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’Which Obama Scandal Will Inevitably Lead to Impeachment?’
15 May 2013
(LPAC)—Benghazi, then the IRS, now the Associated Press. The commercial media seem to be getting the message that it is now OK to go after Obama. Cases in point: * Tuesday, May 14th, Solon.com banners the headline, "Which Obama Scandal Will Inevitably Lead to Impeachment?" with the subhead, "The GOP’s second-term scandal machine is operational! Will Obama be sunk by the IRS, the AP or Benghazi?" Writer Alex Pareene concludes, after dismissing Benghazi and AP for various reasons, "IRS. Yep, this is the one. The IRS persecuting Tea Party Groups. It’s basically the conservative movement’s dream scandal. It’s all over. Pack your bags, Barry. Even if this had nothing at all to do with the Obama administration, and no one at the White House knew it was happening, this is definitely the one that will probably end with Obama forced from office. And maybe in jail. Or deported. Even though it’s definitely true that 501(c)4 groups are mostly tax-dodging electioneering organizations, and even though it seems like Tea Party is a useful heuristic for finding explicitly election-focused groups, and even though it actually seems impossible to argue that the primary purpose of an organization like True the Vote isn’t politics, this will be a scandal that lasts the entire rest of the summer. And I suppose that unless there is evidence that those crazy IRS jihadists in Cincinnati also planned on attacking Organizing for America and StudentsFirst, conservatives have a right to be angry. Two Senate panels are investigating. Two House committees are on the case, too, with Ways and Means looking to hear testimony this week. Reporters are working on expanding the scope of the scandal to Washington. It is going to be a long next few years." Pareene was named one of "30 obvious rising stars in media" by Forbes in 2011. * On the DOJ targetting of the Associated Press: Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren: "sounds like a dragnet to intimidate the media, not a criminal investigation. What is stunning is the breadth of the seizure! If you read the AP President’s letter to DOJ, and if his letter is accurate, the seizure was very broad: two months of telephone records involving many who work at AP! Twenty phone lines, home and cell? NY, DC, Connecticut employees? That doesn’t sound like a criminal investigation; that sounds like a dragnet to intimidate the media. The U.S. Attorney’s issued statement about the secret seizure was blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t say anything. The DOJ better be following the law and the Constitution." * CNN’s John King, who worked for the AP for 12 years: "This is very chilling; this is very chilling. The government gets angry about leaks of classified information. I understand that, and they have ways to investigate them. But did they cross a line here? Did they do something inappropriate here, did they possibly do something that went over legal barriers here? When this happens, however it happens, it sends a chilling message from the government to people in our business; and the AP, I think, is justifiably outraged." * MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough: "What is going on with this administration?" * Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos blog: "People looking for an Obama scandal, this one, spying on the AP is the first legit one." * The Newspaper Association of America: "Today we learned of the Justice Department’s unprecedented wholesale seizure of confidential telephone records from the Associated Press. These actions shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights." * MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, as quoted by Rawstory in an on-air conversation with Michael Isikoff of NBC: "Is this [the targetting of AP] legal? Can you say in an uncomplicated way this is legal? Is it unprecedented? When do we get an explanation and from whom should we expect it?" Isikoff said that the action by the Justice Department is actually a part of a trend, but what hasn’t been seen before is the kind of indiscriminate dragnet approach to seizing so much data at once. Normally the department would simply subpoena the phone records of a particular reporter or editor, rather than the wholesale monitoring of 20 separate phone lines. The Department of Justice, he said, is technically within its rights to seize any data it wants in pursuit of a criminal investigation, but watchdog groups tonight and freedom of the press groups are saying this is positively Nixonian. They have not seen a precedent for this in decades." (WFW) |