President Obama, if he isn’t looking mortal, is at least looking awkward these days. The current “triple scandal” will, I think, end up costing the President little, but it does give the Republicans something to yell about, and yelling to no effect is what the current crop of Republicans does best.
The Administration’s handling of the four murders at Benghazi has been scandalous, and Republicans would have plenty to talk about if they wanted to talk about the facts, but they don’t. They have a massive aversion to substance, and simply want to harangue Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton.
As for Tea Party vs. IRS, the leadership at the IRS clearly failed to give the direction that it should have given. The entire non-profit deal is kind of a bad deal. How many black ministers endorsed Obama and previous Democratic candidates from their pulpits and kept their non-profit status? Quite a few, I’m sure. Does the Catholic Church sometimes function as an ally of the Republican Party while still maintaining its non-profit status? The answer to that one is not no. It is the unofficial but very real will of Congress that the IRS should err very far on the side of caution in these matters—except, of course, when it’s the other side who’s breaking the law. Then they should crack down. The senior IRS management should have seen this coming, and they didn’t. Instead, the odds are that they let a bunch of earnest mid-level managers, who I’m sure earnestly believed that only a complete idiot could believe the things the Tea Party says it believes, make all the decisions.
But, again, the Republicans aren’t interested in the facts. They just want to howl. Unlovely George Will was happy to compare “Cincinnati-gate” to Watergate—one of the grounds for impeaching Nixon was abuse of the IRS, wasn’t it? It’s the same thing all over again! Except that there’s no evidence that Obama had any involvement in what the Cincinnati office did, and that making it difficult to set up a non-profit is not quite the same thing as subjecting someone to a tax audit. But who needs facts? They just slow you down!
When it comes to the Administration’s war on the press, however, I only wish the Republicans were tougher. I would love to see Attorney General Holder take a hike. It has somehow become a tradition in the U.S., going back as least as far as Bobby Kennedy, that attorneys general see themselves as above the law, and Mr. Holder has definitely done his best to maintain it. Let’s hope that the press itself will finally realize that President Obama, with his obsessive fear of embarrassment, is a greater threat to our civil liberties than Muslim terrorists could ever be.
