“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
“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
“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
“Real Vs. Republican Populism”: How To Win The War On Inequality
So Republicans are going populist, or at least two of them are, reports The Daily Beast’s Patricia Murphy. And perhaps it’s only in the sense that unlike Mitt Romney and many in the House GOP, they’re not speaking of working people with contempt. Well, it’s a start. But I wish they’d pick up copies of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Oh, of course Ted Cruz and Rand Paul would find ways to pooh-pooh the book’s findings and conclusions, but it’s nice to think of them merely having to immerse themselves in empirical reality for a few hours instead of the magical economic fairy tales that undoubtedly constitute their usual diet.
If you’ve not heard of Piketty or Capital, it’s certainly the economic book of the year, and probably of the decade so far. (You can read Paul Krugman’s rave in The New York Review of Books here.) I admit I’ve only waded into it so far, but I went to see the author, a French economist, speak at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington to a room full of people who braved a hideous, monsoon-ish rain Tuesday morning. (The video of the event is here.) What Piketty has done, my economist friends tell me, is nothing short of revolutionary and deserves to change the way we think about wealth and inequality. Much more important, it also deserves to alter what we do about them.
Here’s the story in a ridiculously small nutshell. Thirty scholars collected data from 20 countries over about 100 years. Piketty pored over the data trying to pinpoint salient reasons for our insane levels pf income inequality, which is worse in the United States, where the richest 1 percent own nearly 40 percent of the wealth, than in most other advanced countries but hardly endemic to America.
The one key: In all times and places under study, the rate of return on capital increases at a faster rate than general economic growth. Growth averages 1, 1.5 percent. Rate of return averages 4 or 5 percent. So presto, the people with the capital—money and assets of all kinds, land and equipment and what have you—are getting richer a lot faster than the rest of us. And as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, a panelist at the event, pointed out: “Note that this is not a market failure.” This disparity (r > g, in wonk-speak) is a feature, not a bug, as they say, and it’s just our fate, and on and on it shall go, as the rivers roll to the sea.
And is there anything we can do to mitigate this? Three things, said panelist Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute: 1) Make sure more people enjoy more access to r; 2) raise g; 3) lower r.
Now, if you are reasonably conversant in our economic debates, you already have some idea of what all this means. It means what Cruz and Paul would call “socialism” and what I would call “the kinds of reasonable, worker-focused economic policies this country had for about 40 years that were, on balance, the best years this country ever had.” We had large-scale public investment, near full employment at times, a more heavily unionized work force, a minimum wage that until 1968 kept pace with productivity, a more progressive tax system, a much more heavily regulated financial sector in which banks couldn’t gamble against themselves, and all the rest. Even with all these measures in place, r still grew faster than g, but not the way it does in today’s America.
In other words, Piketty makes the case that inequality will just grow and grow unless societies take affirmative steps to reduce the gap between the rate of return on capital and overall economic growth. The problem is the old one: In our present political climate, there’s not a chance of that happening.
As I sat there Tuesday morning, I kept wondering to myself: Is there any way a politician, a presidential candidate, can turn these concepts into plain English, something that can capture people’s imaginations—an answer to the right’s vacuous “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but which happens to have the benefit of being true? We now have ample evidence that the “rising tide” of the better part of the last 30 years has not lifted all boats. The ocean liners are getting farther and farther away from the pack.
I think there must be a way, but before we ponder that question, we first have to wonder whether the presidential candidate I have in mind (it’s not Cruz or Paul) even believes all this. I think she does, or most of it. But this is class politics—not “class warfare,” just class politics—and that hasn’t exactly been Hillary Clinton’s game over the years. The great question looming over her expected campaign is the extent to which she’ll address the inequality crisis head on.
Given the 1 percent’s ownership of our political system these days, we’re probably stuck with living out this crisis for a very long time, until even the 1 percenters are finally forced to agree that something has to be done. We seem a long way away from that. But things do change sometimes. “In 1910 in America, everybody would have said a progressive income tax was impossible,” Piketty said Tuesday. “It could not be permissible under the Constitution, and so forth. But, you know, things happen.” Three years later, we had one. So it’s not impossible. And if trickle-down could start on a dinner napkin, surely the process of reversing its malignant effects can start with a book.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 16, 2014
“A Wink, A Smile And A Voice Vote”: The House GOP’s Down-Low, Backhanded Endorsement Of Obamacare
It’s not all that often that the lead piece on the Drudge Report attacks Republicans, so it’s worth a little savoring when it happens, and this one is especially delectable. The link was to an AP story reporting that two weeks ago, House Republicans stealthily voted for a measure that changed an aspect of the Affordable Care Act.
What? I know. In other words, Congress amends bill it passed a few years ago. In a normal moral universe, this would scarcely qualify as news. But when we speak of the House of Representatives, we are in the modern Republican Party’s moral universe, and there, the rules are different.
You see, by agreeing to amend Obamacare, Republicans are acknowledging the law’s existence and legitimacy. The only things they’re supposed to be doing with Obamacare are burning copies of it on the Capitol steps and voting to repeal it. But here they’ve done the exact opposite. And what made it even worse was the way they did it. The change was very quietly tucked into a larger bill, the Medicare “doc fix,” which helps payments to doctors who serve Medicare patients keep pace with inflation. Only House majority leadership—the Republicans—can do that. And then, to make matters still worse, the yellow-bellied quislings passed the thing by voice vote, so no one had to be on the record.
The change, by the way, removes deductible caps from certain plans small businesses can offer their employees. This allows the employers, according to the AP, to offer cheaper plans to individuals who also have health savings accounts, which conservatives have been pushing for 15 or 20 years. Only around 30 percent of American businesses offer HSAs, and large employers are more likely to include them than small ones. Hence, the target of opportunity for HSA partisans. So the change accomplished a GOP policy goal. But funny thing: apparently not a single Republican member of the House trumpeted the change or even said a word about it when the vote took place March 27.
It hardly matters what the change was. It could have been that the purchase of armor-piercing bullets was now covered under Obamacare and it wouldn’t help: The fact that Republicans used the ACA as the vehicle with which to make this change was the crime. Oh, did I have a jolly afternoon reading through the comment thread at Free Republic:
“The uniparty at work!”
“Appeasement Weasels.”
“Voice vote.”
“And I’ll say it right now: The Republican Party does not want Obamacare to be repealed and will not support candidates who do. I’d love to have someone come back around November 1, 2016 and show me that this prediction was wrong.”
“The G.O.P. (GAVE OBAMA POWER) is the party that created RomneyCARE/ObamaCARE
and imposed it FOR ALL, FOR ROMNEY, FOREVER.”
“Bastards!”
You get the picture. So what do we take away from this?
I think we take away from it that some of these “Freepers,” as they’re called on that site, are on to something. Republicans don’t really want to repeal Obamacare. Or no: they almost certainly want to, but they know they probably can’t. So even while they froth away for the cameras and town-hall meetings, there’s another, smaller, darker part of them that knows the truth, or the likely truth, which is that Hillary Clinton appears likely to be the next president, the Democrats will recapture the Senate in 2016 or vastly increase their majority if they didn’t lose it in 2014, and by the end of the next President Clinton’s first term, Obamacare will be nailed to the floor.
Remember, this happened on March 27: four days before the ACA’s enrollment deadline arrived, and therefore well before anyone knew the number would hit the target of seven million. So they were out there, on Fox and on all those acidic radio shows they do, talking about what a world-historical failure Obamacare was going to prove to be in just a matter of days, while meanwhile, with no one recording the roll call, they were buying shares of it.
This brings to mind some things I’ve read about civil rights and the Dixiecrats. The liberal Northern senators used to chat among themselves in the early and mid-1960s, wondering which of their Southern colleagues really and truly believed the racist pollution that poured out of their mouths. The consensus at the time was that Strom Thurmond really did. Richard Russell. Most of them, however, sorta-kinda believed it but just said it, because they knew that as long as they were 110 percenters on what they called “the n——-r question,” they could get reelected ‘til the end of time provided they weren’t caught with the proverbial live boy or dead girl.
There’s a story in Phil Hart’s biography—Hart, of Michigan, was one of the Senate’s most liberal members, and one of the key movers of the Voting Rights Act—about an encounter he had with Mississippi’s James Eastland. Eastland was as hard-shell as they came. But somehow, he and Hart became friends anyway. And so one day on the Senate floor, after delivering himself of a hideous racial tirade, as he walked back toward his desk, Eastland caught his friend Hart’s eye and winked.
Who knows how much of that kind of winking is taking place on the House floor now? “Hey, Steny, I don’t really mean everything I say ’bout y’all, but old so-and-so from the next district over just gave one helluva stemwinder about health care the other day, and I can’t let myself be out-Obamacared, know’ut I mean?” Oh, of course some Republicans are fire-breathers and diehards. But others seem to understand that if you’re going to try to have actual policy impact in the real world, you have to play ball in the real world. And the real world is Obamacare.
The latter group is probably a minority now. But I’m betting that one day they’ll be the majority, and that that day is going to come sooner than most people think. Maybe even—although they sure won’t admit it—before November.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 7, 2014
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