This morning, Jonathan Chait reported, The Strange Creation of the Obama Scandals. And Glenn Greenward reported, The Major Sea Change in Media Discussions of Obama and Civil Liberties. Indeed, Obama does seem to be experiencing a perfect storm of bad sandal-like news. And most of the coverage of it is horrible.
It isn’t as though all of these controversies don’t tell us a whole lot about modern America. It is just that what they tell us is not playing much of a role in the coverage. Instead of looking at what is wrong with how this country is run, we get stories straight out of bad TV westerns. Obama wearing a black cowboy hat moseys into town and grabs an innocent woman. Suddenly, Rand Paul wearing a white cowboy hat rushes out into the street. “Take your hands off her!” Paul yells at him. And on and on. There’s a bad guy in town and that bad guy is the president who is responsible for everything.
You all know me: I’m not a big fan of the president’s. But he is not the bad guy in all of this. He certainly is one of the bad guys in an evil system that proudly rewards villainy. But he doesn’t stand out in what is really going on and this is most definitely not a story of good versus evil.
Consider scandal number one: Benghazi. There is an important issue here. People in our foreign embassies should not be murdered. Were their problems with that particular embassy or our embassies generally? I’d like to know. I’m sure the American people would like to know. But that’s not what the scandal is all about. It is about how the administration talked about the attack on the Sunday news shows after it happened.
Mostly, this all stayed in the right wing media rabbit hole. Until last Friday when ABC reported on email messages that said that the talking points of Susan Rice were changed many times by the White House. Again, even if this were true, it would hardly be important. But it turned out, that it wasn’t true. On Tuesday, CNN reported that ABC got it wrong. It turned out that the Friday report was not based on email, but rather upon what were surely Republican staffers’ summaries. Once the actual email messages were seen: no story.
That brings us to scandal number two: IRS targeting of conservative groups. Ever since Watergate, there has been a law that stops the president from even communicating with the IRS. Why? To stop the president from doing what conservatives are implying he did: use the IRS to go after his enemies. But there is absolutely, positively no reporting that even hints at this sort of thing going on. So what happened? It seems some low-level staff members were trying to deal with the huge increase in 501(c)(4) applications. These were overwhelmingly from conservative groups. And it isn’t like they didn’t also go after liberal groups. They not only went after them, they denied them. Norm Scheiber puts it brilliantly:
But there is a real issue here. Why are all of these political groups (on the left but primarily on the right) being allowed to pretend that they are do-gooder social groups when they are just the newest kind of political action committees? Again, this is not the focus of the story. Instead it is that evil IRS (probably controlled by that evil Obama) going after all their enemies.
And finally, scandal number three: the Justice Department looking at the phone records of the Associated Press. This one has begun to bug me the most. I am one very small voice of a relatively limited group of leftists and libertarians who have been screaming about this for years. And now the press is interested in it because they think they might be able to tie it to the president? This is pathetic! There is nothing particularly appalling about this revelation. It may turn out to be completely legal. Because Obama (just like every president before him) has pushed these surveillance laws further and further. After the Washington Post said this scandal was calling into question Obama’s status as a civil libertarian, Glenn Greedwald wrote, “You don’t say! The Washington Post‘s breaking news here is only about four years late.”
There are three important questions: (1) are our embassies safe; (2) are our tax laws being taken advantage of by political groups; and (3) what are we going to do about our ever degrading civil liberties? But the mainstream press isn’t interested in these questions. Instead, they are like that dog in Up: “Scandal?!”
Afterword
Fourth Estate my ass:
Issue groups on the left will actually be about issues, more often than not, and issue groups on the right will often be political fronts for wealthy donors backing candidates.
Take your standard leftist issue. The environment or homelessness, say. The purpose of a group working on this issue is trying to get elected officials to help out a little. Maybe get enough petitions signed and enough community leaders on board that you can have a 30-minute meeting in a politician’s office. They’re trying to actually make progress on the issue they care about, and it’s slow work. Donors, rich or poor, want the same thing. If I or George Soros gives money to a group working to help battered women’s shelters, that’s exactly what we want our donations to do.
Right-wing issues are generally about getting right-wing politicians elected. The issue is secondary. Now many people do passionately hate abortion or gun-control laws, but wealthy supporters may or may not care about these things. Their goal is getting politicians elected to enact laws they DO care about; lower taxes and fewer regulations on corporate power.
It’s appalling but not shocking in the slightest that our media hasn’t identified the "Tea Party" as a complete front for the super-rich since the beginning, since that’s all it ever was.
Here’s a happy sidenote. About 18 months ago a highly unpopular Republican Minnesota legislature voted to put a state constitutional amendment banning gay-marriage on the 2012 ballot. (We have no referendums like Oregon and California, but the state legislature can propose amendments to be put to the voters.) This was done not to stop gay marriage (already illegal here) but to bring Republican voters to the polls. The new governor, elected in 2010, was proposing higher taxes on the wealthy, and polls showed that legislators blocking this were losing public support. Something drastic needed to be done.
It backfired in the worst way. Many Minnesotans who were ambivalent about gay marriage responded to a pretty sharp political action group which relied on young gay people hitting the streets and making phone calls, passionately explaining why the unnecessary amendment was a slap in their faces.
The amendment died and the Democrats took control. The new budget is sure to include higher taxes on the rich (not nearly as high as I or the governor wanted, but that’s life) and, on Tuesday, gay marriage became legal here. It was quite a party in Saint Paul.
The thing is, if local Republicans had, say, proposed an amendment supporting civil unions without the inflammatory word "marriage," their ploy might have worked. They might have motivated enough far-righters to the polls without seeming mean to middle-of-the-road types. As it is, they got the worst of all worlds (and the soonest anti-forces can get a new amendment on the ballot would be 2017 or 2018 at the latest.)
So sometimes, this front-group nonsense bites you square on the ass. Not often enough, but it happens.
I’d expect at least five more of these before 2016, by the way. The last REAL scandal I can remember our press covering was Enron, and that wasn’t even the regular press but the financial press, starting with Bethany MacLean. Before that, Iran-Contra, maybe.
Perhaps the public non-response to Iran-Contra taught the press that manufactured scandals (in which the issues are easily hyped by hyperbole, and complexities do not matter) draw more interest than real ones which take a lot of time to understand (and which call into question the notion that we exercise any control over our elected officials at all . . .)