SOME THINGS THAT NEED TO BE REPORTED

Much is being shouted in Scandal Land.  But much has also been lost down the memory hole. 

To refresh our memories while the Scandal Land Follies are being played out, and to bring some proportion to the hysteria that is being manufactured by the opposition, I'm posting the following (with links):




"The one dismal benefit of this particular NotSufficientlyTaxExemptGate pseudocrisis may be that, as with all screw ups or distortions or outright abuses of government power, it's only discovered to be Very Very Bad when a conservative somewhere finds themselves on the receiving end of it. 

Under the last administration, protesting against the Iraq War got you put on an actual Pentagon list of possible terrorist threats, and nobody from the other side of the aisle gave a flying f--k. Quakers got put on that one. Effing Quakers. 

The uncanny nature by which the Terror Alert Level got itself raised before important elections or other politically helpful dates didn't result in outrage even after one of the architects of the Rainbow of Terror admitted that yes, he was pressured to do exactly that. 

And yes, as others have pointed out, one of the vanishingly few times the IRS ever investigated a church for possible violations of their nonpartisan, nonprofit status it was for an anti-war sermon, during the Bush administration, two days before the election that won Bush a second term. That wasn't a scandal either. During the same year the IRS launched an investigation of the NAACP for opposing Bush's reelection. 

No Republicans were calling for Bush to resign over that particular outrage. 

 The Fast and Furious program, long been peddled by current Republicans as the worstest scandal to hit anything anywhere until the next worstest scandal, started under Bush. 

Nobody gives a damn. 

During the Bush administration, there were 13 terror attacks on U.S. diplomatic compounds (not including Iraq or Afghanistan), killing 98. 

You couldn't find a Republican lawmaker then who could even tell you what the talking points for a particular bombing or rocket attack or armed assault were at the time, much less one who decided that the real scandal was whether administration officials classified the attack as a "terrorist attack" or an "act of terror" in the days afterwards, and what might that difference mean? 

What's this? In trying to track down illegal leaks of classified information, the Department of Justice obtained reporter phone records? Yeah, that's nasty. And it's funny how that kept happening; under the Bush administration, the FBI did it to the New York Times. It was under the Bush administration, in fact, that we decided government could obtain all phone records, nationwide, and no longer even needed a reason for doing it, and if they had done it illegally—oops!—then we passed a damn law making it legal after-the-fact and immunizing all the people who did it. 

That's how much of a non-scandal it turned out to be. We were so damn helpful that we passed laws allowing government to break laws. What about the very Department of Justice itself being politicized—being intentionally populated with members of a single ideology while removing less stalwartly ideological members? That happened. 

That was a damn fine example of, in McConnell's parlance, an administration using the powers of government to "squelch" their ideological opponents. It was almost a true scandal, even, given how overt it was and how close the architects were to the White House itself. Almost, anyway, but you'd be surprised at how quickly we can get over these things."





Down the memory hole!  

Glad to be able to remind people who are apoplectic over these "scandals" what REALLY GOOD scandals look like.

And I'm glad to remind everyone of how this is more partisan than it is "scandal." More attempts at throwing more doo-doo at the president, hoping it will stick.

Instead of waiting for all the facts to come out, the rightwing noise machine had indicted and impeached the president.

This has never been about getting to the truth in the Benghazi tragedy, the IRS bungling, or the DoJ leak tracking.  

This is and always has been about "getting Obumma."