“Uniformly Angry And Outraged”: Meet Trey Gowdy, GOP Benghazi Attack Dog
Since House Speaker John Boehner announced the creation of a select committee to investigate the Benghazi affair, Republicans have been saying it will be a serious investigation, while Democrats have been saying it will be a partisan circus. To get a sense of who might be right, I spent some time watching YouTube videos of Rep. Trey Gowdy, the heretofore obscure second-term Tea Party congressman from South Carolina whom Boehner named to lead the committee.
There are a lot of these videos of Gowdy in congressional hearings, posted by conservatives, with titles like “Gowdy DESTROYS Obama Admin Stooge!” He’s obviously very popular among the base. To call Gowdy prosecutorial would be an understatement. Uniformly angry and outraged, these videos show Gowdy always seemingly on the verge of shouting, he’s so damn mad. Like any good lawyer, he never asks a question to which he doesn’t already know the answer. But when a witness gives him an answer other than the one he expects, he repeats his question at a slightly louder volume and angrier pitch, as though the question hadn’t actually been answered.
This is a good example, in which Gowdy blasts the director of the National Park Service for closing national memorials during the government shutdown, thereby allowing Republicans to stage a photo op in which they proclaimed their solidarity with veterans wanting to go to the memorials. You’ll recall that it was Tea Partiers like Gowdy who pushed for the government shutdown in the first place; this was a lame attempt to somehow shift blame onto the Obama administration for the shutdown, one that didn’t work. Instead of thanking the director for making their photo op possible, Gowdy angrily demands that the director tell him the statute that allows him to put barricades around the memorials and prevent our fine veterans from entering them. The director cites the statute that covers the procedures the Park Service is supposed to follow during a shutdown. Gowdy was apparently expecting the director to say, “I have no idea” or evade the question, so he asks the question a couple more times as though it were being evaded. If you didn’t speak English, you’d probably think this tough prosecutor has really got this witness on the ropes: http://youtu.be/eENzH-JIY5Q
Which tells you why Gowdy got picked for this job. John Boehner is doing this for the base, and the base wants someone who will channel the anger and contempt they feel for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the administration. Gowdy, a former prosecutor, is already referring to this enterprise not as an investigation but as a “trial,” making clear that he sees his job not as finding the truth but as convicting the accused. And for someone who has supposedly been obsessed with Benghazi, he doesn’t seem to have much of a grasp on what the multiple investigations of the issue have already revealed. So what we’re likely to see is a lot of desk-pounding, a lot of “Answer the damn question!”, and not much (or any) wrongdoing actually uncovered.
Of course, I’m assuming that there isn’t actually some bombshell revelation just waiting to be discovered. I’m pretty sure I’m on firm ground on that one, though. And it’s possible that Gowdy will lead a professional, sober, thorough investigation that will win him kudos from all observers, regardless of their ideology. But a professional, sober, thorough investigation isn’t what his party’s base really wants. They want to see members of the Obama administration squirm in the witness chair. They want some fireworks. And Trey Gowdy is just the man to give it to them.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 9, 2014
“The Voter Fraud Mouse That Roared”: Republicans Laying Land Mines Around The Ballot Box To Discourage Voting
As we all know, the tide of voter ID and other measures to restrict the franchise is typically justified by its conservative proponents as necessary to combat a vast threat of voter fraud. In most court cases involving individual state laws,voter fraud enthusiasts have been found to come to the table of justice empty-handed. Even more famously, a five-year nationwide effort by the Bush administration’s Justice Department to discover and prosecute voter fraud produced 120 indictments and 86 convictions. Wow.
But now, Iowa’s secretary of state–who is running for Congress–put the pedal to the metal in a voter fraud investigation in that hyper-political state, and is boasting of dramatic findings, as reported by the Des Moines Register‘s John Noble:
Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz’s two-year investigation into voter fraud found evidence of 117 illegally cast votes, led to charges against 27 suspected fraudulent voters and has resulted in six criminal convictions, according to a report released Thursday.
Those results justified the unprecedented partnership between the state’s top election official and the state’s Division of Criminal Investigation, as well as the nearly $250,000 cost of the effort, Schultz, a Republican, said.
“The takeaway is that there are people who voted who weren’t supposed to,” he said. “This is a situation where we tried to do something about it. I think it was the right thing to do and I stand by that.”
Critics have called the investigation a misuse of federal funds intended to expand access to voting and charged that the six convictions prove that voter fraud is a miniscule problem in a state where statewide voter turnout frequently exceeds 1 million.
In some cases, the investigations found more evidence of unjustified denial of voting rights than of voter fraud:
Investigators scrutinized 68 felons who were suspected of registering and voting when their rights hadn’t been restored. Those investigations yielded 16 charges brought by local prosecutors. The effort also identified 20 former felons whose rights should have been restored but had been denied at the ballot box. All 20 have since had their rights restored.
This is almost certainly the best conservatives can do in documenting voter fraud, with a public official making this his signature issue and bending every resource available to the Cause. Schultz is a very persistent mouse, and he’ll continue to roar about his success in exposing the terrible plague of voter fraud. But in the large context of efforts to lay land mines around the ballot box and discourage voting, his squeaks are not persuasive.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 9, 2014
“The Great Benghazi Scandal Gets Sillier”: Potato, Potahto, Tomato, Tomahto; Well, You Know The Rest
You say potato and I say potahto,
You say tomato and I say tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto:
Let’s call the whole thing off.
–George and Ira Gershwin
Here’s how unreal the Great Benghazi Scandal had already grown as of last year. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler devoted an entire May 2013 column to the scholastic question of whether President Obama’s calling the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. Consulate in Libya an “act of terror” was the same as calling it an “act of terrorism,” as he’d recently claimed.
Kessler pondered the deep semantic differences between the two phrases before awarding Obama a full four “Pinocchios,” signifying a “whopper.” Seriously. That’s the big cover-up House Republicans pretend they’re outraged about.
Obama’s exact words, from the White House Rose Garden on the day after the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and his security team:
No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America. We will not waver in our commitment to see that justice is done for this terrible act. And make no mistake, justice will be done.
So who was Obama trying to deceive? People who hadn’t seen the smoking ruins on TV? And about what? Kessler doesn’t say. Only that the two phrases don’t signify precisely the same thing — a distinction without a difference in any realistic political context.
It will be recalled that GOP nominee Mitt Romney executed one of the clumsiest pratfalls in presidential debate history for mistakenly challenging Obama on this exact point. Had the president, or had he not, described the Benghazi disaster as an “act of terror?”
Obama cooly urged his rival to consult the transcript. In fact, he’d used the phrase several times. Had the Washington political press not had so much invested in a “cliffhanger” election narrative, Romney’s blunder would have been compared to President Gerald Ford’s denying Soviet influence in Poland during a 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter.
But then this is the great mystery confronting non-initiates in the great GOP Benghazi cult. What on earth are these people going on about? That if Obama had said “act of terrorism” instead of “act of terror,” Americans would have punished his failure to eliminate jihadists from the face of the earth by turning to Mitt “47 percent” Romney?
That everything would be different if UN Ambassador Susan Rice had cast aside White House “talking points” about inflammatory videos on the Sunday political chat shows and candidly confessed that “[w]hether they were al Qaeda affiliates, whether they were Libyan-based extremists or al Qaeda itself…is one of the things we’ll have to determine?”
Because those were Rice’s exact words, block copied from the transcript of CBS’s Sept. 16, 2012 Face the Nation broadcast in response to a direct question from Bob Schieffer about al Qaeda involvement.
Everybody now pretends she named no terrorist groups, for the sake of keeping the make-believe scandal alive.
It follows that contrary to everything you hear from partisan mischief makers and their helpers among the Washington press, the Obama White House has never sought to deny the obvious: that the kinds of religious zealots who bring rocket-propelled grenade launchers to street demonstrations didn’t simply find them lying around in the bazaar.
The original CIA talking points released 11 months ago said pretty much what Ambassador Rice said: that outrage at a crude, American-made video mocking Islam sparked violent protests across much of the Middle East, and that militants took advantage of the resulting chaos for their own bloody purposes. The exact identity of those responsible isn’t yet known.
See, out there in the real world, it doesn’t always have to be either/or. Most often it’s both/and: armed terrorist groups and a provocative video. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released last January sharply criticized the State Department, but also concluded “that the attack was not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
David D. Kirkpatrick’s masterful reporting in The New York Times established that the anti-western Libyan militia Ansar Al-Sharia had long had the consulate under surveillance, although “[a]nger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters….A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him.”
However, a 2012 White House email has recently emerged, re-stating CIA talking points in somewhat different language. So big deal.
They’ll be singing all summer: Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto.
Well, you know the rest.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, May 7, 2014
“The Nuttier Corners Of The Right”: Is A Drive To Impeach Barack Obama On Its Way?
If you’re looking for some beach reading this summer, you might pick up a copy of this soon-to-be-released book: “Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment,” by National Review writer Andrew McCarthy. It’s hitting bookstores at the perfect time, just as John Boehner has appointed a select committee to investigate Benghazi, and will no doubt be required reading on Capitol Hill and at the Fox News studios.
Is it reasonable to surmise that a move to impeach Barack Obama is a realistic possibility?
It isn’t that no one has talked about impeaching Obama before, because they have. But for the last five years, impeachment has been the purview of the nuttier corners of the right — the conspiracist web sites, the chain emails, the ranting radio hosts. For much of that time, the complaints weren’t so much about specific alleged misdeeds as Obama’s fundamental illegitimacy. Impeach him because he isn’t American. Impeach him because ACORN and the New Black Panthers stole the election for him. Impeach him because while other presidents hired people known as “White House staff,” when this president does it they’re “czars” wielding unconstitutional powers. They could certainly give you a list of particulars if you asked, but what it came down to was that Barack Obama was, well, Barack Obama.
But now we have the Benghazi select committee, and a select committee is what you form when there may be crimes and misdemeanors to uncover. It has no other business to distract it, and it will be led by Trey Gowdy, a former prosecutor who excels at channeling conservatives’ outrage.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Boehner or the party establishment he represents want impeachment, not by any means. They realize what a political disaster it was when they did it in 1998, and they understand that the effects would likely be similar if it happened again. But there are multiple Republican members of Congress who have at least toyed with the idea, and the committee’s hearings could build pressure in the Republican base for it.
How would that play out? The select committee hearings will provide an institutional pathway and the requisite media attention necessary to air all sorts of dramatic allegations against the administration (supported by evidence or not). They’ll get non-stop coverage on Fox News, where some personalities are already calling for impeachment. Conservative radio hosts will talk of little else for months. Spurred on by their media, base Republicans will begin pressuring their representatives, in phone calls and emails and town meetings and wherever those members of Congress go. And remember that your average Republican member comes from a safe Republican district, where the only political threat is from the right. While it may be too late for the 2014 election, potential primary candidates for 2016 will start popping up, saying, “Congressman X didn’t have the guts to impeach Barack Obama, and he won’t have the guts to go after Hillary Clinton. Elect me, and I will.”
All that would make many in the House conclude that coming out in favor of impeachment is the safest political play to make. And isn’t in the logical extension of everything they’ve been saying for the last five years about this socialist anti-American liberty-destroying president?
In all seriousness, an impeachment drive would be, in many ways, another iteration of the central conflict of this period of our political history, the one between a Tea Party pushing the GOP to ever more radical tactics and a party establishment warning of political catastrophe if they go too far. The GOP establishment didn’t want to shut down the government or cause a debt ceiling crisis, but they got pushed into them and didn’t get out until the political costs became undeniable. They’ll warn that impeachment would be a terrible mistake, and they might persuade their brethren to hold back. But it won’t be easy.
The biggest problem the pro-impeachment forces would face is that the Benghazi committee is unlikely to produce any particular action by Obama that they could point to and say, this is the crime for which he must be impeached. The real threat is that it may well produce something that’s good enough for them, even if the rest of the country is unconvinced. After all, even before anyone heard the name Monica Lewinsky, Republicans in the House were preparing to impeach Bill Clinton. All they needed was the controversy that took it from a fringe idea to a mainstream Republican idea, and then the momentum made it unstoppable.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 9, 2014
“Enter Trey Gowdy”: Letting The Impeachment Genie Out Of The Bottle–Carefully!
If you read two posts by Slate‘s Dave Weigel this week about the establishment of the Select Committee on Benghazi!, the potential significance of this move and how it’s being handled by John Boehner becomes pretty clear. This isn’t just a move to provide daily porn for wingnuts, or even to take down Hillary Clinton’s approval ratings a few points, but a conscious step towards impeaching Barack Obama:
On Saturday night, as Washington’s press corps was distracted by a surge of celebrity selfie opportunities, it was missing a kind of milestone. Jeanine Pirro, a former New York Republican star who tumbled out of politics and onto Fox News, was calling for the impeachment of President Obama over “a story no one wants to talk about.”
The story was the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. Referring to that, on Fox, as “a story no one wants to talk about” sounded a bit like CNN asking where all the Flight 370 coverage had been. Not Pirro’s point—she was saying that the media failed to see where the Benghazi story was going to lead. Hint: Impeachment.
“We have impeached a president for lying about sex with an intern,” she said. “A president resigned in the face of certain impeachment for covering up a burglary. Why wouldn’t we impeach this president for not protecting and defending Americans in the bloodbath known as Benghazi?” Pirro then addressed the president directly—though at this point in the evening he was giving a sardonic dinner speech—with a warning that “your dereliction of duty as commander-in-chief demands your impeachment.”
Just one segment on a slow news night, but there was a sense of inevitability about it, of the Overton Window being shifted by hand.
Weigel goes on to pull together a number of quotes from Republican pols and conservative media figures that don’t so much raise the possibility of impeachment as take it as a given and ponder how it can be handled without “looking crazy.”
Enter Trey Gowdy.
In a post today, Weigel suggests the selection of the South Carolinian was made precisely because the “investigation” will likely lead to impeachment proceedings:
To conduct hearings that may lead to impeachment, Republicans needed a leader who seemed unimpeachable. They needed someone exactly unlike former Rep. Dan Burton, who never lived down a demonstration, involving a watermelon and a gun, of how Vince Foster’s “murder” might have gone down.
“When you’re shooting a watermelon you’re probably going too far,” says South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. “I don’t think Trey is going to have a demonstration in his backyard about how Benghazi happened. I’ve known him for years. If you ask any lawyer or judge in South Carolina, Democrat or Republican, he’d get A-plus marks. You’d find that to be a universal assessment….”
After an extended tribute to Gowdy’s skill as a prosecutor and inquisitor, Weigel concludes:
Gowdy only talks about Benghazi the way he’d talk about a re-opened murder investigation, a case given to his courtroom because somebody else screwed it up. He’s good at this. Republicans, who can imagine the select committee lasting through the midterms and into a lame duck president’s final years, are clamoring to be in his jury.
So in choosing Gowdy, it’s entirely possible Boehner had in mind for him a much more important role than entertaining conservatives: he’d be the face of impeachment. That congressional Republicans are contemplating this possibility so seriously when Barack Obama is already heading towards the exit–and given the vast evidence a similar move backfired decisively in the 1990s–shows how much pressure they are under from “the base,” and how deranged the supposed Great Big Adults of the Republican Establishment have become. Maybe the glittering prospect of impeaching Obama while disqualifying HRC is just so bright that they aren’t thinking straight.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 8, 2014
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