It’s Scandal Season! Why Obama is suddenly under siege.

[DonViejo]

By Jacob Weisberg|Posted Thursday, May 16, 2013, at 2:24 PM

Washington’s need for periodic scandal is almost biological. For legislators, it’s an opportunity to strut on the national stage. For the party out of power, it is politics by other means. For the press, it’s an escape from the boredom and frustration of a second term. Scandal means a break in the routine, a thrilling emergency. At some level, the whole political class loves it.

Which is not to say that scandal is never real. Watergate was real. The Whitewater affair was not real but managed to be quite damaging to the Clinton administration anyway. Iran-Contra was real, but not damaging enough to turn Republicans out of office in 1988. Plamegate, which began with the question of who leaked the name of a clandestine CIA agent to a reporter, wasn’t real or damaging, though it did result in Dick Cheney and George W. Bush not speaking anymore.

What a scandal needs to count as real is an underlying crime. What it needs to be damaging is a strong story line. The Benghazi business falls short on both counts. This investigation posits that the top administration officials conspired to hide the truth about the September attack on an American consulate that resulted in the death of four diplomats, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Republican accusations about Benghazi derailed the nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

The charge against Rice was essentially that she delivered distorted political spin by calling the attacks spontaneous riots rather than a planned act of terrorism—the theory being that before the 2012 election, the Obama administration didn’t want to tarnish its success against al-Qaida. It emerged yesterday that Rice’s much-parsed Sunday television talking points were prepared not by the State Department but by the more politically independent CIA. But in an inquisitorial frenzy, dead ends are synonymous with new avenues. Republican investigators can now return to Gregory Hicks, the diplomat serving in Tripoli, Libya, who claims he was punished for speaking frankly to Republican investigators.

Full article
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_big_idea/2013/05/barack_obama_s_scandals_why_the_white_house_is_suddenly_beset_by_the_controversies.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content

[hollysmom]

1. Obama has never not been under siege.

[Cha]

2. Got that right, hollysmom

[smallcat88]

3. cry wolf

This is the GOP version of the little boy who cried wolf; they've been crying Impeach! ever since he got elected. So anything that comes up, they latch onto and try to make it into an impeachable offense. (This from the party that lied to the whole country to get us into 2 illegal wars!) But outside of the far right, most people have stopped listening, after all, we've heard this all before. The real wolf left office with Darth Vader 5 years ago.

[Aristus]

4. That's a fact.

Welcome to DU!

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

5. Next year is an election year. The ReTHUGS are trying to get the Teabagger Hate Brigade back in thei

corner. It's really the Republican Party that is fractured. Going after Obama brings he party back together.