the surveillance state.
Republicans thought they had something with the job offer to Joe Sestak (remember the calls for an FBI special prosecutor?). Then maybe the “Fast & Furious” story. Or maybe Solyndra. Or Benghazi. Or the IRS. The new Watergate will turn up eventually, if only the GOP keeps digging.
As we talked about a couple of years ago, part of the underlying cause for the right’s apoplexy is that they’re absolutely convinced that President Obama is a radical criminal up to no good, which means there must be some kind of scandal somewhere.
And when the “scandals” unravel into nothing and the various investigations point to no actual wrongdoing, two things seem to happen. First, Republicans see the lack of proof as proof – if it appears that Obama is running a scandal-free administration, it necessarily means he’s hiding something awful. Second, some in the GOP make the transition to delusional thinking, convincing themselves that discredited controversies remain viable, evidence be damned.
In other words, the lack of proof to substantiate what Republicans believe appears to have driven some in the party a little crazy.
Nixon had Watergate; Reagan had Iran-Contra; Clinton had Lewinsky; Bush had more scandals than he knew what to do with (Plame, the U.S. Attorney purge, torture, etc.). There’s an expectation that every White House will invariably have to deal with its share of damaging controversies.
In reality, however, Obama just isn’t cooperating in the scandal department. His critics aren’t wearing their desperation well.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 5, 2014
“Benghazi! The Musical”; Dancing, Shouting, Not Much Plot”: It’s Kind Of Like Oklahoma!, Only Rather More Grim
If Republicans in Congress really want to get Americans to pay attention to the Benghazi scandalette, they’re going to have to do some creative thinking. Since hearings and periodic expressions of outrage haven’t worked so far, maybe a musical would do the trick. A soaring ballad or two, some hopping dance numbers, maybe a pair of star-crossed lovers. Naturally, it would be called Benghazi!, kind of like Oklahoma!, only rather more grim.
But in the meantime, they’re going to go with a select committee to investigate the matter, as House Speaker John Boehner announced on Friday. One does wonder whether they think that if they just do some more investigating, they’ll uncover the real crime. No one knows what it is yet, but just you wait.
Or, as is far more likely, they’re just hoping to create a lot of bad news days for the administration, where the whiff of “scandal” surrounds the White House regardless of whether any malfeasance is actually uncovered. And could the fact that Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State at the time, the same Hillary Clinton who will probably be running for president starting very soon, have anything to do with it? Perish the thought.
You have to give Republicans this: for all the buffoonery of House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-CA), they’ve actually been somewhat restrained in their use of hearings to investigate the Obama administration, particularly compared to what they did to the last Democratic president. In the 1990s, Republicans in Congress held hearings to investigate everything short of whether Bill Clinton was flossing before bedtime. To take just one example, they heard 140 hours of sworn testimony on whether Clinton had abused the White House Christmas card list. If you’re too young to remember, that sounds like a joke. And it was a joke, but it also actually happened.
Given that Republicans despise Barack Obama at least as much as they did Bill Clinton, their more limited use of congressional investigations is rather puzzling. So maybe Boehner’s select committee is an attempt to make up for lost time. But there is little doubt that many Republicans sincerely believe that once the American people get a good look at how corrupt this administration is, they’ll be shocked and appalled. These are the same Republicans who believed that once Americans heard about Rev. Jeremiah Wright they’d never vote for Obama, and that once Americans heard about that “you didn’t build that” comment, they’d turn to Mitt Romney in droves.
You’ll be hearing the term “cover-up” a lot as they talk about Benghazi, but when you ask Republicans what exactly was being covered up, you’ll find that the suspected crimes have been downgraded significantly over time. They used to believe that someone high up in the administration—Clinton? Obama himself?—gave a “stand down” order to military units who could have gone into Benghazi and saved Ambassador Chris Stevens and the others at the consulate there, knowingly allowing Americans to die because…well, because something or other, they were never really sure. Now that we know that never happened, they’ll tell you that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the administration was more concerned with putting a positive spin on the events than in getting to the bottom of it.
Which, depending on exactly whom you’re talking about, is true. Ben Rhodes, for instance, the author of the e-mailed memo released last week about which Republicans have gotten so excited, wanted his colleagues “[t]o underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” (You’ll note that he refers to “protests” in the plural, meaning not just what happened in Libya but also what occurred in Cairo and elsewhere.) So there you have it: an Obama administration official who is trying to make sure no one thinks there was a failure of policy!
That’s what we call “spin,” and whatever you think of it, it isn’t a crime (and it happens to be Ben Rhodes’s job; his title is “deputy national security adviser for strategic communications,” which is what you call someone when “director of foreign policy spin” sounds too crass). Nevertheless, they seem to believe that this new e-mail Changes Everything.
“We now have the smoking gun,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Charles Krauthammer pronounced the e-mail to be the equivalent of the discovery of the Nixon tapes, because it raises the vital question, “is there any involvement here of the White House which makes it obviously a political issue, the reelection of the president overriding the truth?” A White House, acting politically and concerned about the president’s reelection? Truly shocking. Someone must get to the bottom of this.
Keep this in mind as you watch Republicans get worked up into a froth over Benghazi in days to come: the terrible crime they think they’ve uncovered is that in those first few days, when it was unclear exactly what had happened there, the White House sought to portray the events in a way they thought would minimize political damage. That’s it. That’s the thing that was supposedly being covered up.
When you and I think of scandal and cover-up, we think of things like selling arms to terrorists, then diverting the revenues to fund a proxy war in direct violation of the law. Now that’s something you need to cover up! Or perhaps ordering break-ins, paying hush money, using the CIA to obstruct an FBI investigation, and committing so many crimes that dozens of officials, including the attorney general and the White House chief of staff, end up going to prison. That’s prime cover-up material. Or even the president having an affair with an intern half his age, which is something you’d probably want to cover up if you did it.
Watergate gave us the expression, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” but it’s really both. Only when it comes to Benghazi, we have neither. There was a bureaucracy that may not have done enough to secure our missions overseas, a consulate that wasn’t prepared for violence that might have been foreseen, and a military without the ability to respond quickly enough when it happened. You can call it an unavoidable tragedy or a monumental screw-up. But if you’re looking for crimes committed at the highest levels of the administration, you’re going to be looking for a long time.
But as far as Republicans are concerned, you don’t need actual malfeasance, or evidence of an actual cover-up. As long as you have lots of subpoenas, and cameras to catch all the pounding of tables and expressions of outrage, you have all you need to put on a show.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 5, 2014
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