I don’t want to overly downplay the severity of the three scandals bedeviling the Obama administration right now, but Republican whispers about impeachment bespeak a cluelessness not seen since the last time the GOP tried to oust a sitting president. Seriously, did they learn nothing from the Clinton years?
They say an elephant never forgets. If that’s the case, the GOP needs to change its animal mascot to a goldfish … with a brain lesion … swimming in a bowl full of Jose Cuervo and Percocet.
You geniuses tried this once before, remember? By the time Bill Clinton bobbed and weaved his way through the impeachment process – which wasted gobs of valuable time and money – he looked like a conquering hero, and all that really came of the Republicans’ efforts was the exorbitantly expensive Starr Report, the most thoroughly footnoted Penthouse Forum letter in U.S. history.
To one degree or another, each of the current Obama scandals is concerning:
1. Benghazi: To me, the Benghazi situation is chiefly about a State Department that was in full cover-your-ass mode, but Republicans seem to want to gin it up to Caligula-like proportions. As Michael Crowley pointed out at Time.com, the emails the administration recently released show that no one involved in crafting the administration’s post-attack talking points doubted that a demonstration had taken place at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, and the CIA was actually responsible for striking language from the talking points about the agency’s warnings regarding security threats.
So the State Department was less than completely forthcoming. We’d all like full transparency from our government officials, but we’re all adults. We know that folks in Washington are pretty much always in self-preservation mode. Seems more like PR spin than outright malfeasance. So key information was left out of the message. McDonald’s does that every time it airs a commercial without any morbidly obese people.
To me, this is more about a party that’s been in full attack mode (anyone have the latest over/under on the number of times House Republicans will attempt to appeal Obamacare?) since Barack Obama was elected. There were 13 similar attacks on embassies and consulates during the Bush administration. Where was Fox News then? And where were the network’s attack dogs when the famous Downing Street Memo revealed that the Bush administration had been manipulating the public into supporting an ultimately ruinous war?
2. The IRS: The IRS’s targeting of conservative groups is perhaps the most concerning of the recent scandals, but we shouldn’t pretend that liberal groups have never been targeted. They have – both during this administration and the previous one. In fact, there’s a lot of missing context in this case that gets drowned out by the GOP’s screeching. And it’s not yet clear how far up the food chain this screw-up goes. That said, the last thing you want is even the appearance of government bullying and intimidation toward groups that are exercising their First Amendment rights.
3. AP/phone records: There will always be a tension between national security interests and freedom of the press, and this scandal brings that tension into sharp relief. A free press is an indispensible pillar of any democracy. So is not getting your fingernails yanked out by the Taliban. Where you fall on this one may depend on your value system. I don’t want to be too flippant about this one (I think the Obama administration richly deserves the criticism it’s getting), but it’s not a black-and-white issue either.
So it’s not like Obama doesn’t deserve some criticism, but are there really any high crimes to speak of here? If this is the new standard for impeachment, why not just draft articles of impeachment each inauguration day and then have the opposition party fill them in on the fly, like a stalker working on his latest scrapbook? Because that’s kind of what Michele Bachmann looks like right about now.
(For another take on this topic, check out IB Editorial Director Joe Vanden Plas’ erudite analysis here.)
(Continued)
WEDC update
There’s a bipartisan effort afoot to tighten up the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., our state’s answer to a Saigon intersection.
Last Thursday, bipartisan legislation was introduced that “would require WEDC board members to serve fixed terms instead of serving at the pleasure of the governor and legislative leaders,” according to an AP report. Another bill would require the agency to submit to an annual independent financial audit.
Sounds great. I might also suggest having the state spring for a copy of Excel. But whatever works. After all, it’s become abundantly clear that something had to be done.
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