Relentless Republican outrage and the fake scandals that failed to bring down Barack Obama

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Another fake scandal.

It wasn't really such a bad week for President Obama, just a bad week for President Obama according to a Beltway media establishment desperately looking for some excitement and more than willing to go right along with the ongoing Republican assault on everything the president does.

The point is, while it was a week of annoying scandalmongering, and surely incredibly annoying to the White House, what really happened is that the Republicans pushing the scandals along with their media enablers were finally exposed as a bunch of frauds. Consider:

Benghazi: This has long been over, but Republicans won't let it rest. They thought they had a smoking gun in leaked White House e-mails that suggested political interference in post-attack talking points, but the story, after the White House released the full e-mails, is now rightly about how Republicans altered those e-mails and how ABC News was played and/or in on it. End result: Republicans look bad.

IRS: Conservatives freaked out and Republicans ultimately blew their load. The IRS could and should have handled their investigation of Tea Party groups with greater care, but there's no scandal. Obama didn't order any sort of Nixonian investigation of his enemies and the IRS invesigates the tax-exempt claims of groups across the spectrum. End result: Obama found a scapegoat in the IRS commissioner, which is a shame, but it's clear the IRS did nothing fundamentally wrong. Republicans don't look bad as much as they look hypocritical.

AP: The federal government's subpoenaing of the media organization's phone records may be the only real scandal here, and initially the Beltway media were up in arms, but there's no one really driving this one other than Obama's critics on the civil libertarian left (e.g., Glenn Greenwald, and I tend to agree with them). Everyone knows that this sort of thing has gone on for a long time (Patriot Act, anyone?) and everyone knows that Obama has maintained much of the Bush-Cheney national security state. And Republicans have no interest in defending the media from the left. They're not saying anything because they agree with the Justice Department. End result: Obama and Holder deserve criticism, but this one's done.

Oh, but Republicans are as desperate as ever to try to bring down the president (as well as the person they see as their likely nemesis in 2016, Hillary Clinton). Indeed, what this week proved is not that the president is being brought down by scandal (given that these are faux scandals pushed by Republicans and sensationalized by their media enablers) but that Republicans have nothing but obstructionism and outrage to hurl in his direction. His approval numbers are fine, Obamacare is becoming the law of the land, and while they've successfully blocked him in Congress (e.g., voting down the extremly popular Manchin-Toomey background check gun bill) their electoral prospects remain dim. They tried for four years to tear him down. This is just more of the same. It's all they've got.

Just consider how the week ended, with conservatives freaking out over Obama's request, at a Rose Garden news conference with Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, that a couple of Marines hold umbrellas for them. It's like he asked them to sodomize each other while performing an abortion and setting fire to the American flag.

Now, it's really no scandal at all:

"Marines are always out getting rained on. That's sort of what we do," said Capt. Eric Flanagan, a Marines spokesman. A request from the president to a Marine who serves at the White House, however, would be an "extenuating circumstance," he said.

Flanagan also pointed to Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which states that members of the Marine Corps shall "perform such other duties as the President may direct."

But that isn't stopping Republicans from going ballistic -- because, again, they're desperate, because they have nothing else but this relentless assault of (mostly faux) outrage. They're losing so badly on the substance, on real issues, that they have to make shit up to try to bring him down. Like getting a Marine to hold a fucking umbrella.

The media, with their non-existent attention spans and myopic sense that the here and now is forever, kept telling us that it was a horrible, terrible, brutal week for President Obama. But was it?

It's easy to get lost in the fog, but what this week revealed, again, is that his enemies are pathetic and dishonest, that the media (or at least some prominent parts of it) are stupid, and that the president has an agenda to move the country forward while Republicans are paralyzed by anger, fear, and outrage, because they just can't stand the fact that he's in the White House and one of their own isn't, because they can't just run roughshod over the country with their right-wing ideology.

Ultimately, these fake scandals too shall pass. Even Benghazi. But they'll be replaced by others, all with the same mouth-frothing outrage on Fox News and throughout conservative media. Republicans failed this week, as they've failed miserably throughout Obama's presidency, but it's who they are and it's all they've got, and failure isn't about to stop them.

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Affinity bias and the White House scandals

By Frank Moraes 

I've been thinking a lot about why so many journalists I follow went so wrong on the supposed White House Scandals this week. I think it has a lot to do with affinity bias. And that does not speak well for the state of journalism.

A lot of people wonder why, for example, conservatives often hold opinions that are just wrong. Throughout the Bush administration, Fox News viewers were systematically misinformed about important issues. Why was that? It's quite simple: they trusted Fox News. And that is not only acceptable, it is necessary. We can't independently become experts on every issue we hear about. So we find people who we trust as experts and believe what they say.

Of course, it pays to be selective. Anyone who gets their information from cable news is cruising for a bruising. In general, I think that MSNBC is a lot better than Fox News. But that isn't always case. I think Fox News has done a better job under Obama than they did under Bush. It's all been pretty bad, though. MSNBC has done better generally, but I think they were soft on Obama during the campaign. At times they act as apologists for the Obama Administration -- especially certain shows. Regardless, I think that MSNBC does a better job of informing liberals than Fox News does informing conservatives. Of course, the best conservative print publications are better. Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review and Josh Barro of Bloomberg View are both fact based. I wish a lot more conservatives got their news from people like them.

There really is a difference between what liberals and conservatives think about things even when they are working off the same set of facts. And that should be enough. But instead, generally conservatives get different facts than liberals do. I think this is about 90% the fault of conservative media, but it hardly matters. My point is that we've got to trust someone.

I've worked very hard to find people who I feel I can trust -- people who will not knowingly deceive me and will admit when they are wrong. I still feel very dependent on these people. But not always. For example, most of them went crazy this last week. They acted as though there was something to all these scandals. There were damned few people like me who were pushing back against this. And my question is: why?

I think there is a problem with being too plugged into the media structure -- something that I cannot be accused of. And in this case, all the liberal commentators were trying to prove that they weren't just partisans. If the Obama administration had done something wrong, they were going to hold it accountable. The problem is that this kind of thing is just as bad as blind partisanship. From Monday on, there was no information that implicated the White House. Yet much of the reporting was of the type that I saw coming from Greg Sargent: very cautious concern.

This week I wasn't exactly kind to Obama. I blasted him about firing Steven Miller. And I've been very hard on him about the Associated Press, even though the scandal is systemic and not especially Obama. But I didn't fall for the theatrics, which I correctly labeled a "perfect storm of bad sandal-like news."

So why didn't the others see this? I think it is the same thing as for all of us: we have people we trust. Unfortunately, many of the people I trust, themselves trust Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Politico. (I avoid reading them if I can.) They are the very definition of "Washington Insider." And they create a kind of sports reporting approach to politics. Indeed, in his "nothing to see here" article yesterday, Ezra Klein wrote, "On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn't look like any of them will pan out." But the evidence that became available between Tuesday and Thursday didn't change the facts as the Monday CNN report did change Friday's ABC "facts." All that changed was that the commentariat had a chance to calm down.

The whole thing reminds me of The Ox-Bow Incident. The media depended upon its trusted connections to believe that something happened that the facts just didn't support. Ezra Klein and others are always quick to note that a stunning revelation could turn any of these supposed scandals into real scandals. But that's always true. It could turn out that Obama got an Oval Office blow job by an intern. Or that Michelle had Vince Foster killed. Or maybe they both fired the people in the travel office to give their friends a job. Any of this could be true. But barring any actual, you know, facts, it is just a big game of telephone played by journalists who really ought to be smarter than the average cable news viewer.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

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