p m carpenter's commentary

Seeing opportunities

This anti-handwringing, anti-bed-wetting, anti-D.C. punditocracy piece from former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau is getting a lot of attention today. The president, writes Favreau, is handling these scandalous times with characteristic aplomb, and

if that means Dana Milbank thinks he's too passive; if it means that Jim VandeHei will keep calling him arrogant and petulant; if it means that Chris Matthews will whine about him not enjoying the presidency, then so be it. He'll live.

True. As will we. But Favreau is arguing against an argument not being made. Of course the president shouldn't be "willing to fire a bunch of people before knowing all the relevant facts" or "go on a witch hunt" before investigative phases are finished. These aggressive strawmen may exist in some whacked-out, faraway field other than the right's, but I haven't noticed them.   

I can't speak for Milbank or Matthews, and I refuse to try to read the mind of that idiot at Politico, but as I see it the issue isn't how Obama reacts to these scandals in the short term, but whether he can turn them to his and, more importantly, to the nation's advantage in the longer term.

Maybe it's regrettable that aplomb can't do the trick. We live in a regret-filled world. But I'd rather Obama's last regret not come in his presidential memoirs--sorrow expressed for having declined George Washington Plunkitt's brutal political etiquette of, "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em."

Sometimes, you just have to strike.    

Coping with (others') pseudoconservative myopia

Whether Nate Silver is trying to genuinely enlighten Peggy Noonan's naivete or just casually refute her partisan bullshit, I can't say. But it's a fun romp, extrapolating, as he does, that probably "about 380,000 of Mr. Romney’s voters were audited last year"--proving Noonan's four-person theory of IRS conservative targeting--"as were about 480,000 of Mr. Obama’s voters"--disproving Noonan's four-person theory of IRS conservative targeting.

My guess is that Silver is merely chuckling, since at the end of his piece he recalls that Noonan once "cited evidence like the number of Mitt Romney yard signs in certain neighborhoods as an indication that he was likely to win."

Yes, that was a keeper. And, it should go without saying, revealing. The Peggy Noonans of this nation really can't see beyond their own--and adjoining--backyards. It's not a preference; it's a disability. Some Noonan-like conservatives may, for all I know, sincerely want to see farther. But they can't. They can't see, for instance, sequestration's harm to isolated seniors or cancer clinics, because the harm isn't there, in their own backyard (well it was, at the airport, till the political class obediantly corrected for it). And if Fox News doesn't report it, presto, it doesn't exist as even a potential sighting.     

So their political myopia abounds. That much is clear to us all. What stuns is that public affairs programs such as "Meet the Press" keep inviting these short-sighted stumblebums on the air to offer up yet more of their blurred, benighted vision of the nation at large. From fiscal to foreign policies they have consistently McGoo-ed the map. Hell, how is Peggy Noonan supposed to know where the IRS "scandal" is taking us when she can't see beyond her laptop? But yesterday, there she was, with D. Gregory & Co., prattling on and on about the Big Picture. 

Maybe Silver is right. Just get a good chuckle out of it, and move on.

Hillary, softening the territory

The mystery endures:

Philippe Reines, one of those former Senate loyalists who followed her to the State Department and is now a paid spokesman for the former first lady, dismissed speculation about a 2016 run even as he pronounced that Clinton "would be a great president and I would want to help her do that."

By all means read and enjoy the preceding analysis, taking time to savor such peculiarities as: 

With the former core team [e.g., Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson] apparently intent on staying out, can Clinton rebuild an inner circle capable of running and winning a presidential campaign?

This particular peculiarity is probably better framed as an error. It should read: "With the former core team otherwise in, would Clinton be capable of running and winning a presidential campaign?"

Memories of Hillary's '08 campaign are damn near nightmarish. Rarely has such a juggernaut derailed with less gracefulness. It was hideous--sadistically pleasurable for those of us not of the Clinton camp, but hideous nonetheless. The campaign was so conspicuously bad--it began with her pandering, '03 prowar vote--that on the day after the Iowa caucuses I felt confident in titling my morning meditation: "President Obama."  

With or without her "former core team" it is inconceivable that she could repeat the hideousness. It was a singular spawn. It had to be.

Yeah, but what's the margin of error?

Dionne at his gloomiest:

Ernst Hillebrand, the head of international policy analysis for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation ... describes a chilling finding in a 2009 survey...: "that zero percent--yes, zero percent--of workers in Germany believe they can have a significant impact on how policy in Germany is shaped via the ballot box."

Even chillier, a Pew poll "found that Germans are far more satisfied with their country’s situation than are their European neighbors."

Paddling west, Dionne notes that in North America Canadians brood about "largely unaccountable power in the hands of the prime minister"--and that their southern neighbors, in effect, should be so lucky. Here it's just "gridlock and polarization," a stalemated sewer of pettiness.

Such is the state of global democracy and the associated game we all play. We bang away at the ballot box (notwithstanding "apparent declining rates of voter participation") and they ignore us. Not all of them wish to ignore us, but they're constrained by either lapidary rules or excessive timidity. Dionne symbolically recommends that politicians here at home "contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal ... by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points."

I think Dionne and I are on the same page here. If he's suggesting that the president is squandering an ideal opportunity, then indeed we are.

Rather than waiting for them to blow over, Obama should use these scandals, spotlight them, plow into them, hold them up as the towering, prima facie evidence of a political system--of a political party--gone mad.

Last week a Republican congressman charged that one of these scandals is merely "the tip of the iceberg"--which is precisely the point that Obama should be pounding. All of these scandals are but the tip of the iceberg: a massive, underlying iceberg of inert governance and glacial progress--courtesy a minority gang of nihilistic thuggery.

You want jobs, less wealth inequality and more healthcare efficiency; you get distractions, you get hysteria, you get conspiracy theories and all manner of unhinged everything-else. This is not what you voted for. This is not what you--the majority--deserve. You deserve better. Now get out there and mobilize and kick up a little republican spirit and while you're at it kick some democratic ass and then, a bit down the road, rid yourselves of this wretched plague known as the modern GOP. 

Or, you can do nothing, and let the bastards win.

Schiff hits the fan

Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff isn't buying GOP protests of innocence regarding what was clearly a political manipulation of talking points about a grave matter of national security: 

A GOP leak of doctored e-mails [became] the basis of GOP talking points.... Congressman Issa owes the public an answer as to who doctored these emails, who leaked them to the press, and who is being held accountable.

We're all quite aware of Darrell Issa's immense love of country, which no doubt will compel him to get to the bottom of this scandal. Issues of national security aren't political playthings, as the honorable Oversight Committee's chairman frequently notes as he battles the evils of slavish partisanship in the pursuit of emancipating truth.

It would have been wrong--wrong, wrong, wrong, horrendously wrong, wickedly wrong--had the White House erected any political cover for its initial Benghazi narration. Rampant scuttlebutt suggested the White House did, but, turns out--to the GOP's country-loving relief--it didn't. Praise be.

However it also turns out that somebody or somebodies in the scuttlebutt camp tampered with the exonerating evidence, most likely for--brace yourself--political gain. This is the very kind of partisan skulduggery that we all know Darrell Issa's immense love of country won't tolerate.

Mr. Issa has been overworried and overworked of late. Single-handedly upholding American honor is an exhausting job--especially when it's of the frenetic, Keystone Cops variety. This surely explains Mr. Issa's tardiness in pursuing the latest truth: Who is the evidence-tampering somebody or somebodies of partisan depravity?

But we know he'll get there. For when it comes to truthiness and the nation's security, snake-alarm salesmen are ultimately tireless.        

BenghazIRS

This story delves dangerously into facts, which have the unfortunate effect of "muddling" the ecstasy of skulduggery and scandal:

Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers, stalled by miscommunication with I.R.S. lawyers and executives in Washington and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name. But their review went beyond conservative groups: more than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.

More facts pile up from there. And they're most unsatisfying. Even Benghazi is better than this. 

Avian fecal matter as a political strategy

The New York Times reports that "The president’s aides ... have ordered the White House staff not to be distracted by approaching hearings on Capitol Hill." This is not unlike Gen. Eisenhower ordering Allied troops not to be distracted by the Wehrmacht's approach in the Ardennes, but we get the gist: Pay no attention to all the scandalized insanity, folks; it'll soon go away. 

On the NYT's op-ed page, there's evidence the WH's effort is somewhat superfluous. Observes Charles Blow, "According to a Gallup report released Thursday, 'The amount of attention Americans are paying to the I.R.S. and the Benghazi situations is well below the average for news stories Gallup has tracked over the years.' "

Americans not paying attention to political events is, unfortunately, as deepeningly chronic as you suspected it was.

And that, as I see it, is the core weakness of the WH's strategy. It is inverted damage control, which seeks mostly survival. As the Times frames it: "the theory [is] the best way to get past the controversies is to emphasize policy proposals and contrast them with what the administration will portray as political gamesmanship by the Republicans."

Reverse that--emphasize GOP gamesmanship and contrast it with policy proposals--and you've the contour of a more serviceable strategy. Which is to say, the WH should capitalize on--not "get past"--the controversies. For their name is "Obstruction," which is the mother of all afflictions in today's American political system.

The Times continues:

Some of the president’s allies have urged him to develop a political "circuit breaker" in case the Republican effort to stoke controversies continues for months.

In case?

But ... there were no plans for Mr. Obama to make a big speech to confront controversies that White House officials do not believe will last.

That the White House may be right is what frightens.

Hit the GOP now, especially now--now as the scandals' foundations are disintegrating. Obama's Pattonesque message to WH aides should be that "I don't want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the GOP do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy. We're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. We're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like crap through a goose."

That, I suspect, would get Americans' attention; a reasonably fair share of Americans, anyway--and more than just cranky, old, midterm-voting-prone white men. 

A propagandistic frenzier at her best

Peggy Noonan has penned a grandmommy of propagandistic hysteria. It's a pleasure to read. She raves like an offended banshee and piles vitriolic rumor upon vitriolic scuttlebutt and longs for the clean, virtuous era of pre-Obama, although she forgets herself once and concedes broadly and axiomatically that "Presidents always undo themselves." (Then "The Scandals" are inexorably, but merely, presidential?)   

You simply must read Peggy's complete indignation. It's right here. Just a taste--it begins forebiddingly: "We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate."

Now I thought the Benghazi scandal was the worst scandal since Watergate, and of course it is, which Peggy's pals on the fanatical right are determined to (mis)prove. Turns out, though, that there's another worst scandal, which isn't the lone, actual scandal of the Justice Department, although that too is among Peggy's survey of scandals, also presumably as the worst. (I guess she wants to keep her options open.) No, the worstest worst scandal is the scandal of the lowest common denominator, which by definition appeals to the widest populist outrage, which, further, is the primest territory for rhetorical demagogues like Peggy Noonan.  

It takes her a while--she battles sinisterism, shock and suppression along the way--but Peg finally gets to the final outrage, and it's a whopper of sham:

[I]t would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

Yes, it took the misdeeds or possibly just poor judgment of a government agency independent of President Obama's control for Ms. Noonan to get herself anguished over the integrity of our system and our ability to function. Republicans--potentially "shallow"--have been undermining and overtly dynamiting both the American people and their government for years, they've been ripping hell from integrity and gutting even the most basic of good-government functions, and yet this--a Cincinnati IRS branch under a commissioner appointed by another president--is what launches Peg into a falling sky.

It's beautifully done. Really, it's a pleasure to read. Propagandistic frenzy at its best.

***

p.s.: I don't wish to spoil your read, but I couldn't resist noting my favorite line amongst Noonan's amassing drama. "Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician ... told ABC News: 'It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.' "

And I once developed hemorrhoids after frequenting JCPenney. The devils.

The gang that STILL can't shoot straight

Classic.

From The Hill:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Ohio) told The Hill that he hired a special oversight director in March, Rob Borden, at Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) behest, to help coordinate the various committee investigations.

“[Borden] was hired because the Speaker said, ‘We’re going to focus on [oversight] this year.’ And at the Speaker’s request, we hired Rob Borden, who is every day involved with the committees, their staff directors, counsel. I’m  meeting with chairmen to talk about working together,” Cantor explained.

Later, same story:

[Rep. Darrell] Issa sent out a notice that his panel would hold a hearing on the [IRS] matter next week, unbeknownst to the Ways and Means Oversight subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany (R-La.).

“Oh, is he?,” Boustany responded to The Hill when asked about Issa’s Wednesday hearing. “I’m not aware what Issa’s doing yet.”

Good old Republican management.

Go West, young Foxes

In what I gather is a celebratory announcement, Breitbart reports, "Allen West Makes it Official Over at Fox News." They quote from Fox's press release:

"Representative West’s congressional and military experience along with his fearless approach to voicing key issues will provide a valuable point of view to the FOX News lineup," said Fox news vice president.

Although not on Breitbart, Fox's press release continues:

Former representative West is, of course, hilariously nuts, as in batshit fucking crazy, so we know he'll fit right in here at B.F.C. Fox News. From our point of view, his ultimately hireable lunacy came in 2011, when he told a gaggle of right-wing women that left-wing ladies were castrating American males, and that the right-wing women needed to stop the left-wing ladies, "Because if you don’t, then the debt will continue to grow."

Go ahead. Try to outcrazy that.

In the yawn camp

I guess this is one of those things that depends on how you look at it.

Josh Marshall says "Wow, this is pretty epic," while Kevin Drum writes that "It's not as if we didn't know this already."

Other commentators have since assembled in one of the two camps: epic ... yawn.

The "this" under discussion is yet another, overreaching, dirty little Republican trick. The party's "whistleblowers" blew it in exaggerating, when not downright inventing, the bureaucratic scuffling behind the Benghazi talking points.

Republican pols, Republican aides, Republican operatives and the entire obscenity of the Republican media smear machine got to work and--lied.

I'm in the yawn camp.      

The hooting IRS hearing

I'm watching the IRS hearing, in which, much like the Benghazi brouhaha, Republicans are delivering the astonishing revelation that bureaucracies can be slow, ham-handed, and, in a word ... bureaucratic.

I'm still trying to collect myself. Who knew?

The hearing's best part came before the hearing's official beginning, though. The Republican chairman, brimming with wholesome integrity, said in effect: Here at Ways and Means we don't normally swear in witnesses, but today we've a bunch of fucking liars before us, so I'm reversing that custom.

Integrity. Always, integrity.   

A Klein must-read

Ezra Klein has scrupulously channeled President Obama's mind, as well as yours and mine, as well as every sober brain and despairing intellect in the country. Here's the president, saying what he thinks he can't say, although he can, and has: 

Look, the reason the American people can’t trust their government is here in Washington. Right now sequestration is cutting unemployment checks by 10 or 11 percent. Do you hear anyone talking about that? Or doing anything about it? No. You hear Republicans aides telling Politico, anonymously, that the speaker is quote “obsessed” with Benghazi....

And not even Benghazi. The Benghazi talking points. Are you kidding me? He’s not obsessed with global warming or unemployment or rebuilding our infrastructure. And now that there’s conflict, all of you [in the press] are obsessed with Benghazi talking points too, and meanwhile, we’re cutting the National Institutes of Health and we’re cutting too deep into the military and we’re making life harder for the unemployed and we’re doing nothing to keep this planet in good shape for our kids.

Read the whole thing. It's a minor masterpiece of unreal, but desperately needed, reality. Klein didn't just invent it in a moment of creative disgust; he "asked a number of ex-Obama aides and political consultants what the president would say if he went Bulworth.... [I]t’s what the people who have heard Obama vent about Washington in private believe he wishes he could say in public."

He can. There's no constitutional prohibition of executive candor. Indeed, Obama has brushed against the above rhetorical contours on several public occasions already. The universe survived.

There's also no political prohibition of presidents bringing a gun to a knife fight. 

Obama needs a gun in the shape of a cliche: "a game changer." The first half of his first term was historic. Diverting the nation from a great depression redux, among other great things, propelled him to near-great status, but he's been sliding ever since. He's now a punching bag. And his weak, defensive position is going to worsen until he fights back.

A vague fear still abounds that in telling the truth Obama will sound angry. He should welcome the fear. FDR wasn't exactly jocular in battling an enemy assault on Pearl Harbor nor was LBJ particularly lighthearted in his war on poverty or against racial discrimination. Presidents get mad. They're human. They're supposed to get mad. It's allowed. Even to black ones.

Nevertheless, reread Klein's passage above. Does it sound angry? Or does it sound like the unembellished truth?--which is the only thing missing in this, Obama's asymmetric Washington war.     

Housekeeping II

Well so far no complaints about the recently activated "verification code" commenting system, which rather surprises me. Last night I test drove it a few times and in half of those occasions I couldn't distinguish letters from numbers, or, if I was pretty sure some scrawl was a letter and not a number, I couldn't discern precisely what letter it was. But evidently that was me, not you. Glad to see it. 

A Bulworthy refinement

I agree with Chait's blunt assessment that "Bullshit works" but "Bulworth doesn’t," which may surprise, given that I've spent two posts this morning urging the president to "go Bulworth." But, as always, context matters. Chait explains:

Any political scientist will tell you that the scope for possible legislation in this term is very narrow: The median House member is a very conservative Republican who represents a district that voted for Mitt Romney, and whose biggest political risk is losing a primary to an even more conservative Republican.

But most political reporters and analysts don’t pay attention to the political science. They like narratives that revolve around the president as a protagonist. When you confront them with structural analysis that confounds their narratives, they just get upset with you.

In short, for Obama to go Bulworth with the intent of accomplishing much of anything in the 113th Congress is almost pure fantasy, as I earlier labeled the White House's mumbo-jumbo about "focusing" on job creation etc. etc. in the midst of a full-blown GOP hysteria attack that's quite unlikely to abate. The mumbo-jumbo sounds silly and looks silly mostly because it's so immensely, so conspicuously silly to anyone paying any attention.  

No, if a focused Bulworthing there be, it must be dedicated to excising the pseudoconservative tumor, in 2014. Otherwise we'll be doomed for another two years, as will the entirety of Obama's second term. The task of 2014 is herculean, but doable--if Obama and party start now.    

A less than gentle guide to drawing conclusions is what's needed

At this afternoon's joint press conference with the Turkish prime minister, President Obama, in a sadly characteristic response to a reporter's question about the current administration waxing Nixonian, said he would let the folks in the press "draw [their] own conclusions."

We might call that a "permission structure," while adding that it's a big part of the problem.

It was always a foregone conclusion that the Republican smear machine would attribute Obamian malice to every scandal--one real, two invented, and probably counting--but only in the absence of presidential counterpunching do such conclusions join the "foregone" category among the general press. The press will cover the noise, they don't much care if it's from only one source. It's easy, sensationalist copy; let the crackpots be their guide.

I gotta say, the current, scandalous! threesome is damn near a refreshing change, for we're in the fifth year of the GOP's monotonous imbecility and the press' stenography of it. Together, they've undermined the American political system's health and brought it to the point of a chronic disease. Hence the presidential time is now for a crushing, reorienting counterblow--for "going Bulworth" in exposing our potentially fatal attraction to all the present absurdities. (The proximate object, of course, is a reset, in 2014.)    

Now obviously now doesn't mean during a joint press conference with the Turkish prime minister. But I sure hope that Obama is quietly composing a whopper of an asap counterthrust. His homework is already overdue.  

A John Wayne investigation

Abstract of John Boehner's morning press conference:

We in the GOP demand two things: first, mass incarcerations, then, the facts. We're the party of liberty.

Constitutional conservatism indeed. 

When did you last hear of "constitutional liberalism"?

Sen. Rand Paul, speaking last week to a group of right-wing Iowa Christianists:

I’m not advocating everyone go out and run around with no clothes on and smoke pot. I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.

Oh. So that's what he is.

He's also confused. Libertarians don't "advocate" nude pot-smoking, they merely defend every American's right to get stoned and naked. I've no problem with that.

I do, however, have a problem with Paul's further confusion: that semi-libertarianism amounts to "constitutional conservatism," which even further suggests the inadmissibility of constitutional centrism, or constitutional liberalism, or, for that matter, constitutional socialism. The fundamental purpose of our founding document was to enable the populace (narrowly regarded in electoral terms at the time, but permitted to expand) to shape the nation's (if you will) ideological future, which neither compels us to Social Security nor constrains us to free markets. The choice is up to us--either way, perfectly constitutional.    

Liberals have already conceded the flag, God, and even the word "liberal" to conservatives (who aren't conservatives, but that's another story). Now conservatives are deep into owning the constitution--which is tantamount to Christianists feeling free to commit any desired hypocrisy, because God's on their side.

Rand Paul is of course just one voice in this right-wing chorus. Regrettably, one hears virtually no pushback from the left--and one certainly never hears the phrase "constitutional liberalism." For the reason noted above, that phrase would be just as preposterous as constitutional conservatism, but might others please point this out?

"Going Bulworth"

The NYT's Peter Baker references President Obama's aborted fury:

In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought.

Counterbalancing that, though, is either the advice Obama receives, or a presidential predisposition that advisors loyally echo: 

“Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod.... “It’s probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.”

At this point, Axelrod's adjectival distinctions escape me.

In a system in which being "truthful" about the opposition--in the sense of being harshly, openly critical--might well gum up the work of achieving the "practical" outcome of moving legislation forward, then prudence would dictate a measured approach.

But Obama doesn't operate in such a system; even the prospect of practical outcomes is a mirage. Instead, Obama operates, or rather is stymied, within a systemic structure which is practically nuts--all for the practical benefit of a uniformly venomous opposition to whom dysfunction and chaos are necessary default positions. Having been fed a pure diet of venom for years, the opposition's hardcore base can tolerate no other; and because the base determines who its representatives are, the latter are left only to cater.

Thus it's not merely a fiction but a practical disservice to the nation for the Obama administration to persist in prattling on about how the president "will continue to focus" on "growing the economy, helping it create jobs, strengthening the middle class, expanding opportunity, expanding security for middle-class families and seniors," as Jay Carney has been implausibly prattling all week.

There is no path, no political mechanism by which Obama could conceivably advance, let alone accomplish, any of these pressing items. For the president and his spokesmen to insist he's focusing on a fantasy is disturbing. By definition it feeds the impression that he's out of touch--untethered from the practical reality of Republican perfidy.

You "want to be practical," Mr. President? Then tell the nation the truth.

Housekeeping

Sorry but I had no choice. Since Typepad can't stop spam from flooding the comments section, and I haven't the time to police the area, I've had to opt for a "randomly generated verification code" for all commenters to enter before posting. I'll undo this action in a few days and see how things go. If no spam gets through, I'll leave it undone. Again, my apologies. But it's either this, or dozens of Cheap Meds! ads after every post. 

The trashiest Allen & VandeHei yet

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Politico's dual foghorn of hysteria squared, are positively giddy over the Obama administration's scandal-plagued prospects. I could find only one incontrovertible sentence in their sadistic gushing: 

[T]he press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

Gushing and giddy, yes. Of course it is. But also a kind of notice. They're virtually declaring their partisan ground, or at least their anti-Obama ground. Not because aggressive reporting should always be the press' job, but because they spy a long-awaited opening to "get" Obama.  

Trashy. Really trashy.

***

update--and a relevant musing:

I guess I wasn't the only one who sighed. I didn't know when I read the Politico piece that it had already made the blogospheric rounds. Sargent addresses it at some length, as, I gather, others have. That's their style, and there's certainly nothing wrong with it, but I don't see the point in "fleshing out" the obvious. And isn't that what Allen and VandeHei's unprofessionalism is? Bloody obvious?

This by way of a kind of confession. I have struggled for some time with lengths of discussion in posts. I once wrote longer ones. Much longer. They largely went unread in their entirety. I've shortened them purposefully--there's no reason to write 850 words when 250 can cover the same territory. I'm not comparing myself to Philip Roth, but he once observed that most of his writing career had been devoted to "amplify, amplify, amplify"; then he saw Saul Bellow doing "compress, compress, compress." He was intrigued, and he followed suit. (I'm glad he didn't do so prior to Sabbath's Theatre.) Anyway, that seemed like a reasonable approach to me. So I've shortened discussions.

Whenever longer discussions seem necessary, I'm happy to oblige. But with trash like the Politico piece, I just don't see much to elaborate on--I see little to nothing that hasn't already occurred to most any reader, so I shoot for either brevity or silence.

I trust you're OK with this. It saves everybody a lot of time, all the way around. 

Pressure works

The Hill:

The White House on Wednesday asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to reintroduce a media shield law amid criticism of the Department of Justice’s subpoena of Associated Press phone records....

A spokesman for the New York lawmaker said Wednesday that Schumer would reintroduce the language that was approved in a 15-4 bipartisan committee vote [in 2009].

That would be the media shield law the White House opposed, which prompted Schumer to lament at the time that Obama's "opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback." Notwithstanding Carneyesque gobbledygook intended to muddle the issue of WH inconsistency, that opposition has now evaporated. Finally, the First Amendment, a proud 1; Obama, a chastened o.  

But that's OK. It's in the primordial nature of the executive beast to gorge power. The Founders expected most presidents to be gluttons--to jealously retain whatever powers have been amassed as well as ramify more, hither and yon, anew. Hence the constitutional system's Chuck Schumers and the occasional Supreme Court to tell the likes of Dick Nixons to go shove it.  

But in this WH capitulation, there's no shame. It's smart politics--not to mention a necessary protection--even if the chief executive will have a hard time swallowing it.

***

Correction: The WH opposed the original shield bill, but not the compromise bill that Schumer's to reintroduce. 

Sober minds think alike

Speaking on MSNBC, David Axelrod revealed why no with a dram of political sense could have been involved in the IRS scandal: "[I]f anybody political was involved in this, they would say, 'Are you kidding me?' "

Speaking to Politico, an AP reporter revealed why no one with a dram of political sense could have been involved in the Justice Department scandal: "No one was yelling and screaming, but it was like, 'Are you kidding me!?' "

Repent!

Milbank on WH Press Secretary Carney, who said yesterday that

Obama’s love of press freedom “is backed up by his support for a media shield law.” This would be the shield law that died in Congress in 2010 because of Obama’s objections.

Read the link. I'd forgotten the issue. Jay Carney, meet Baghdad Bob.

The much larger point is that this, the AP story, is the killer story. Benghazi and the IRS' foolishness are insignificant compared to a scandal in which the press itself is the offended party, from which no administration would ever again get a fair shake on any other issue--not until the press is satisfied that that administration has duly, properly humbled itself.  

You can rage that that's grossly unfair and that the press is behaving like privileged frat boys. Rage away. But it won't alter the fundamental reality of the Fourth Estate's working relationship with the executive branch--and the latter needs the former to successfully engage and destroy the imminently apocalyptic GOP.

Obama must swallow his pride, bend his knee, and publicly pray for the press' forgiveness--and thereby convert the press from enemy to ally. He needs them, as many as he can get.

Holder and the complication of Obama's life

Eric Holder just complicated Barack Obama's life.

In the aftermath of the immensely stupid Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy, in a brilliant public-relations move, took personal responsibility for the fiasco. This stroke of ingenuity swept his embarrassment from the forefront and added double digits to his approval rating. Nobody's perfect, and the American public likes to hear its imperfect leaders admit the obvious. 

A similar resolution awaits President Obama's handling of the brutish, clumsy A.P. story.

Much as Kennedy's Bay of Pigs was founded on the accumulated stupidity of the previous administration, Obama's indifference to the press' constitutional prerogatives as well as the Justice Department's own regulating guidelines was built on the amassed abuses of several preceding administrations. So goes executive power, whose growth the left intensely disdained under George W. Bush, but for which it has found a tempered understanding under Obama. So goes partisanship.

At any rate, admitting to such abuse seems Obama's smartest public relations option. I suspect he'll get around to it. But Eric Holder complicated matters yesterday when--commenting on an open investigation about which he had just pledged not to comment--he grieved that the A.P.'s story involved one of "the top two or three most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen. It put the American people at risk. And that is not hyperbole."

Which was rank hyperbole. The A.P. initially had held the story at the administration's request; it went forward with publication only hours before the administration was to release the story itself.

And all that, Obama will have to explain as he rolls out a public apology. He'll need to isolate the seriousness of the administration's leak, which may or may not have put the American people at risk, from the entirely distinct seriousness of the press' constitutional right to print the leak.

Somewhere in that messy mix Obama will have to untangle Holder's exaggerated, complicating conflation of the two. The attorney general would have better served his boss by simply reserving comment, as he had promised to do.   

Obama's lucky week

This may seem like an odd time to say this, yet there's probably no more appropriate time to say it: Barack Obama remains the luckiest politician alive.

If he were Jimmy Carter this week's triumvirate of scandals would have dripped out in successive months; just as one quieted down, another would have been waiting in the wings, ready to plague all the above-the-folds. Instead, Obama has had the good fortune to confront all the outrage collectively. The country's capacity for scandal and outrage is limited, so everything above that indefinable tolerable level is squandered--it's the excess of outrage that Republicans will never recapture for what could have been the maximum political advantage of drip, drip, drip.

This isn't to say that Obama is himself abbreviating his good fortune, however. This isn't the time for "cool." That routine may awe once again his most dedicated base, but the country would, I'm sure, appreciate a presidential press conference in which, with considerable animation and proper indignation, he took all comers--not merely a question or two while standing next to David Cameron. And Obama should open the presser by announcing the brutal unmoorings of ... whomever. That would place at least one necessary punctuation mark in this scandalous narrative, many more of which will necessarily follow. He should start putting them down now.

But, having said that, it still astonishes: Obama's luck seems endless. From landing Alan Keyes as a senatorial candidate to taking his second presidential term's lumps virtually all at once, well, it makes one think that somebody up there must really like him.  

The latest Drudging

Drudge is going to be fun to follow for a while. The top headliner, for the moment:

McCONNELL: 'We've Only Started to Scratch the Surface of This
Scandal'...

No need to click on which scandal. To the right, they're all fun-gible.  

Strike 'The Battle Hymn'

The pathologically sunny Greg Sargent:

Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is. That’s because when scandal grips Washington, a president actually needs his core supporters more than ever to ward it off, making it harder to do anything that will alienate them.

Oh Greg you silly thing. If there's a way to fuck this up, the American left will find it.

Run whatever sells

Is the right even capable of getting a story straight?

Townhall.com, minutes ago: "BREAKING: Eric Holder Recuses Himself From Leak Investigation." Yes you read that right, the A.G. is on the run. Then came the exciting, explosive lede:

Attorney General Eric Holder has recused himself from the Associated Press leak investigation. He will officially announce his recusal at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. Fox News is reporting his recusal comes partially because Holder has testified about potential national security leaks surrounding a May 7, 2012 Associated Press story.

All of that absolutely true--except Holder's recusal came last year.

Does this embarrass Townhall? No way. Shift to bottom of story:

UPDATE: During [THE] press conference Tuesday afternoon, Holder said he recused himself from the case "early on."

Townhall has left the "BREAKING" headline up, however. It sells better than reality.

The awful truth, per Kessler

One of the pleasures that WaPo subscribers will be paying for by this summer will be that of Glenn Kessler awarding, for instance, President Obama "Four Pinocchios" for such wretched nefariousness as claiming that the phrase "act of terror" is pretty much the same as "act of terrorism."

Well gee I don't know, Glenn. Is there a difference between "ass" and "assclown"?

Never assume

In a really perverse way, President Obama is proving that any assumptions of reasonableness will always be violently rejected as a foreign invader by the host of body politics.

Assume nothing, especially reason. Stay out in front, and stay there aggressively. And if you must assume something, then assume only that reasonable acts will be conspiratorially twisted beyond recognition--so, see Number Two, stay out in front of every conceivable twist.

And this, as Milbank notes, the Obama administration did not do with respect to those behind-the-scenes Benghazi emails:

They didn’t say anything publicly in March when they provided congressional investigators with e-mails showing that White House officials had been involved in an intense fight between the CIA and the State Department over the drafting of the points and that at least a dozen versions had been written.

The administration's silence--its assumption of reasonableness; that it had done its job and there the matter would innocently lie--rendered yesterday's presidential "outrage" moot. Said Obama: 

The e-mails ... were provided by us to congressional committees. They reviewed them several months ago, concluded that in fact there was nothing afoul in terms of the process that we had used. And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no "there" there.

Of course there isn't. But it would have helped had the "nothing afoul" been advertised loudly by the administration in March--not yesterday. Instead, the administration assumed a certain amount of reasonableness by, I don't know, somebody. And you just can't do that. Not in Washington.

THIS impeachment: the deciding showdown

I must be totally out of the liberal loop. I thought that the GOP's routinization of madness was a political given, ergo, that talk of impeachment would come as naturally as this spring day, and, accordingly, that any folks who openly speculated on the odds of presidential impeachment proceedings weren't really speculating on the odds nor necessarily endorsing the proceedings--they were simply observing the objective reality of GOP horror.

Or so I thought. And it seems that's what the Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky thought; but now I see that he was out of the liberal loop, too.

He writes that he caught flack last week for noting the obvious: Brace for impeachment. He then goes on, at some length, defending himself for having made note of an enormously looming reality. "I was on the business end of a small number of angry tweets from liberal readers," he grimaces, "and I see that the UK Daily Mail trotted out my statement in a way that made it sound as if I thought it was legitimate." 

Well that's what you get, Dr. Tomasky, for telling a patient he has gall stones. Don't you see? It's the same as condoning his gall stones. It's not at all the same, of course, except that it's precisely the same--on Twitter, in the blogosphere, within the reckless misapprehensions of cable news.

At least Tomasky insists that liberal anger embodied a "small number," even if smaller is always louder. What won't remain small, however, is our resurrected confusion over What rises to the level of an impeachable offense. Remember that chestnut from the Clinton era, trotted out every 30 seconds every bloody night by every talking head on every deafening cable channel? 

Tomasky pre-adds to the confusion. He begins by observing that "yes, folks; under the Constitution, the President must do something" to be impeached, yet he later concedes that "A high crime or misdemeanor is whatever the House majority decides it is." The former is flawed; the concession is correct. It's that straightforward. But that doesn't mean we won't be subjected to inexhaustible debates on which is accurate.

What's singularly relevant, though, are those two little words, "House majority."

For the majority in place is mad, quite mad, as routinely mad as any political party's routinization of madness can get. The coming attempted coup won't be about President Obama--no more about him, anyway, than the GOP's previously attempted coup was about Bill Clinton. It will be about the GOP's incurable madness, and whether this republic, the world's oldest representative democracy, will tolerate it any longer. 

A perfectly legal outrage

When scandal is scandalously legal and in fact carried out by the nation's top law enforcement agency:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news....

The Obama administration has aggressively investigated disclosures of classified information to the media and has brought six cases against people suspected of providing classified information, more than under all previous presidents combined.

One can certainly understand the administration's purpose in aggressively investigating leaks; presidents and national security officials get nervous when highly sensitive, classified information becomes public currency.

But this president, of all presidents, what with his scholarly background in constitutional law and history, should himself understand and make clear to subordinates the notoriously deeper national harm performed by the "chilling effect" of spying on First Amendment sources--this time with the added, Nixonian touch of a broad and prolonged dragnet effect.

The irony. One real scandal finally comes to light, and it's perfectly legal.

How to whip up a scandal

On "Hardball" tonight we watched a media-gushing, Whitewater-like Washington scandal in the making. In the persons of HuffPost's Howard Fineman and Time's Joe Klein we witnessed speculation passing for reporting, guesswork substituting for legwork, and self-inflated splashing about at the vortex. There was however no news.

Fineman was proudest about the "pushback" he had already received from the White House on his "reporting." What reporting was that? From his column:

You don't have to be a Republican conservative or a tea party member or a hardened cynic to wonder who in the Obama campaign or the Obama White House might have known about inquiries into the tax status of Obama's foes.

And from crack-analyst Joe Klein we heard three times that this scandal will really explode--brace yourself--if it's connected to the White House. This would be big news. This would be, ahem, very harmful to the WH's political interests. Three separate times Klein felt compelled to enlighten us on this fine point of political acuity. I repeat, Joe Klein is a crack analyst.

I swear I was almost embarrassed for the two of them. Analysts, indeed.

Glenn Beck's unified theory of ultimate relativity

Sure it's confusing, but great minds think elaborately and spherically and thus can connect the seemingly scattered dots. Here's Glenn Beck's vast brain, at work today--with the dots helpfully highlighted:

America, if you don’t pay attention to what they did with the IRS and Benghazi, next year, your health care goes to the IRS.... So now you have to turn over all your medical records.... If you don’t think that they won’t use that to source and to sort people and to intimidate and to take away your guns, quite honestly....

What happened with the IRS was an Inquisition. It targeted Jews. If you were the wrong religion, if you were Jewish, if you were the wrong religion--submit!

When you have a government going in and putting a litmus test together for a religion, you are developing a very frightening state. If there aren’t impeachment hearings, if there aren’t massive firings and if there isn’t a change in the media, you are already operating under tyranny.

Go ahead, take your time. It's needed to sort all that out.