“Notes On A Pseudo-Scandal”: With No Credibility On Issues, Republicans Demand For Scandal Is Intense And Unflagging
OK folks, if you have the patience for some meta-blogging on the subject of Benghazi, let me share with you some of the thoughts that have been running around my head as I struggle with how to talk about this story. Whenever a topic like this comes up, you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do I have something worthwhile to contribute to this discussion? Is there something that needs to be said but hasn’t been yet? Is this thing even worth talking about? Much as I’d like to be immune to the consideration of whether I’m doing a favor for those pushing the story for their own partisan ends by keeping the discussion going, it’s hard to avoid that question popping into your head from time to time.
There’s an objective reality out there, hard though it may sometimes be to discern—either there was or was not actual wrongdoing, and the whole matter is either trivial or momentous—but everyone’s perception of that reality is formed within the context of a partisan competition. Irrespective of any facts, Democrats would like this story to just go away, and Republicans would like it to become The Worst Scandal In History. I’ll be honest and say it’s hard to avoid thinking about that when you’re writing about it. Even doing something like refuting the latest crazy thing someone on the right is alleging does, to at least a small degree, help maintain the story’s momentum.
To step back to the big picture, a “scandal” can proceed regardless of whether any wrongdoing is ever found. If you have your own media system, you can keep talking about it (combined with, always always always, accusations that the mainstream media are ignoring it not because of a reasonable news judgment but because of their liberal bias) until the mainstream media start doing their own reporting on it, pushing the story ahead. This is a routine conservative media are practiced at, and they seem to be having some success yet again. If you have control of one house of Congress, furthermore, you can start investigations and hold hearings, which may not uncover anything incriminating, but it creates news events and produces information, which can be spun to be something nefarious even if it’s utterly mundane.
For instance, conservatives continue to froth at the mouth over whether a set of talking points the administration produced contained the words “terrorism” or “Islamic extremists” or “extremists,” as though one answer means everything was above-board and another answer means there was a cover-up so sinister that impeaching the president is the obvious response. You may be shocked to learn that talking points on national security matters are routinely edited by representatives of different agencies! Or maybe you’re not shocked, but just in case, Republicans are going to act as though it’s shocking. If you’re an Obama partisan, the fact that your opponents think that the key to the President’s undoing will be found in some Microsoft Word “track changes” should make you feel pretty secure, since those opponents are plainly a bunch of buffoons.
Trouble is, that may not stop the “scandal” from continuing to generate momentum. Brendan Nyhan just put out a paper in which he posits a theory of scandals, arguing that they are a “co-production” of the media and the opposition party. Specifically, the less popular a president is with the opposing party, the more likely a scandal is to emerge.Other factors have an impact as well, including competing news stories, the time a president has been in office, and the time since the last scandal. This is essentially what Jamelle noted yesterday, that while there may not be much of a supply of actual Obama administration wrongdoing, the demand for scandal on the right is intense and unflagging. That demand is met by the conservative media, whose coverage pushes Republican lawmakers to get involved, which generates more coverage, which generates more demand in the Republican rank and file, and on and on.
I hesitate to even use the word “scandal” to describe Benghazi, because so far we haven’t learned of anything scandalous anyone did. Conservatives themselves don’t seem to be able to say exactly what the Obama administration is supposed to have done wrong, particularly since lethal attacks on American diplomatic mission are a frequent occurrence, even under Republican administrations. “Talking points were edited to make the attack sound less terrorist-y” isn’t exactly a high crime. “Some different decisions in those first chaotic hours might have made a difference” isn’t much of an indictment either; that’s always true of any tragedy. Yes, there are some people on the right who will speculate that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton actually said, “Go ahead and let those people in Benghazi die, because even though we could save their lives, doing so might harm our re-election, so screw ’em.” But those people are obviously nuts, and everybody knows it.
It may well be that, as it was during the Clinton years, even many of the people pushing the alleged scandal realize there’s not much to it, but they find political utility in keeping the president under siege. If he’s worried about this, he’ll have less time to devote to his other priorities. Spend tens of millions investigating a failed land deal, and even if you don’t find that he did anything wrong there, maybe along the way you’ll discover that he got a blow job from an intern.
As reluctant as I am to feed that beast, in the end I suspect they’ll be punished for their obsession with Benghazi, assuming that they fail, just as they have so far, to uncover any actual wrongdoing. And that’ll happen whether people like me write about it or not.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 10, 2013
“The Hearing To End All Hearings”: The Hunt For The GOP’s White Whale Will Never End
It was tempting to think the Republican obsession with the politics of last fall’s Benghazi attack had run its course this week. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had lined up one last spectacle, suggesting it would be the hearing to end all hearings, and it was a dud. After multiple reports and hearings, the story had run its course.
Except, it hasn’t.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) is asking the White House and State Department to hand over emails related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, which House committees were able to see, but not keep or share, during their investigation into the response to the attack. […]
Boehner is asking for two sets of emails, both of which are related to whether the White House tried to change the initial characterization of the attack…. The emails, according to Boehner, show a senior State Department official telling her superiors that the Libyan ambassador said the attack “was conducted by Islamic terrorists.”
But we know what the email says, and we know it’s different from Boehner’s claim — it said “extremists,” not “terrorists.” As the New York Times reported, “The distinction is important, administration officials said, because while the White House did not initially characterize the attack as terrorism, senior officials, including Ambassador Susan E. Rice, acknowledged the possibility that extremists had been involved in the assault.”
So why is Boehner pursuing this at all? Perhaps because he’s dealing with pressure from his own members to create another special committee to investigate the attack, on top of the other congressional committees that have already investigated the attack, which complemented an independent panel that also already investigated the attack.
Meanwhile, it’s also becoming increasingly obvious that the GOP’s preoccupation with Hillary Clinton is once again reaching unhealthy levels.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Fox News yesterday to argue the former Secretary of State needs to testify to answer congressional questions on Benghazi, and she “should be subpoenaed if necessary.” This is of interest because Clinton has already testified — was Cheney not paying attention? — and because when Cheney was vice president, he believed congressional requests for testimony should be ignored.
Of course, that didn’t stop Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) from quickly endorsing Cheney’s line.
As Jonathan Bernstein explained yesterday, this isn’t what congressional oversight is supposed to look like.
With Obama, there’s no need for these scandals to make sense; the conservative press will run with them either way. And there might even be an advantage to incoherence. After all, if the accusations are gibberish, the neutral reporters will tend to ignore them — and then conservatives can go on conservative talk radio and Fox News and charge the rest of the press of ignoring these extremely important charges.
All of which means that Republican politicians have little incentive, and perhaps even some real disincentives, for doing the hard work of government oversight — or even the hard work of first-rate scandal-mongering. No wonder they get lazy!
Unfortunately, that leaves us with hyped-up accusations, but no real government oversight — no one really probing for real mistakes, or even real malfeasance, from the Obama Administration. There’s just no reason to bother. And that leaves everyone worse off — except perhaps those reaping profits in the conservative marketplace.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 10, 2013
“Terms Of Art”: The Rebranding Of The Republican Party Is Simply The Renaming Of Intolerance
Many on the political right simply can’t get this diversity thing right — and I deeply doubt that they want to. Theirs is a bone-deep contempt for otherness, a congenital belief in the superiority-inferiority binary, a circle-the-wagons, zero-sum view of progress, prosperity and power.
This became apparent yet again Wednesday when it was revealed that one of the co-authors of a much maligned Heritage Foundation “study” about “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,” Jason Richwine, had written a Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard in 2009 titled “IQ and Immigration Policy.”
Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post summarized Richwine’s dissertation thusly:
“Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in I.Q.’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group I.Q.s are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach I.Q. parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-I.Q. children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.’ ”
Matthews continues:
“He does caution against referring to it as I.Q.-based selection, saying that using the term ‘skill-based’ would ‘blunt the negative reaction.’ ”
Skill-based. Clever. Or Machiavellian.
In reality, it’s just another conservative euphemism meant to cast class aspersions and raise racial ire without ever forthrightly addressing the issues of class and race. This form of Roundabout Republicanism has entirely replaced honest conservative discussion, to the point that anyone who now raises class-based inequality is labeled divisive and anyone who raises race is labeled a racist.
It’s a way of wriggling out of unpleasant debates on which they have stopped trying to engage altogether. The new strategy is avoidance, obfuscation and boomerang blaming.
This “skill-based” phraseology is simply the latest in a long line of recent right-wing terms of art.
There was Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment about the people who would “vote for the president no matter what.” He continued: “there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
That was in line with the other-ing of President Obama, whether in the form of aspersions about his birth or his faith or his understanding of and commitment to the country he leads. Recall John Sununu, a top Romney surrogate, saying that Obama “has no idea how the American system functions” and saying that he wished the president “would learn how to be an American.”
Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s vice-presidential running mate, blamed turnout in “urban areas” for their loss, rather than their ragtag campaign operation and a coreless nominee who was utterly inept when attempting to connect with average voters. Remember Romney liked grits, y’all.
The former House speaker and failed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — the one who said that poor children had no habit of working “unless it is illegal” — told Fox News last year that President Obama was “not a real president.” During that same television appearance, Gingrich said of the president: “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while, um, watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythms are.”
Huh. Needs large amounts of rest and to go play basketball and watch television. Nothing subliminal there. Moving along.
This list could extend to more than one column — including terms like “job creators” and “we built this,” and the candidate Rick Santorum (who has three degrees) calling the president a snob for wanting “everybody in America to go to college ” (which is not at all what the president said).
And it could stretch back further to the patron saint of the right Ronald Reagan’s use of the welfare queen meme and George Bush’s and Lee Atwater’s invocation of Willie Horton in the 1988 presidential campaign.
But I think you get the picture.
The right is constantly invoking class and race as cudgels in our political discussions; they just hide the hand that swings the club.
The rebranding of the Republican Party is to a large degree the renaming of intolerance.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New Tork Times, May 8, 2013
“Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion: Republicans Taking The Politics Of Extortion Past The Breaking Point
With the House and Senate both having passed budget resolutions, the next step in the process should be a conference committee, which Republican leaders said they wanted. Recently, however, they changed their mind and now refuse to allow the process to proceed.
Why? I’ve worked under the assumption this is the result of GOP lawmakers feeling apprehension about their unpopular ideas and fearing a public backlash. But the Washington Post reports there may be a little more to it.
[The shrinking deficit] might seem like good news, but it is unraveling Republican plans to force a budget deal before Congress takes its August break. Instead, the fiscal fight appears certain to bleed into the fall, when policymakers will face another multi-pronged crisis that pairs the need for a higher debt limit and the fresh risk of default with the threat of a full-scale government shutdown, which is also looming Oct. 1.
In the meantime, Republicans face a listless summer, with little appetite for compromise but no leverage to shape an agreement. Without that leverage, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday, there is no point in opening formal budget negotiations between the House and the Senate, because Democrats have no reason to consider the kind of far-reaching changes to Medicare and the U.S. tax code that Republicans see as fundamental building blocks of a deal.
“The debt limit is the backstop,” Ryan said before taking the stage at a debt summit organized by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation in Washington.
I realize talking about budgets, conference committees, and debt ceilings is dry. This no doubt strikes some readers as inside baseball, of little interest to anyone other than political junkies and wonks.
But I hope folks will take a moment to consider what Ryan and his colleagues are saying here. They’re admitting, publicly and without shame, that they can’t engage in budget negotiations unless they can also threaten to deliberately crash the economy. GOP lawmakers want a “backstop” that will give them “leverage” in talks — whereas the conference committee is ostensibly about finding a bipartisan, bicameral compromise, Republicans need the possibility of a brutal self-inflicted crisis to hang over the process.
And if they can’t have it, they won’t engage in the budget process at all.
Wait, it gets worse.
Congressional Republicans made a series of assumptions, all of which have turned out to be wrong. They assumed Senate Democrats couldn’t pass a budget. They assumed Democrats wouldn’t want a budget process considered under regular order. And they assumed the budget talks, if they occurred, would happen around the same time as the need for a debt-ceiling increase.
GOP lawmakers were terribly disappointed, then, to see Senate Democrats do exactly what they were asked to do, and the economy improved quickly enough to push off the debt-limit deadline until fall.
But with their plans foiled, Republicans are stuck with no Plan B, no leverage, and no credible threat. Consider how remarkable this is:
[S]enior Senate Republicans, including several who recently dined with Obama and huddled with administration officials, conceded that it may be tough to bring their colleagues to the table too far ahead of the debt-ceiling deadline.
“I think there’s a better atmosphere for a solution than there’s been in the past, but I’m a little worried about people here in the Senate having fiscal fatigue. There isn’t any sense of urgency right now,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), one of three senators who joined Obama on Monday for a round of golf.
“We need to realize this debt ceiling is out there. It’s inevitable. It’s coming. And [the later deadline] should not relieve pressure,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. But “sometimes we don’t want to act until a gun is at our heads.”
Think about that for a second. The ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee is willing to admit — out loud and on the record — that there can’t be a budget process unless he and his Republican colleagues can threaten to trash the full faith and credit of the United States on purpose.
And here’s the kicker: Republicans aren’t even asking for anything specific yet. They know they want to hold the nation hostage, but they’re not sure why, and haven’t figured out what their demands are. Jonathan Bernstein argued persuasively yesterday that we’re looking at “extortion for the sake of extortion.”
The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It’s the extortion that’s the point. Not the policy.
I’ve run out of adjectives to describe how crazy this is, but I’ll just conclude with this: those pundits who assume Republicans are a mainstream political party, and it’s a mystery as to why President Obama hasn’t had more success negotiating with these folks, just aren’t paying close enough attention.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 9, 2013
“Conspiracy Theories Abound”: The Five Biggest Republican Lies About Benghazi
In case you missed it, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held yet another hearing on Wednesday concerning the September 11, 2012 attacks on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya which resulted in the deaths of four Americans. House Republicans were hoping to find some type of damning evidence that would reveal a scandal or cover-up of information by the White House and State Department.
The terrorist attacks in Benghazi have been highly politicized by Republicans since the day after the attacks took place. Before President Obama was able to make a formal statement on the incident, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney leapt at the opportunity to indulge in a political attack. “I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi,” he said. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”
Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, vowed from the day he took the gavel to hold over 200 hearings throughout the year to confirm that President Obama is “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” Wednesday’s hearing was just one of Issa’s attempts to try to associate the administration with a right-wing-generated conspiracy theory.
It seems as though the grand inquisition into finding a smoking gun may actually linger for a while longer. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), who up until a weekly press conference on Thursday has remained silent on the issue, called on the White House to release email correspondence related to the attacks, “Last November, the president said he was ‘happy to cooperate in any way Congress wants. This is his chance.” Boehner continued, “The State Department would not allow our committees to keep copies of this email when it was reviewed. I would call on the president to order the State Department to release this email so the American people can see it.”
Republicans are so desperate to find something, anything, that they continue to obsess over the same talking points that have all been previously set straight. Here are five biggest lies expressed by Republicans regarding the Benghazi attacks.
Hillary Clinton Personally Signed Cables Denying Security
During Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s testimony before the House Foreign Relations Committee in January, she vowed to have no knowledge of a request for added security at the American compound in Benghazi. Fox News fueled Republican hysteria with an allegation that a cable denying additional security, which has yet to be seen, was in fact signed by the former Secretary.
Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked the three witnesses during Wednesday’s hearing if this was standard protocol–all three agreed that Secretary Clinton’s signature appears at the bottom of all cables regardless if they reach her desk or not.
The Media Is Ignoring These Allegations
Fox News likes to grant itself credit with being the only news network to cover and reveal the “facts” surrounding the “Benghazi-gate” “scandal.”
On his Sunday show last October, Brit Hume lashed out against the mainstream media, “One of the problems we’re having here is that it has fallen to this news organization, Fox News, and a couple of others to do all the heaving lifting on this story. And the mainstream organizations that would be on this story like hounds if there were a Republican president have been remarkably reticent.”
The reality of this allegation is that all news networks were covering the attacks in Benghazi–Fox News is simply angry that the other networks weren’t politicizing the attack and condemning President Obama as they were. Even Fox host Geraldo Rivera had words for his friends at the network: “People, stop, I think we have to stop this politicizing. … [T]hese preposterous allegations –- reckless allegations that paint a picture of some fat bureaucrat watching TV –- I think that’s really beyond the pale.”
Fox News should have been more careful during its coverage of Wednesday’s hearing after being so quick to criticize other news outlets following the September attack. Host Megyn Kelly criticized her own network when she admitted they were a bit “lopsided” in their coverage of the hearing after cutting to commercials during Democratic questioning of the witnesses.
Obama and Clinton Watched The Attacks In Real Time
Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed in at least eight different circumstances that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama watched the Benghazi attacks in real time from the situation room. “And if the State Department is now saying they never believed that this attack on the 11th of September against the U.S. consulate was a film protest gone awry, think about it — then, it’s nearly impossible to believe that President Obama didn’t know.” Hannity said. “Oh, and did I mention the State Department was watching this unfold in real time?”
In a response to a question from Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) about this fictitious viewing party, the former Secretary stated, “There was no monitor, there was no real time.”
What seems to have caused confusion for conservatives is the difference between Clinton and Obama receiving real-time updates from Benghazi, which was in fact the case, and watching real-time video.
Teams Were Prepared To Deploy But Given Orders To Stand Down
Republicans were up in arms upon learning that a Special Forces team stationed in Tripoli was ready to deploy to Benghazi during the attacks and was instead given orders to stand down.
The former Deputy Chief of Mission in Libya, Gregory Hicks, who was one of the witnesses at the hearing on Wednesday, confirmed that the team told to stand down was never meant to deploy to the site of the attack. Instead, they were intended “to secure the airport for the withdrawal of our personnel from Benghazi after the mortar attack.” Hicks also stated that another team was deployed before this specific one was told to stand down — the first did in fact report to Benghazi and all officials were taken to Tripoli within 18 hours of the attack.
Accountability Review Board Is Part Of The Cover-Up And Their Report Can’t Be Trusted
After the September 11 attacks in Libya, the State Department’s Accountability Review Board was prompted to review the handling of the attacks by officials. Republicans clearly not pleased with the fact that the report didn’t condemn President Obama and former Secretary Clinton decided it wasn’t credible and launched their own investigation.
The result was a congressional report aimed at Republicans, which criticizes the administration for failing on just about every level — failing to acknowledge the need for heightened security at foreign consulates on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, failing to realize that Benghazi would be a site for post-Gadhafi demonstrations, and the administration’s attempts to mislead the American people with flawed information. The report states, “In sum, the events in Benghazi thus reflect this administration’s lack of a comprehensive national security strategy or effective defense posture in the region…Congress must maintain pressure on the administration to ensure that the United States takes all necessary steps to find the Benghazi attackers.”
Unfortunately for House Republicans looking for outside approval for their report during Wednesday’s hearings, not only did the witnesses not come to their defense, but also weren’t overly critical of the ARB report. Eric Nordstrom, the Regional Security Officer for Libya said of the ARB report, “I had an opportunity to review that along with other two committee reports. I think taken altogether, they’re fairly comprehensive and reasonable.”
By: Allison Brito, The National Memo, May 9, 2013
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