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Conservative Advice To GOP: Don’t Legislate, Focus On Scandals (NPR.org)

In the autumn of 2010 I decided to stop following politics so closely, in part to focus on my fiction writing, but also because I was getting sick and tired of all the Tea Party nonsense and could see the handwriting on the wall in terms of how the midterm elections would turn out. I still kept half an ear on the news, though, since I needed to know what was going on for my teaching work and other reasons. It was in those pregnant weeks before the midterm elections that the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, famously declared that after the Republican landslide that was about to come, “The single most important thing [they] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Inter-party animosity is hardly something to generate headlines, but it is not, nor should it ever be, the primary guiding force of a politician, let alone a political party. Your primary objective, as an elected official, is to serve the needs of your constituents, whether you believe those needs to be increasing or decreasing the role of government in any particular area. This may ultimately result in other elected officials being voted out of office, but that is always a secondary goal, an effect of the policies you put into place as opposed to a cause. Even if your main goal, deep down, is to get rid of a politician you really despise, you at least put on a veneer that your primary goal is to put your policies into action. McConnell’s naked admission that Republicans were primarily interested in stopping Obama’s reelection efforts should have been a red flag to independent voters that Republicans didn’t deserve their vote, but the anti-Obama furor drummed up by the right, combined with apathy on the left thanks to Obama not acting strongly enough to rescue the working and middle classes from the recession, were too much for Democrats to overcome in 2010.

Republicans playing chicken with the debt ceiling in 2011, and other similar acts of brinkmanship, garnered the most attention after that election, but one of the (many, many) things that hasn’t received as much scrutiny as it deserves is just how little Republicans have actually done since the 2010 midterms. In the first congressional term since those midterms, fewer bills got passed than in any other congress in recorded history, less than a quarter of the number of bills the “Do-Nothing Congress” of the late 1940s. Part of the reason for this is that once Republicans took the house back over they promptly reinstated the ridiculously untaxing schedule that was a hallmark of their previous tenure leading the House, with the House of Representatives only scheduled to work 126 days this year. Worse yet, House Republicans are outright wasting what time they do spend in Washington by repeatedly and pointlessly voting to repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act; this week marked the thirty-seventh time in the past thirty months House Republicans have voted to “kill Obamacare,” even though all these efforts were destined to die in the Senate, let alone overcome an inevitable Obama veto. I understand holding one vote for symbolic purposes and to get congresspeople on the record, but thirty-seven votes in less than two and a half years is nothing short of absurd, a head-smackingly obvious sign of how Republicans are more interested in playing petty games for their base’s amusement than in doing any actual business.

Americans didn’t seem to mind so much in President Clinton’s second term when Republicans went impeachment-crazy over the Monica Lewinsky thing, mostly because the economy was going gangbusters and people were so fascinated with the Internet that they weren’t noticing how much harder they were having to work to maintain their standard of living. We are far, far from those conditions right now. Even as corporate profits and the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 hit record highs, unemployment continues to move at a snail’s pace, and both working-class and middle-class Americans are still suffering the effects of the most recent recession because all that money corporations and their CEOs are making isn’t trickling down (not that it ever did). This is a time when strong government action to bolster the economy is needed, but instead of getting good action, or even bad action, now one of conservative America’s biggest think tanks is literally telling elected Republicans to do even less than they’ve already been doing, to stop doing the work they were elected to do in order to devote their time to fluffing up the aura of scandal surrounding President Obama right now.

To be sure, two very legitimate scandals broke this past week: Revelations that IRS agents illegally targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny, and the US Attorney General’s office admitting to the Associated Press that they secretly subpoenaed the home and work phone records of AP employees in what, at first blush, appears to be a massive overreach of power. Although there’s no serious suggestion that President Obama was personally involved in either of these scandals, they still need to be investigated and resolved thoroughly. (I don’t like how some liberals have tried to smokescreen the IRS scandal by pointing out how ridiculous the tax laws are in allowing political groups to get tax-exempt status; that’s a legitimate point that needs to be addressed soon, but conservatives deserve time to voice their outrage right now.) Unfortunately, these legitimate scandals are getting obscured by the very Republicans who should be the most eager to pursue them because of the false scandals they’ve ginned up for their bloodthirsty base — everything from Benghazi to Umbrella-gate (no, I am not kidding about that last one) — to the degree that trying to keep track of all the ridiculous claims the far-right is making about Obama is now a full-time job.

That’s the thing, because there are already lots of people whose full-time job is pretty much fanning the flames about all bad things, real and perceived, about President Obama and Democrats. From talk radio, to Fox News Channel, to the rapidly-growing beyond-the-fringe efforts like The Blaze and InfoWars — outlets based on such absurd paranoia and conspiracy theories that they give tinfoil hat aficionados a bad name — America already has more than enough people working to discredit Obama and the Democratic Party in the media and push a radical conservative agenda. If more people want to get into that business — and I guess I can’t blame them because clearly there’s a market for it, and people need to make money — then maybe they should go into that as a full-time job.

If you are an elected member of the House of Representatives or the Senate, though, you already have a full-time job, one that you have taken an oath of office to fulfill. It may not get the hoopla of a presidential inauguration, but it is no less important or sincere of an oath. If you no longer want to perform that job because you are more interested in trying to scandalize another elected official than do the people’s business — the business you were elected to do — then you should resign your office and allow someone who will do that job to take your place. Say what you will about Sarah Palin — I certainly have — but at least she had the decency to end her tenure as Governor of Alaska when she decided she’d rather be a right-wing media darling and cultivate her little cult of personality than do a governor’s job. Similarly, the conservative think tank responsible for this “Hey Congressional Republicans, stop passing bills so you can slam Obama all the time” missive is headed by Jim DeMint, who left his job as a Senator from South Carolina months ago in order to lead the think tank.

It’s no great secret that Republicans, starting shortly after the Reagan Revolution, deliberately sabotaged government departments they didn’t like by cutting their funding and appointing people who weren’t interested in handling the duties that those departments are tasked to handle. When Democrats got back in power, Republicans then said that these departments needed to be cut even more (if not eliminated) because “clearly” they weren’t effective (because they were sabotaged), and as Republicans and Democrats have traded power in Washington this cycle has no less than devastated numerous government offices. If Republicans are going to pull what is effectively the same tactic on an entire branch of government, then it may soon become impossible for Congress to do, literally, anything.

It would be bad enough if this were being done in secret, but the fact that conservatives are so publicly and unapologetically considering this demands strong and immediate action just to ensure the ability of our government to function on the most basic of levels. Any elected official, regardless of party, who willfully refuses to perform their job in order to spend more time bolstering a partisan media firestorm should be impeached for dereliction of duty and refusal to perform the duties they swore an oath to perform. If that means impeaching every Republican in the House and the Senate, then so be it. They’re the ones who are so eager to turn everything into a scandal, so let’s see how they like beings the targets of one for a change.

Benghazi Schools Obama In The Politics Of Scandal (npr.org)

The beginning of May is the start of what’s known as the “silly season” of American politics. Most states have held their primaries, and until we get closer to the election — around September or October — there’s a sense that there won’t be much in the way of “serious” politics done until then. (This isn’t so much the case in presidential election years, thanks to the increased importance of the parties’ annual conventions and vice-presidential announcements and all that hullabaloo.) In addition, fewer people tend to pay attention to the news because they’re out enjoying the nice weather, so many news outlets delve much deeper into the sensational and insubstantive than they normally do in an effort to keep their advertising revenues up through increased viewership/readership. Sometimes the results are laughable — in both good and bad ways — but this year it looks like it will be no laughing matter.

We’re now months into the first round of sequestration cuts, and the stories that at one time were on some people’s radars — devastating cuts to Head Start with some schools literally holding lotteries to determine which kids have to leave, funds for WIC and meals-on-wheels for elderly and infirm people being slashed, furloughs of government employees and kicking homeless people out of shelters and putting them back on the street, among others — have slipped from people’s minds, in part because news outlets stopped talking about them and “news” outlets instead blathered on and on about how cutting White House tours was the Worst Thing Ever. Given that both major political parties just voted overwhelmingly to ease the sequester for air traffic controllers so business travelers wouldn’t face delays, this is a genuine “pox on both of your houses” story with deep human interest roots that touches most of us. Congress voting to ease air travel for the rich but still taking food out of the mouths of poor children and the elderly? Any journalist worth their weight in sweat would be driving across the country right now, collecting and publishing stories of how devastating these cuts are at a time when the economic recovery is still failing to reach the working and middle classes like it is big companies and their executives.

Instead, House Republicans just yelled “Benghazi” en masse this week, and a press corps desperate for juicy scandal to boost their profit margins seems all too eager to go along with them just to get some extra money by fluffing up a far-right conspiracy that has so little substance behind it that any reputable news organization should have dismissed it months ago. As long as our press is governed by profits and not journalism, though, this is the crap we’re going to have to put up with.

I don’t want to get into a full elaboration on why the whole Benghazi controversy is a load of hot air because I’ve done so already, but in short, the errors made during the Benghazi attack and its immediate aftermath have already been investigated and shown to have been accidental, not deliberate in any manner. Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama were both proven to have had no culpability in the matter, but they still took responsibility anyway because that’s what you do when you’re the boss. The only way conservatives’ logic for impeaching President Obama (or effectively disqualifying Hillary Clinton from a 2016 presidential bid) is to begin with what is both their first premise and ultimate conclusion, the same as it’s been for every issue from Cash for Clunkers to Fast and Furious — that President Obama (and Secretary Clinton by extension) “hate America” and are “evil.” Remove that premise — and it’s so absurd that only the blindest of political partisans would even attempt to believe it — and nearly every conservative argument about Benghazi falls to pieces on the elementary question of motive.

Their new tactic is to focus instead on an alleged cover-up after the attack, going back to White House e-mails following the attack that Republicans have literally had their hands on for months, and using some kind of super-secret decoder ring they’ve constructed in the meantime to show how President Obama allegedly tried to conceal the mistakes made in the response to Benghazi. On the plus side, this is one argument where people don’t have to buy into the “Obama is evil/hates America/is a secret Kenyan Muslim America-hating freedom-abolishing socialist atheist whatever” line, because the only claim being made is that Obama tried to hide his mistakes. That reaction is human enough, and one Americans are certainly prone to believe their politicians of doing a lot of the time.

However, when the Republicans rolled out this new line in their congressional hearing this week, there were so many red flags to raise about how it was presented — Democratic committee members not allowed to call witnesses who could have refuted claims Republican witnesses made, and not gaining access to said Republican witnesses — that the hearing shouldn’t have registered as more than a blip anywhere but in the right-wing media bubble. It was pure show trial, Republicans polishing a turd of an argument so well that it provided just enough substance that journalists, tempted by the lure of scandal, have presented it as the political equivalent of a summer blockbuster movie. It’s the hit of the summer! Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in Benghazigate. You don’t even have to buy a twelve-dollar ticket to see it; just tune in to your political show of choice.

We have seen this repeatedly since the earliest days of the Obama Administration. Just like Republicans leaped on every small thing they could find about Bill Clinton when he was president that they could scandalize, until the whole Monica Lewinksy thing finally stuck, they have tried to turn President’ Obama’s every word and action into a possible cause for impeachment. If Democrats had put in even a tenth of the effort Republicans have put in to make Bush 43 pay for the very real scandals of his time in office — not paying enough attention to their own intelligence that said months before 09.11 that al-Qaeda was planning on attacking targets within America, Vice President Cheney and oil company executives rewriting the country’s whole energy policy in secret, lying the country into a war that cost thousands of American lives and trillions of American dollars, outing Valerie Plame as political payback for her husband debunking one of the administration’s lies for that war, Bush pretending to play guitar with John McCain while the New Orleans levies broke, among others — Bush would have been out of office, and probably in prison, long before his second term was up. For every real scandal of a Republican president, conservatives froth at the mouth to create an equivalent scandal for a Democratic president, usually with “evidence” and reasoning that doesn’t pass a basic smell test because they pulled it straight out of their asses and it still stinks like what it is — total and complete crap.

The worst part is that this is coming in the wake of a very real scandal that conservatives have every right to seize on, the IRS admitting that they hassled Tea Party-affiliated groups since the dawn of the Tea Party movement, targeting them for special scrutiny. Tea Party groups have been making this claim for years, and they have now been proven completely right. So far this is looking like the work of unscrupulous low-level employees — the IRS has only two positions that are filled by political means because the IRS is supposed to be apolitical — but this is exactly the kind of thing that should never, ever happen to any group. This demands no less than a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of how this happened, who was responsible, and what safeguards need to be put in place to make sure this never happens again.

Perhaps the IRS story will pick up steam in the days to come, but right now Benghazi continues to dominate the news. Like the old journalism saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads,” and the lives lost as a result of the Benghazi consulate attack are “sexier” than a tax scandal, much less poor kids going hungry or getting kicked out of Head Start. It is unspeakably shameful that the press has turned a blind eye to the millions of victims of the sequester, those who already had so little going for them before the illogical and tragic butchering of the social safety net at a time when it is needed most, but time and time again the American press has shown that profits trump actual journalism in their eyes. All we need is a semen-stained dress from Benghazi to make the whole wretched spectacle complete.