If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
... fill in the blanks: Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran Contra, Lewinsky... Benghazi? You may have noticed that every time one erupts, it's compared in heinousness to the last really big one.
Soldiers are well trained and prepared psychologically to face armed conflict. Civilian contractors, government servants and diplomats -- who serve alongside and in support of our military -- are not as well trained, prepared or supported pre, during and post deployment as their military counterparts.
On the other end of the political spectrum from all of the foolishness in D.C. is a groundswell of terrific, on-the-ground activism and organizing work taking place across the country in just about every state, with tangible results.
On the face of it, the Tea Party seems autonomous and even a thorn in the side of the GOP. But that façade masks the real truth about the Tea Party, which is that ultimately it is less a political organization than a contract killer working for the Republicans.
Many in Washington now dismiss further assistance to Libya as useless: the Libyans themselves are fractious and have limited 'absorbtive capacity.' At the same time, it is wrong to say we have no influence in Libya, or that we have no means of increasing that capacity.
What a week for Republicans! It started with Obama fighting off simultaneous scandals and 24 coming back this Fall. But as Spitzer and Reagan discuss, by Friday the Scandals Scorecard revealed more smoke than fire. Who'll tell FOX?
I might suggest that we first take a deep breath and make an effort to put the events of the past week in some perspective, but I know it wouldn't do any good. There is blood in the water and in deeply partisan Washington, the struggle for advantage and power always trumps reality.
Scandals real and imagined rocked Washington this week. See how good of a muckraker you are by taking our news quiz.
By attacking Obama, the Republicans are throwing red meat to their base, which is an increasingly small and extreme group of right-wingers. The danger of tossing red meat to a tiger is that it becomes even more aggressive.
Imagine a Washington, D.C. where Republicans came to work each day fired up with renewed passion and zeal. A Congress where energized Republicans legislated in bi-partisan fashion on behalf of the American people.
Every U.S. president should visit a Blackjack table in Atlantic City sometime in the first term. It should happen just as they are in the middle of those Dreams From Your Ego, which promise bright new hopes if they can only win that second term.
Say what? "Benghazi. The IRS. AP phone records. The failures for which Barack Obama will be remembered are not just those of one man or one administr...
Three scandals have converged in the past week to preoccupy Congress and the press. Benghazi was the first to come, and it has surprised by its staying power. The abuse of power by the IRS may be, in the long run, the most damaging of these cases for the Obama presidency, but its outlines are only beginning to emerge. But the ugliest of the scandals has come from the revelation of the justice department's seizure of two months of phone calls by 100 AP reporters. This was done to investigate the leak of a thwarted terrorist plot which the government itself had already decided to disclose in public. Different as they are, the scandals all point to a single disorder that afflicts the Obama White House and the Holder justice department. The name of the disorder is paternalism, and its leading symptoms are suppression and secrecy.
The news this week about the DOJ looking at the phone logs of journalists covering the White House, and of the IRS scrutinizing the tax returns of various right-wing groups, is bad for the Obama administration. They are also much more likely to stick than the Benghazi story.
If we take the word "Watergate" to mean what nearly everyone has understood it to mean for the past four decades, then it becomes rather difficult to justify even mentioning Watergate and Benghazi in the same sentence.
Not since New Coke have we as a nation seen a disaster that both sides of the aisle can agree on. America is now unanimously and officially outraged that the IRS would have the audacity to target political groups -- groups that publicly despise taxes and call for the end of the IRS.
