At this point, when all the intelligent or logical people have dumped last week’s scandals in the garbage, where they belong, the Sunday morning talking heads, with a bewildering inability to find anything in the world worth discussing, have clung to those phony scandals with Gila monster like tenacity.
The first I encountered was George Stephanopoulos of This Week with Whoever Shows Up. George tries to make the point that all the troubles of the week have helped to drive confidence in the government down. Of course they have, that’s why they were invented in the first place. He makes this statement right after Don Pfeiffer, a White House spokesman has seemingly, effectively knocked down each Republican allegation of Presidential involvement in both the Benghazi affair and the IRS mess.
So the question becomes, why is George even delving into this question when every non-political, logical thinker already dismissed it as more Right wing wishful thinking? It seems that the need to sell soap or maybe oil, check out those BP and Shell commercials, has taken precedence over the need to discuss news on all the big network shows. This was true across the board this week.
Stephanopoulos then gives a platform to Republican Ohio congressman Bob Portman who gets a chance to claim that in the case of the IRS, politics was put in front of the public interest. Startlingly, he makes this statement after denying any real knowledge of the situation. So, Bob, you don’t know what happened or who was involved but you do know it was all the White House’s fault. Very astute.
Then Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey points out that hundreds of millions of dollars were stashed in 501 © 4s to be used for political purposes, not for the charitable purposes, for which the various entities were established, which is the real scandal.
Portman replies that it is immaterial whether the statute is being rightly or wrongly used, that all that is important is that the tax code has not been applied evenly or fairly. He has a point here, even if he fails to mention that liberal organizations went through the same thing under the Bush administration and that the reason for the scrutiny at this point was the surge of Tea Party and Right Wing groups who wanted to take advantage of a weakly monitored statute and jump on the financial gravy train to finance and thereby influence the 2012 election. This huge rush of new groups trying to get into the tax-exempt follies in order to support Right Wing candidates caused a bump in the wave, which came to the notice of the IRS and anyone who has ever filed a tax return knows that the last thing you want to do is come to the notice of anyone at the IRS.
As with any bureaucratic organization, it is the squeaky wheel that immediately gets the grease and in this case the grease was a long and some claim invasive series of questions on how they planned to use the funds for which they were claiming tax-exemption.
It was interesting that anytime Stephanopoulos asked Portman a question on any part of the investigation, Portman’s reply always started with “I don’t know yet, there isn’t enough information available,” and then he went on to spread lies, rumors and innuendo for the next five minutes.
Later in the program, George Will, a man for whom I usually have great respect, crushed that concept and showed us the way most Republicans really see the whole phony scandal picture when he extrapolated on the similarities between Watergate and the current problem. He drew all kinds of inaccurate parallels between the two scandals except he conveniently forgot to complete the most important one, that Nixon was running a criminal activity from the Oval Office and Obama isn’t. That’s the bottom line. The barely lucid Michele Bachman and the impeachment nuts can rant all they want but Nixon was a crook and Obama isn’t. Much of the Right is just not intelligent enough to grasp that fact.
There is enough wrong with this administration without the Right trying to create scandals out of nothing. The problem for the GOP is that all the things that are wrong with the Obama administration are also wrong with them. We claim that the administration is failing on immigration but the Right doesn’t want an immigration bill. We attack the DOJ for their unconstitutional abuse of the AP phone lines but the Right doesn’t want a free press, just a press that agrees with it. We attack Obama for wavering on the pipeline but the Right wants the pipeline to happen. They don’t care if we suffocate ourselves in pollution or the world dries up, as long as the oil companies pay a good dividend. The only issues that the Right has to support are self-manufactured scandals that have no basis in reality but can be doctored up to look like a bad copy of the real thing and that will look appropriate only at the super market checkout line.