Why some scandals are covered and some are not

Jennifer Rubin, the right-wing WaPo columnist, asks “How different is this [Veterans being treated shabbily by the VA] from the myriad of other scandals that have plagued the White House?”

Good question. First off, we can very much agree that the way veterans have been treated is indeed shameful and that something must done yesterday!

Is it the Obama Administration's fault? Of course it is, to some extent. There's also the refusal of Republicans to allocate the money necessary to fix the problem. The problem is not simply one of doing things poorly, it's also a problem of the VA no having the resources to do enough. Congress could very easily fix that part of the problem by putting enough money into it, but they had the chance to fix it and instead

U.S. Senate Republicans blocked legislation on Thursday that would have expanded federal healthcare and education programs for veterans, saying the $24 billion bill would bust the budget.

Yeah, we had an extra trillion or so dollars to spend on fighting a war of choice, but a tiny pittance of $24 billion would “bust the budget.”

Let's look at Rubin's ideas of what constitutes a true scandal:

In the case of the Internal Revenue scandal, we now have documentation that targeting conservative groups was not a rogue operation out of a local office, but organized in the D.C. office.

Erm, actually, we have no such thing. The Boston Herald article that Rubin links to is full of weasel words that mean far less than meets the eye. FAIR covers the emails that Rubin thinks are so significant (Starting at the 1:30 minute mark) and shows, again, that the “scandal” is considerably overstated. The IRS “scandal” is also less significant than it appears to be as progressive groups were targeted more than conservative groups were.

Here's an interesting charge:

Funny, CNN covered the partisan Democratic witch hunt about the Bush administration’s entirely legal dismissal of U.S. attorneys.

How serious a scandal was the firing of US Attorneys? As legal as the firings may have been, keep in mind that it took quite a while for non-Bush Administration insiders to even know that the US attorneys were being dismissed on a systematic basis or that the Bush Administration was behind the firings.

The White House's active involvement in the firings, as depicted in the report, can be divided into two broad categories: First, its role in initiating and promoting the overall plan to remove an unspecified number of U.S. attorneys -- traditionally treated as apolitical prosecutors who operate independently from the political agenda of the administration -- deemed insufficiently committed to the Bush agenda. And second, its apparent work in pushing specifically for several of the most high-profile dismissals.

Were the firings “entirely legal”? It's not at all clear that crimes were committed, but why was the Bush Administration so hush-hush and secretive about something they had every right to do? In December 2006 “...seven U.S. attorneys received phone calls from DOJ asking them to resign,“ but in October 2008, “ TPM says the scandal “broke early last year.”

Is Rubin a good judge of what does and doesn't constitute a scandal? I don't see any evidence that she does.

Revisionism watch

A WaPo piece describes how President Bush has recently begun to display his "sensitive side." Funny though, the "burrowing" of Bush Administration people (transforming political appointees into career civil servants as appointees are expected to vacate their jobs when a new administration takes over, but it's difficult to fire a civil servant) proceeds full speed ahead.

Has Bush shown much compassion and sensitivity over the years he's been in office? Well, in late January 2003, a Methodist Bishop tried to get an audience with Bush to discuss the upcoming Iraq War, saying that it "violates God's law and the teachings of Jesus Christ." The Bishop was refused and their face-to-face conversation never took place. In August 2005, Cindy Sheehan wanted Bush to take time out from his vacation and talk with her about her son's death and what, if anything, he was doing to see to it that more sons and daughters and husbands and fathers didn't die needlessly in Iraq. She too, was refused an audience.

Also, a report from the Senate Armed Services Committee makes it quite clear that Bush is directly linked to detainee abuse by his having stated that "...the Geneva Convention did not apply to the U.S. war with al Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to prisoner of war status or legal protections." The entirely predictable result was that:

Many of those deaths caused by abusive treatment have been formally characterized as "homicides" by autopsies performed in Iraq and Afghanistan (see these chilling compilations of autopsy findings on detainees in U.S. custody, obtained by the ACLU, which reads like a classic and compelling exhibit in a war crimes trial).

For Bush to suddenly start claiming to have been a "compassionate conservative" (a term that many liberals dismiss as being a contradiction in terms) is like Calvin of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes suddenly deciding on December 24th that he'd better start being a good boy or Santa won't bring him any presents.

And hey! Bush is now claiming that he never said that the Taliban had been eliminated! Erm, uh, yeah, and the "Mission Accomplished" banner had been spontaneously put up by the sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln and was not a project directed by Karl Rove's people.

And oh yeah! General Eric Shinseki didn't really contend at the time that Rumsfeld's plan for the occupation of Iraq was fatally flawed!

Sigh! Yeah, unfortunately, we're going to hear a lot more of this kind of revisionism over the next few months.

Election reactions

Ah, the sweet smell of success! Victory has been attained, but it's not a military-type victory, attained with the blood of our enemies, the wailing of foreign widows and the crying of the children of other lands. No, the election of Barack Obama by 63 million to 56 million was obtained peacefully, with persuasion, with good arguments, and yes, with an economic situation that was the direct result of Republican rule over this land since 1981 (CEPR counts Clinton as a "Republican-lite" for the purposes of this study). Certainly, the Mideast, with the exception of Israel & the Kurdish NorthEastern part of Iraq, has been hungry for change and so welcomes the American regime-shuffling.

And yes, I know it's mean, but I really had to guffaw at the National Review Online guy who bitterly complained that:

Just watched Wonder Boy's speech. Hmph. "Callused hands?" When did he ever have callused hands?

Ri-i-i-ight! Like, anybody at the NRO knows about "callused hands" from anything but storybooks and the occasional field servant that they dealt with in their youth. He then blames "the swooning complicity of the media," but it's quite clear that the traditional media was firmly on the side of McCain throughout the election campaign.

Media Matters also compared coverage of Obama's association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers to coverage of McCain's association with G. Gordon Liddy, whom Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman has described as McCain's "own Bill Ayers."
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Moreover, while these same media outlets mentioned Obama's ties to Ayers 311 times in 2008 through Election Day, they produced only five reports mentioning McCain's connections to Liddy, whom McCain has praised and repeatedly associated with in public and in campaign settings.

And our NRO guy then has asks a question:

Sour? You bet I'm sour. Where was conservatism in this election?

Hmm, okay. but we have to ask, what exactly does he mean by "conservatism"?

Where was restraint in government? Where was national sovereignty? Where was liberty? Where was self-support?

I heartily agree that government has been completely unrestrained under Bush. What with warrantless wiretapping, detaining prisoners without evidence of wrongdoing in defiance of habeas corpus (or the Geneva Conventions, as applicable), voter suppression through the widespread use of "vote caging," (that is, "sending 'Do Not Forward' letters to minority voters that, if returned, could be used to challenge them as nonresidents"), vote purging (famously seen in Florida before the 2000 election) and the firing of US Attorneys who weren't sufficiently pursuing bogus "voter fraud" allegations (as opposed to "vote fraud," which is when vote suppression is done by the government).

Problem: Where was the NRO during all of this lack of "restraint in government"? Seems to me that conservatives of all stripes and varieties spent the early part of this century praising Dear Leader Bush and bashing the liberals who tried to object. Or did the bulldozing of Dixie Chicks' CDs strike people as an action where the right wing showed respect for political dissent? And remember:

The "K Street Project"—the most successful shakedown operation since the first Gilded Age—was the brainchild of Representative Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist...

I don't remember any conservative objections to that, either. Granted, the "K Street Project" was shut down shortly before the Democrats took over Congress, but let's not confuse a preemptive, defensive reaction to an action based on principle.

Quite frankly, Obama's choice of Rahm Emmanuel for Chief of Staff fills me with joy, as no, he's not as liberal as I'd prefer (He backed NAFTA and wants to privatize the border), but he "doesn't do 'bipartisan'," which I find completely cool at this point.

A piece on PhillyIMC makes an interesting charge, that as the left of 1993 didn't put up much of a fight to control Bill Clinton's "Third Way," "Republican-lite" tendencies, that the left of 2009 will be equally useless at guiding and directing an Obama Administration. I dunno. Seems to me that the left of today is much more together, more energetic, more connected than it was in 1993. President Reagan garnered genuine support from the American people and the elder Bush, who inherited a lot of that good feeling, was less of an overt criminal than the younger Bush is. When the press corps of 1993 launched its all-out assault on Clinton with idiotic crap like "Whitewater," the press being crazy and out of control was a new thing and progressives weren't sure how to handle such a thing. Nowadays, we're fully aware of it and know how to deal with it. That's not to say the netroots are as powerful as the traditional media is, but I think they're far more able to take on the combination of the right-wing noise machine and the traditional press then they were before.

Finally, I agree that there's a danger that Obama will become the new Dear Leader who can do no wrong and who will be defended from our side of the aisle whether he deserves it or not, but I think this blogger makes some very good points:

But I genuinely expect that those who have made the restoration of our Constitutional framework and preservation of core liberties a top priority over the last eight years will continue to pursue those goals with equal vigor, regardless of the change of party control. And few things are more important in that effort than having a Supreme Court majority that at least minimally safeguards those principles. It's hard to overstate the importance of last night's election outcome in ensuring a reasonably favorable Court majority and, even more so, in averting what would have been a real disaster for our basic rights and system of government had John McCain been able to replace those three Justices with GOP-approved nominees. By itself, maintaining the Court more or less as is won't reverse any of the Constitutional erosions of the last eight years, but it is an absolute prerequisite to doing so.

I think all the work we put into making sure that McCain did not succeed Bush was well worth it.

After the election?

I have to agree that this is about the dumbest idea I've heard all week:

Last, I believe this [that Obama will pursue a centrist strategy] is likely because Obama understands that to succeed, he must make peace with John McCain just as he has done with Hillary Clinton. When this historic election concludes, I expect the two to sit down, without precondition, and negotiate an agenda of reform.

The problem here, is that if Republicans had any serious ideas for how to run the country better, they would already have been talking about those ideas. Instead, Karl Rove's "big idea" is for them to have started attacking Barack Obama's relationship with Palestinian-American Professor Rashid Kahlidi last spring instead of waiting until the week before the election. To attack Professor Kahlidi is racist to the core as:

[Kahlidi] is a distinguished scholar, and the only objectionable thing about him from a rightwing point of view is that he is a Palestinian. There are about 9 million Palestinians in the world (a million or so are Israeli citizens; 3.7 million are stateless and without rights under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza; and 4 million are refugees or exiled in the diaspora; there are about 200,000 Palestinian-Americans, and several million Arab-Americans, many living in swing vote states). Khalidi was not, as the schlock rightwing press charges, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He was an adviser at the Madrid peace talks, but would that not have been, like, a good thing?

John McCain has attacked Professor Kahlidi as a "neo-Nazi" and of course, Matt "the GOP-friendly Internetist" Drudge has splashed the story onto his home page, and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been pushing the story as only a Vice-Presidential candidate can. The Obama campaign's very appropriate answer is that the whole controversy is:

...another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters' attention from John McCain's lockstep support for George Bush's economic policies.

And this was a good one:

At an event Wednesday in Raleigh, North Carolina, Obama said McCain has spent the last few days calling him "every name in the book."

"I don't know what's next. By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten. I shared my peanut butter and jelly sandwich," Obama said.

Governor Palin then went on for a few paragraphs about achieving "energy independence" from Mideast oil, but didn't once mention alternative energy. Simply drilling for more oil runs into the "Peak Oil" problem (A few decades ago, the US had already pumped more than half the oil it will ever pump and the rest of the world is now at or very near that same stage). Nuclear energy has a lot of advantages, but storing the nuclear waste is a problem that hasn't been solved yet.

...the DOE acknowledges much progress in addressing the waste problems of the industry, and successful remediation of some contaminated sites, yet also major uncertainties and sometimes complications and setbacks in handling the issue properly, cost effectively, and in the projected time frame.

So, while "energy independence" is most certainly a valuable and worthwhile thing to do, it's far from clear that the McCain-Palin campaign has any seriously meaningful ideas for actually achieving such a thing.

How about in other areas? How's the War on Terror going? Well...er...not so hot, actually. It's really cool for:

...defense contractors, lobbyists, think-tankers, ambitious military officers, the hosts of Sunday morning talk shows, and the Douglas Feith-like creatures who maneuver to become players in the ultimate power game

but, as for the rest of America, it's

a fiction, a gimmicky phrase employed to lend an appearance of cohesion to a panoply of activities that, in reality, are contradictory, counterproductive, or at the very least beside the point.

Sorry, but the idea that Obama and McCain can sit down after the election and talk productively with each other about the future direction of this country is, well, a pretty stupid one. I simply can't see McCain having anything serious to propose.