“Paul Ryan Is A Whiny Sore Loser”: Why He’s Still Mad At Candy Crowley For 2012 Loss
Wow. Rep. Paul Ryan is still complaining about CNN’s Candy Crowley’s 2012 debate moderation. Specifically, about the fact that she corrected Mitt Romney for saying President Obama took 14 days to call the 9/11 attack on the Benghazi compound “an act of terror,” when Obama said those words in the Rose Garden the very day after the killings of four Americans.
Talking to Hugh Hewitt Wednesday night, Ryan rehashed the Crowley moment, agreeing with Hewitt that it was “perhaps the most significant intervention by a member of the media in a presidential campaign ever.” While Ryan wouldn’t speculate about whether Crowley would do anything different if she knew what we know now (more on what we know now, later) he alleged that Crowley “violated the rules of the debate.”
There’s so much to unpack in Ryan’s complaint, but it underscores why Benghazi fever is so rampant in the GOP. There’s a strain of the fever for every type of Republican. Ryan’s not a crazy birther (though he’s got some racial issues) or a bomb-thrower; he likes to play the statesman. He’s not a fact-averse “prosecutor” like newly minted Benghazi investigator Trey Gowdy, getting the details of the story wrong every time he opens his mouth.
No, Ryan’s particular strain of Benghazi fever lets him use the faux-scandal to rewrite the results of the 2012 election: If the White House had told the truth, as soon as it was known, Obama wouldn’t have been able to boast about his national security record, and Romney-Ryan would have won the election. It’s an updated version of the “unskewed” polls movement that blinded Republicans, including Ryan and his running mate, to the ticket’s impending loss 18 months ago.
There’s so much wrong with even this relatively moderate strain of Benghazi fever, it’s hard to know where to start. First of all, despite all the ongoing noise about the composition of Susan Rice’s infamous Sunday show “talking points,” there is no evidence the White House hid the unfolding truth about what had happened at the compound (the CIA’s role is more murky). And like it or not, there is also no evidence that Americans cared very much about the issue when they cast their votes that November.
It also helps to remember that Romney himself set the stage for the way the Benghazi story unfolded, with reporters and with voters, with his witless and craven attempt to jump in front of the facts and accuse Obama of “sympathizing” with the attackers. Here’s the statement his campaign released the same night as the killings of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans:
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. 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.
Romney’s charge was based on a statement from the U.S. embassy in Cairo attacking the anti-Islam video that was inspiring protests across the Middle East (and that was first believed to have sparked the Benghazi attack). The statement came from embassy officials, not from the White House, and it was issued before the Benghazi killings. Reporters challenged Romney on his charge the day after he made it. But Ryan’s running mate doubled down: “When our grounds are being attacked and being breached, the first response should be outrage,” he told reporters. “Apology for America’s values will never be the right course. We express immediately when we feel that the President and his administration have done something which is inconsistent with the principles of America.”
So let’s be clear: Given a chance to focus Americans on the valid questions about what had happened in Benghazi, the Romney-Ryan ticket went for dishonesty and cheap shots. That pattern set the context in which Crowley gently corrected Romney for insisting the president hadn’t called the attacks an “act of terror.” Ironically, Romney himself was accusing Obama of lying when the president said he’d used those very words to describe the attack the day after it happened in his Rose Garden statement. “Get the transcript,” Obama shot back, and that’s when Crowley gently interjected: “He did, in fact, sir.”
That’s what Hewitt calls “perhaps the most significant intervention by a member of the media in a presidential campaign ever.” Ryan and other Republicans would have you believe that’s when they lost the election. By the way, Ryan’s wrong that Crowley “violated” the debate rules. She was honest about never signing off on them in the first place.
This is why Republicans can’t get over Benghazi fever. It’s a symptom of a more deadly disease: the party’s determination to deny Obama legitimacy. If he lied to get reelected, he didn’t really win at all. They don’t have to reckon with the truth that voters rejected the soulless Romney, who would say anything to get elected, and his running mate, the allegedly principled and wonky Ryan. In the end, he had to hide his unpopular budget ideas to face the voters, turning out to be as craven as Romney. It’s not really a surprise that he’s blaming Crowley for his troubles, but it’s disturbing nonetheless.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 8, 2014
“Clinton Derangement Syndrome Will Soon Be Back”: It’s A Kind Of Political Crystal Meth That Makes Conservatives Get All Excited
There was a time when I thought that the heights of derangement to which Barack Obama drove his political opponents were even greater than what we saw during the Clinton years. The dark warnings of socialism, the inability to accept that he is actually a U.S. citizen, the musings from prominent Republican figures about his “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” the conspiracies sketched out on Glenn Beck’s chalkboard, the “unskewed” polls, the fifty Obamacare repeal votes (and counting), the tricorner hats, the whole mad chaotic mess of the last five years—surely these people were nuttier than they had ever been. But now, as the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and thus of a Hillary Clinton presidency, becomes real, I’m beginning to wonder.
There are some things you just can’t compare with any precision—what’s crazier, believing that Barack Obama’s parents planted a false birth announcement in Hawaii newspapers when he was born so that one day he could illegitimately run for president, or believing that Bill Clinton oversaw a drug-running operation out of a small Arkansas airport and had dozens of his political enemies murdered? There’s no way to answer that.
It isn’t so much that conservatives have already gone off the deep end about Clinton. But we’re starting to see the signs, the way that anything involving the former president and the former secretary of state acts like a kind of political crystal meth, making conservatives get all excited and depriving them of the ability to think rationally. Take, for instance, the reaction to the fact that Monica Lewinsky is writing an article for Vanity Fair, one that, from the looks of it, won’t be particularly interesting. To look at that and see the sinister hand of Hillary Clinton masterminding the release of the article, you’d have to believe some awfully strange things. You’d have to believe that Clinton can dictate editorial decisions to the magazine, and that she’d even want Lewinsky to be drawing a lot of attention, and most importantly, that Hillary Clinton would be able to convince Lewinsky herself to do it. Try to imagine that conversation. “Monica? Hi, it’s Hillary. How’s it going? Listen, I need a favor.” “Oh, anything for you, Hill. You know how much I value our friendship.”
But look here:
“I really wonder if this isn’t an effort on the Clintons’ part to get that story out of the way,” Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, said during a Tuesday night interview on Fox News. “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton didn’t want in Vanity Fair?”
Lynn Cheney isn’t some fringe nutball. She’s been around politics for a long time. Her husband was White House Chief of Staff, then Secretary of Defense, then Vice President. She worked in government. She knows how things work. But she thinks not only that the Clintons have control of the magazine industry and of Lewinsky herself, but that anyone would believe that a Lewinsky-penned article would “get that story out of the way,” as if 1) there’s anything about that story that we as a nation don’t already know, and 2) once there’s an article about it in Vanity Fair, that means no one will talk about it anymore.
I don’t mean to make too much out of this one little thing, but I think it’s a harbinger of what’s to come. When it comes to the Clintons, conservatives are willing to believe just about anything, no matter how bizarre. If you said that Hillary Clinton was harvesting organs from American veterans in a secret lab underneath the State Department, a lot of them would say, “Yeah, I buy that.” They went through eight years of insanity, trying to pin one thing and another on the Clintons, never coming to grips with how the country increasingly saw them as having taken leave of their senses. And they’re ready to start it all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 7, 2014
“Down Another Political Blind Alley”: Three Reasons Why Reviving ‘Benghazi’ Is Stupid For The GOP
House Speaker John Boehner has made what appears to be the remarkably stupid decision to set up a “select” committee of the House to once again “investigate” the 2012 Benghazi incident in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stephens was killed.
He apparently believes that another “investigation” of this tragedy will be politically advantageous to Republicans in the mid-term elections — and somehow tarnish the reputation of the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepares a potential run for the White House in 2016.
Already the GOP has bet heavily that its obsession with Obamacare will bolster its political position — a bet that increasingly looks like a loser. Now, in its never-ending attempts to mollify the tea party fringe, the GOP leadership has turned down another political blind alley.
There are at least three reasons why their renewed obsession with “Benghazi” is politically stupid for the GOP.
Reason #1: There is no “there,” there. The Benghazi attack has been investigated over and over and there is simply no evidence that there is any scandal to be had at all.
The latest “revelation” is that Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email aimed at helping former ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice frame her description of what happened in Benghazi before she went on various talk shows. Problem is that his suggestions were entirely in line with the talking points produced by the intelligence community — which believed early on that the attack was mainly the result of reaction to an anti-Muslim videotape and demonstrations that had erupted in Cairo in protest.
Of course, it turned out later that there was more to the story — though both The New York Times and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the event did in fact confirm that the response to the video tape did play a role — and Al Qaeda did not.
David Corn of Mother Jones pointed out that The New York Times, after a comprehensive investigation, reached this conclusion:
Months of investigation…centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
The Times continued:
Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…
The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger 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. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.
The Senate intelligence committee report released in January concluded that the attack was, “not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
It went on to say:
It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks or whether extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. Some intelligence suggests the attacks were likely put together in short order, following that day’s violent protests in Cairo against an inflammatory video.
And is anyone really surprised that the actual circumstances surrounding the attack were unclear at the outset? The same was true of the circumstances surrounding the Boston bombing and the Newtown shootings that took place right here in the United States — events involving our own law enforcement. That is the nature of chaotic violent events.
The right wing has done everything in its power to turn “Benghazi” into a politically salient scandal without success. CBS’ Sixty Minutes even bought into the right wing narrative when correspondent Lara Logan based an entire story on a tale about Benghazi that turned out to be entirely fictional. The story was fabricated by contractor Dylan Davies in order to sell his book. Ultimately CBS suspended Logan as a result.
On its face, the loss of life at Benghazi demonstrated a breakdown in diplomatic security. That’s why the independent State Department Inspector General did a study of what went wrong and how to prevent a future loss of life. Procedures needed to be changed. But there was never a shred of evidence that any U.S. official did anything intentionally — or because of some political motivation — that caused this event.
And what did the Republicans who are so fixated on embassy security do in response? They actually cut the budget for State Department security.
If you were in the position of making it harder to prevent future attacks like the one at Benghazi would you really want to focus attention on the subject?
Reason #2: The “Benghazi scandal” does not resonate with most voters — except, of course, the extreme right wing.
Republicans counter that polls show a plurality of Americans disapprove of the way the Benghazi attack was handled. In fact, a Huffington Post/You.gov poll show showed 42 percent disapprove and 27 percent approve of the way “Benghazi” was handled by the administration. But of course people are dissatisfied with the way the event was handled — four people were killed.
The real question is whether “Benghazi” is an issue ordinary people care about. The fact is that the Benghazi issue has no political saliency. It never appears on the list of major concerns the voters express might affect their choices in the 2014 mid-terms. That is partially because there is no real “Benghazi scandal.” It is also because ordinary people have much more important questions on their minds like the need to increase their wages and standards of living.
The fact is that “Benghazi” does not have the elements that have made “scandals” of the past — like Watergate or the Monica Lewinski affair — relevant to the voters.
To be politically salient, a “scandal” must include two key elements that are not present in “Benghazi”:
- Real “scandals” do not involve flawed procedures. They must involve actions taken — or not taken — for improper or immoral reasons. There is no indication whatsoever that the American ambassador or anyone in the administration short-changed security in Benghazi to advance their political fortunes or to make money. Instead you have a brave American Ambassador who was willing to risk harm to himself to accomplish his mission but with inadequate security procedures. The ambassador was President Obama’s personal emissary — the last thing he wanted to do was risk his death.
- To have staying power, real “scandals” generally involve a cover-up. The Republicans argue that the administration’s taking points after the event somehow constituted a “cover-up.” But instead they reflected the best information from the intelligence community at the time. Instead of a “cover-up,” what followed was an independent State Department Inspector General report that was very critical of procedures and proposed changes — but found no “scandal” whatsoever.
By reaching out for “Benghazi” the GOP looks desperate for something to talk about. And that’s for good reason. On virtually every other major issue that is really of concern to ordinary Americans, the Democrats have the high political ground — e.g. the minimum wage, unemployment benefits, the power of big money in government, immigration reform, equal pay for equal work, voting rights, reproductive choice, contraception, gay and lesbian rights, and increasingly even Obamacare — which by Election Day could actually help Democrats (especially with turnout).
Reason #3: Do the Republicans really want to turn the conversation to foreign policy?
The GOP launched the Iraq War — the most disastrous foreign policy catastrophe in the last half-century — and they want to talk about competency and honesty in foreign policy?
In fact, some of the same people who regularly go on Fox News to rail on about the “Benghazi conspiracy” helped promote the notion that we were invading Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — the most pernicious lie ever used in recent American politics.
The War in Iraq was an unmitigated disaster — killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, costing thousands of American lives, costing our economy trillions of dollars, and spoiling America’s reputation throughout the world.
Frankly, no self-respecting media outlet should allow any of the people who intentionally lied to the American people about Iraq on the air ever again.
If you were the political party that presided over such a horrific foreign policy disaster would you really want to turn the political conversation to the question of who is best equipped to conduct America’s foreign policy?
Apparently so. It appears possible that the Republican leaders are just as inept at formulating their own political strategy as they were at conducting America’s foreign policy.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, May 5, 2014
“Time For Some Happy Talk From Democrats”: Ban The Word “But” Until After The Election
Democrats, if you want to win in the fall, take some advice from Pharrell Williams: “Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.”
The Mountie-hat-wearing pop singer’s infectious “Happy” should be the Democratic Party’s theme song for the midterm election. Despite Republican claims to the contrary, things are definitely looking up. Democrats ought to be clicking their heels and spreading the good news.
Friday’s announcement that unemployment fell to 6.3 percent was huge. The fact that the economy added 288,000 jobs in April — despite continued bad weather early in the month in parts of the country — suggests that the recovery has greater momentum than pessimists had feared. Economists were expecting decent numbers. These are great.
The stock market, meanwhile, is flirting with an all-time high. The Dow has risen about 10 percent over the past year; the S&P 500, more than 16 percent; the Nasdaq, about 22 percent . During President Obama’s term in office, the Dow has more than doubled. If he were a socialist, as his harshest critics claim, he’d be a truly lousy one.
The numbers prove that Obama is, in fact, a skillful capitalist who guided the economy out of its worst slump since the Great Depression. He accomplished this feat despite being saddled with a Republican opposition in Congress that reflexively opposes his every initiative — even those based on policies the GOP supported in the past.
Speaking of which, the Affordable Care Act — which is based, you’ll recall, on a framework developed in Republican think tanks — is clearly a success and may soon be seen as a triumph. More than 8 million people have signed up for insurance through the federal and state exchanges; Obama’s benchmark had been 7 million. Enough of these enrollees are young and healthy to ensure the program’s continued viability.
The disasters predicted by the Republican Party have not come true. Critics have stopped talking about a hypothetical “death spiral” in which the health insurance reforms collapse of their own weight, since it is now clear that nothing of the sort will happen. Early indications are that any increase in premiums for next year will be modest. Republicans will keep attacking Obamacare because it fires up the base, but the program is here to stay.
Democrats now have a positive story they can tell in their campaign ads and speeches: “We promised you that these were the right policies to get the economy on track and reform health care. We said it would take time to see results and asked for patience. You gave us your trust, and now we’re seeing the benefits. This is just the beginning. Give us a mandate to keep moving forward on an agenda that is working.”
This is what Democrats are saying, more or less. But would it hurt to show a little enthusiasm?
Obama can be excused for his brief and relatively low-key reaction to the jobs numbers Friday. He spoke in the White House Rose Garden alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom he had just met, and the situation in Ukraine was clearly weighing on both leaders’ minds.
“The grit and determination of the American people are moving us forward,” Obama said, “but we have to keep a relentless focus on job creation and creating more opportunities for working families.”
I propose that Democrats ban the word “but” until after the election.
Republicans are giving “but” a workout. Unemployment may be down to 6.3 percent, they say, but too many people are leaving the workforce. The jobs numbers for April may look good, but we don’t know if this rate of growth can be sustained. Enrollment numbers for the Affordable Care Act may be impressive, but have all those people actually paid their premiums?
These are not honest caveats. Republican claims about enrollees not paying their insurance premiums, for example, are based on a survey taken before many of those premiums were even due. The GOP wants to foster the notion that nothing is going well with Democrats in charge of the White House and the Senate — and that it’s time for a change.
When Democrats sound like the old “Saturday Night Live” character Debbie Downer — emphasizing what’s still ailing about the economy, promising to “fix what’s broken” in Obamacare — they reinforce the Republicans’ message rather than refute it.
Listen up, Democrats. You fixed the economy. You expanded access to health care. Oh, and you ended two wars.
Show a little happiness. It’s contagious.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 5, 2014
“It’s All They’ve Got”: The GOP Hunt For A Watergate-Scale Scandal Continues
It was no surprise that White House spokesperson Jay Carney spent a healthy portion of his press briefing today talking about the latest White House email on Benghazi that has conservatives on the attack once again. As you’d expect, Carney described the whole thing as “an attempt by Republicans to politicize a tragedy,” adding: Like so many of the conspiracy theories that have promulgated by Republicans since the beginning of this, this one turned out to be bogus.”
Republicans, however, see it very differently. “We now have the smoking gun” on Benghazi, says Sen. Lindsey Graham. And the press is echoing this view. If you do a news search on “Benghazi smoking gun” you’ll come up with hundreds of articles from the last 24 hours. We’re talking about an email by national security adviser Ben Rhodes, written just after the attack in September 2012 and just released. As Dave Weigel demonstrates at length, there isn’t any smoking gun here.
But while the email doesn’t actually demonstrate anything criminal or corrupt, it does show that the silliness of spin goes all the way up near the top — on both sides.
This email is actually interesting, if not for the reasons Republicans want you to believe. The section of Rhodes’ email, written two days after the attack, that has people interested is some bullet points under the heading of “Goals”:
- To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;
- To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;
- To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;
- To reinforce the President and the Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.
What follows is a series of answers to potential questions about the attack and the administration’s response, always stressing the President’s strength and steadiness and steadfastness and statesmanship. Yes, this is what some of our top White House officials spend their time on.
Now, spinning, and advising others on proper spin, is part of Rhodes’ job. Is there something a little unseemly about that? Well, you might think so. But it’s a bipartisan endeavor, one undertaken in every White House and every member of Congress’ office, where communication staff spend their every waking moment wondering how they can make sure their boss looks good no matter what.
But to Republicans, when the White House does it, it’s not just unseemly, it’s downright criminal. They believe that because they are convinced that Barack Obama and everyone who works for him are corrupt down to their very core. And one of their great frustrations of the last five years is that this president, whom they loathe with such intensity, has not been caught actually doing anything that would warrant his impeachment, at least to that portion of the American public not scanning the skies for black UN helicopters coming to take their guns and force their kids to gay marry a Marxist Kenyan abortionist.
Over the last year and a half since the attack occurred, I’ve gone back and forth on what conservatives really think about Benghazi, in their quiet moments. At times, it has seemed like they genuinely believe that this was one of the worst cases of presidential malfeasance in American history. When I compared it to other genuine scandals, I can’t tell you how many wingnuts have poured into my Twitter feed with, “How many people died in Watergate? Huh? Huh?” When I attempted to patiently explain what Watergate was actually about and why it was such a big deal, they were unconvinced.
But at other times, I’ve gotten the sense that they’re making whatever they can out of Benghazi not because they really believe that they’ll find some criminality if they keep searching, but just because it’s all they’ve got. To their chagrin, this administration hasn’t had a major scandal on the scale of Watergate or Iran-Contra. While scandals like those got more and more serious the more they were investigated, the opposite happened with the ones in this administration: the closer we looked, the more it became apparent that we were talking about simple screw-ups, not corruption and malfeasance. That’s what happened with every one of the mini-scandals, from Solyndra to the IRS to Benghazi. The administration even managed to dispense $787 billion of stimulus money without so much as a hint of theft or double-dealing, which was a pretty remarkable achievement.
If Republicans had anything better to work with to show America that Barack Obama really is the pulsing heart of evil at the center of an administration riven with criminal wrongdoing from top to bottom, they wouldn’t be crying wolf at every new Benghazi email they get their hands on. Even after all this time, the “cover-up” they claim occurred wasn’t actually covering anything up, which is kind of the whole point of a cover-up. Yes, the White House was spinning in those first few days when it was still unclear exactly what had happened in Libya, spinning for all it was worth, to show how “resolute” and “strong” they were. They wanted to make sure no one thought there was any “broader failure of policy.” And did they mention that President Obama is strong and steadfast? Oh yes, he most certainly is. That may be silly, but it isn’t a crime.
By: Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, May 1, 2014
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