Scandalmania!

I've been as riveted as everyone else by the trifecta of scandals, or perhaps "scandals" faced by the President.  A friend sent me an editorial from the Wall Street Journal that started out like this:

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.

Now it's hard to take an article seriously when it starts off like that.  More serious than Iran-Contra?  More serious than Monica Lewinsky (which I think was stupid, but it DID lead to an impeachment proceeding).  More serious than the US government approving torture of enemy combatants?

Let's just stick with Iran-Contra.  Remember that the Reagan administration blatantly broke the law by providing funding for rebels in Central America.  With full knowledge and leadership from the president.  At the same time, the president was selling arms secretly to the Iranian government, which was also against the law, and which was done with full knowledge of the president and his top advisors.  And there was never even a mention of possible impeachment.

 

So here we have three "scandals".  Let's look at them one at a time:

• Benghazi is a wholly partisan piece of manufactured drivel that makes no sense on even the most basic level.  The conspiracy theorists believe that President Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to cover up the fact that the attack was a terrorist operation, in order to... what? Never explained is why it would be that a terror attack hurts the President politically more than a mob attack.  As Hillary said during her testimony: "What difference does it make?!".  This whole thing blew up last week because of some emails that ABC news first reported seeing, which showed the administration covering up the terror connection in their talking points discussions.  But then it turned out that the emails were never seen by ABC, and in fact the disturbing lines quoted by the reporter were invented by the confidential source, as proven when the actual emails were released.  The source, of course, was a Republican staffer who has yet to be named.  Confusing?  Well, read about it here if you don't believe me.  There is absolutely zero scandal here.
• The IRS story is bad for the IRS, no doubt.  So far all the evidence suggests that low level staffers in the Cincinnati field office made a terrible judgment call.  The Right is darkly suggesting that the President will be shown to have had his fingerprints all over this.  That sounds like something that's pretty hard to hide with this level of scrutiny.  So far there's nothing linking the White House to it.
• The third leg of the stool is the Justice Department's use of extraordinary measures to try to find out who leaked confidential information to the Associated Press, including getting a huge swath of their phone records.  This is outrageous.  It's being done by a cabinet agency, run by a close friend of the President.  And it appears to be perfectly legal.  It shouldn't be legal... but it is.  Obama's record on civil liberties isn't very good, and this is a great example.  Gleen Greenwald and others have been killing the President for five years on things like this, and he continues to do so.  My favorite point here is made by Kirsten Powers at the Daily Beast: Republicans have been hammering the President up to now regarding his inability to plug these leaks, and calling for harsher measures.  So this scandal is bad, but it's bad in the way that Republicans should like!

Jon Stewart gets it right: Some people don't have the standing to criticize.

Deficit is Down!

I know blogging has been nonexistent for a while, but life has most definitely gotten in the way. Anyway, I have some time to kill now so I thought I'd expound on something.

The big econmic news lately is that the federal budget deficit is shrinking faster than predicted http://www.cbo.gov/publication/44144 . Apparently, the economic recovery, the 2013 tax hikes, spending cuts from recent years, and of course the Sequester have worked as intended by the deficit hawks, and we could have a balanced budget in a few years if all goes well (which it might not of course). So here we are again with the bizarre good news/ bad news positioning:

• This is great news for the Deficit Scolds! Right? Well, for some reason none of them seem to be thrilled about it. I guess it's because their whole existence requires constant hysteria about our mounting debt so that they can implement their actual agenda, which is cutting down government and the welfare state. They don't want to hear that, actually, we can afford to keep old people from dying of malnutrition and treatable diseases here in the richest country in the history of the world.
• OK, well it's great news for the Obama apologists who have stood firm against austerity in tough times, right? No, not really, because the economy is still in a depressed state, and in fact falling deficits are seen as a bad thing by the Keynesians, since the recovery will be slower due to the lack of demand in the private sector. It's true that liberals supported increased taxes on the wealthy which are a part of the reason for the good budget news, but what we really wanted was for those taxes to go up in a few years, when the economy was humming along again. And everything else that allowed this to happen was stuff we opposed like decreased social spending.
• Well, at least it's good news for the Tea Party right, whose victory in the Sequester fight is one of the big reasons for this outcome. No? My right wingnut correspondent and inveterate commenter on this blog keeps telling me that this is not even close to good news, because we still have a really big national debt we have to start paying down (where was this guy during the Reagan and Bush deficit years? Silent about that, naturally). Of course the real problem for this crowd is that they can't accept that anything good could possibly happen while Obama is at the controls.

Look, most of this is really about the economic recovery, which is slow but steady. I predicted a while ago that whoever was elected president in 2012 was going to get credit for the recovery, which was going to come almost no matter what policies were in place. The austerity policies of 2013 aren't severe enough to derail the recovery, so we're still on target for my prediction to work out.