MAYBE YOU SHOULD TAKE YOUR OWN ADVICE, MODO

Maureen Dowd today:

The president should try candid; wistful and petulant aren't getting him anywhere. The Republicans who are putting partisan gain above solving the country's problems deserve a smackdown.

Interesting advice from a person who has one of the most high-profile commenting gigs in America, and who's written thirty columns so far this year, but hasn't once published the same kind of "smackdown" of the Republicans that she's recommending to the president.

Dowd has written this year about Bush and Cheney, and Cheney again, and then the whole Bush family, and (of course) Hillary Clinton twice; she's written about Hollywood historical fiction and The Great Gatsby and the golden age of newsmagazines; she wrote a column about Annette Funicello, Lily Pulitzer, and Margaret Thatcher, in that order.

Oh, and this is the third column she's written urging Obama to be tougher on the Republicans -- here are the first two -- as well as one urging Obama to be nicer to the Republicans.

Smackdowns of Republicans putting partisan gain ahead of the national interest? I'll let you know if I find one in Dowd's archives.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO, OBAMA IS NOT THE FIRST PRESIDENT WHO HAD A SERVICEMEMBER HOLD AN UMBRELLA FOR HIM

The ridiculous Obama umbrella "scandal" has been pretty thoroughly debunked by The Atlantic, by The Atlantic again, by The Washington Post, and, most memorably, by Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf, who enlists her ex-Marine brother to explain, with many appropriate obscenities, that a Marine must follow any order issued issued by his commander in chief ASAFP. In the first Atlantic post, please note the military uniform on the umbrella holder in the second picture of George H.W. Bush.

I'll just add a couple more examples for the record.

LBJ, as president, had an umbrella held for him by an Air Force General, James U. Cross, according to Cross's own memoir:





Cross, later promoted to brigadier general, was LBJ's Air Force One pilot; more about him here, and about his memoir here.

And there's this, from a 1932 story about President Herbert Hoover attending an Easter sunrise ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery:





So, yes, servicemembers hold umbrellas if presidents ask.

IF THIS IS YOUR BABY IN AN INCUBATOR, MAYBE YOU OUGHT TO RETHINK YOUR P.R. STRATEGY

I think the IRS story has the potential to be very damaging to the Obama presidency -- but not if this is the right's idea of a victim with a tear-jerking story:

... Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call -- put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land....

First of all, what's being alleged here (by Kimberly Strassel of The Wall Street Journal) is that Obama merely has to say a harsh word about someone and he's automatically responsible for anything bad that subsequently happens to that person -- people listening to his words have no independent agency. Fine. Then let's hold everyone to the same standard. By that standard, Sarah Palin should literally be indicted for murder and attempted murder, and be standing in the dock right next to Jared Loughner.

But seriously, righties -- you want us to shed tears for Frank VanderSloot? Yes, he was one of several high rollers mentioned on an Obama campaign Web page under this paragraph:

A closer look at Romney's donors reveals a group of wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them. Here’s a look at just a few of the people Romney has relied on....

And why might that be? Could it be because of the history of his company Melaleuca?

Melaleuca's get-rich pitches have in the past caused Michigan regulators to take action, resulting in the company's entering into a voluntary agreement to "not engage in the marketing and promotion of an illegal pyramid"'; it entered into a separate voluntary agreement with the Idaho attorney general's office, which found that "certain independent marketing executives of Melaleuca" had violated Idaho law; and the Food and Drug Administration previously accused Melaleuca of deceiving consumers about some of its supplements.

That's from Glenn Greenwald, who has much more about VanderSloot's "chronic bullying threats to bring patently frivolous lawsuits against his political critics -- magazines, journalists, and bloggers." Hell, even a somewhat admiring journalist, Phyllis Berman of Forbes, refers to Melaleuca as "a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway."

He's your poster child, righties? He's your aggrieved innocent? Well, good luck with that.

Oh, and did I mention that VanderSloot says that, yes, he was audited, but the audits actually saved him money? Yeah, tht's going to make him a really sympathetic figure to Joe and Jane America.

*****

ALSO, TOO:

GOP donor Charlie Moncrief telling ABC he was audited because he raised for Romney. Not his first time at the rodeo: nytimes.com/1998/08/02/bus…

— Nick Confessore (@nickconfessore) May 15, 2013

IF THEY WERE TRYING TO INFLUENCE THE ELECTION, THAT WAS A DUMB WAY TO DO IT

Micah Cohen of The New York Times reports:

Public data from the Internal Revenue Service ... shows that dozens of Tea Party groups were approved for tax exempt status beginning in May 2012. That was the same month that Representative Dave Camp of Michigan wrote to the I.R.S. asking for information about all "social welfare" groups that had applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, to determine whether the I.R.S. was targeting conservative groups.

The flurry of approvals that came in the next few months was a sharp break from the previous two years, during which the agency approved just a handful of 501(c)(4) applications from Tea Party groups....

Here's a chart showing the approvals by month:





If you were a nakedly partisan IRS employee, is this how you'd have helped President Obama win reelection? It's not what I would have done. Remember late 2011: Herman "Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan" Cain led the Republican presidential field for quite a while. Then Newt Gingrich, temporarily an honorary teabagger, led the field. Then, in 2012, Rick Santorum made his move.

If you'd wanted to help the president, I think you'd have wanted to unleash the teabaggers in 2011. I think you'd have wanted them free to make mischief for Mitt Romney -- who, for all his flaws as a campaigner, could have pulled out a win against Obama with a better-executed campaign, unlike, well, every candidate enthusiastically embraced by tea types (see also: Trump, Bachmann). And I think you would have wanted teabaggers more deeply involved in GOP House and Senate primaries. More Christine O'Donnells and Sharron Angles!

So if you IRS folks were monkeying with elections, you were screwing it up.

AMERICA IS A MORAL CESSPOOL, AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT

Politico reports:

A majority of Americans are following both the controversy over the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi and the brewing IRS scandal - but at levels below historic averages, according to a new poll.

Fifty-four percent said they are closely following the story of how the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups, according to the Gallup survey on Thursday, and 53 percent are closely following Benghazi. For both stories, 22 percent were following "not too closely" and 24 weren’t following at all.

"The level of attention being paid to each is below the average 60 percent of Americans who have closely followed more than 200 news stories Gallup has measured over the past several decades," Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the poll....

Sorry, GOP (and Washington insiders).

Now, if the public's reaction continues to fall short of all-consuming, pitchfork-wielding, head-on-pike-demanding outrage, I can tell you what will happen next. Recall that the famous 1998 Sally Quinn article about D.C. insider reactions to Monicagate was written out of a sense of disgust that the morally fallen general public didn't grasp the true import of what had transpired. Quinn wrote:

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton's gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.

Bad public! Wag your fingers self-righteously or you won't get any pudding!

So if the public remains indifferent to the Obama scandals, it'll be the fallen nature of America that's at fault. I assume Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei will take the baton from Sally Quinn and be the ones to lecture Americans on their moral failings.

ALLEGED PARTISAN OBAMACARE ENFORCER: HIRED UNDER REAGAN, PRAISED BY BUSH

Right-wingers are crowing about this:

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS' Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

So what do we know about Sarah Hall Ingram? Well, we learned this in 2009:

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman has selected Sarah Hall Ingram as commissioner of the Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division....

Ingram, who has served as Chief of Appeals for the past three years, previously served as TE/GE Deputy Commissioner from 2004-2006. Prior to that, she served as Division Counsel/Associate Chief Counsel for TE/GE, where she was responsible for providing legal services to TE/GE, as well as other parts of the IRS. Ingram began her career with the IRS in the former Tax Litigation Division in 1982.

Oh. So prior to that 2009 promotion, she got her previous promotion in 2004 -- under President George W. Bush. And she was hired when Ronald Reagan was president.

The only remotely scandalous story about her that I can find in the news archives is this story about large IRS bonuses, from 2004:

Last year, 25 senior executives in the [IRS chief] counsel's office received bonuses totaling $510,660, an average of $20,426. One lawyer, Sarah Hall Ingram, received a $46,900 award, after being singled out for distinguished service by President Bush.

Let me repeat that last sentence again:

One lawyer, Sarah Hall Ingram, received a $46,900 award, after being singled out for distinguished service by President Bush.

And in the Obama years, I see that Ingram showed her political bias by targeting a beloved right-wing institution: Harvard.

Harvard University President Drew Faust received $822,011 in salary and benefits in 2008, including travel expenses and the use of a home....

Harvard said in January that it's among about 40 institutions undergoing an audit as part of an IRS program to examine school finances. The federal agency is looking at how schools report income unrelated to their tax-exempt missions of teaching and research, and how officials are paid, said Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS commissioner of tax-exempt and government entities....

So, yeah, a lot of liberal bias there. Impeach!

CATHOLIC LEAGUE'S DONOHUE: OBAMA IS SO EVIL HE CONTROLLED THE IRS EVEN BEFORE BECOMING PRESIDENT

Tomorrow, Bill Donohue of the Catholic League will be on a FoxNews.com Web-only show to talk about President Obama and the IRS -- or, rather, President-Elect Obama and the IRS:

Fri 5/17 Bill will be on FOXNews.com "Spirited Debate"@ 1:10 pm ET Re '08 Catholic League IRS controversy live.foxnews.com

— Catholic League (@CatholicLeague) May 16, 2013

Yes, it's true, folks -- that says "Re '08 Catholic League IRS controversy." Barack Obama is so evil he controlled the IRS even before he was sworn in as president!

But Obama had help from a certain international Jew billionaire, as Donohue explained today in a Newsmax article:

... I have never made this public before, but given the heightened interest in the way the IRS has conducted itself, the time has come to disclose what happened.

Just weeks after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I was notified by the IRS that the Catholic League was under investigation for violating the IRS Code on political activities as it relates to 501(c)(3) organizations. What the IRS did not know was that I had proof who contacted them to launch the investigation: Catholics United, a George Soros-funded Catholic organization.

The IRS was contacted on June 5, 2008, to launch a probe of the Catholic League, and the letter sent to me was dated Nov. 24, 2008. The June 5 letter was sent to the IRS by lawyers from Catholics United; it was mailed to Director Marsha Ramirez, director of Exempt Organizations Examinations, and to Lois G. Lerner, director of EO Division.

The "evidence" against me was nothing more than news releases and articles I had written during the presidential campaign on various issues....

Yes, and that was pure harassment, because everything Donohue and the League did before the election was perfectly innocent and apolitical! Like this ad, which ran in the weekend edition of The Washington Times shortly before the election (click to enlarge):





Oh, and here's a representative sample of articles from the September and October 2008 issues of the Catholic League's magazine, Catalyst:

* "Obama's Public Policy Blunders"
* "Bob Casey Mislabeled as Pro-Life"
* "Pelosi Gets an 'F' in Religion"
* "Biden Digs Himself a Hole"
* "Casey Blows It on Abortion"
* "Democrats Sponsor Catholic Bashing"

Gosh, I don't know where anyone would get the idea that Donohue was motivated by electoral politics in 2008.

And what sort of heavy-handed oppression resulted from this Jew/Kenyan/socialist/atheist thuggery by a guy who wasn't president yet and his zillionaire puppetmaster?

In the end, the IRS concluded that although the Catholic League had "intervened in a political campaign," it was "unintentional, isolated, non-egregious and non-recurring"; our tax-exempt status remained intact.

Oh.

Well, then impeach Obama now! We should have impeached him before he was even sworn in!

LET'S RESTRICT GOVERNMENT ACCESS TO GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS! (BECAUSE: GUNS)

This is actually happening:

Less than six months after the state Revenue Department began scanning driving applicants' personal documents into a state computer system, Missouri lawmakers sent the governor legislation Wednesday that would force the department to stop....

Republican lawmakers began pushing for the measure after learning about the new license procedures early in the legislative session. The push accelerated in March after a Stoddard County man filed a lawsuit challenging the state's new licensing procedures. They said that scanning documents, such as birth certificates and concealed weapons permits, were an invasion of privacy....

The bill passed the Senate 25-8 on Wednesday and the House earlier this week. It would prevent any future document scanning and would require the department to securely destroy any documents collected since September 2012....

All this scanning started in order to combat fraud involving undocumented residents. That's an effort you'd think right-wingers would support. But no:

The department began scanning documents shortly after a clerk in a St. Joseph license office pleaded guilty Dec. 11 in a scheme to accept false identification documents that federal prosecutor say resulted in Missouri licenses being issued to more than 3,500 people living illegally in the U.S.

Right-wingers were outraged -- and notice that what upset them was the government being allowed to retain copies of government documents.

Of course, the concern is all about one particular category of government document, as The Kansas City Star's Barbara Shelly explains in this blistering column:

It's a tough job, but today we will attempt to select the low-light of the great document-scanning "scandal" that the Missouri legislature has used as an excuse to avoid doing much real work this session.

Was it the "hearing" in North Kansas City, when a citizen worried that the sharing of the names of Missouri concealed gun permit holders with a federal agency would land her on a United Nations watch list? Cue the black helicopters....

This winding saga began when a citizen in Stoddard County went to renew his driver's license and a clerk insisted on scanning his conceal carry permit.

Paranoia reared its head. Lawmakers dropped mundane matters like health care, finances and economic development bills and hauled state officials into hearings.

It turned out that the Department of Revenue, as part of a cost-saving move, has begun digitally scanning documents needed for a driver's license, such as Social Security cards, birth certificates and concealed carry permits, and having the licenses processed by a private company. It was further discovered that the Missouri Highway Patrol had attempted to share the state's concealed carry permit list with a federal fraud investigator.

The names of concealed carry owners are a closed record in Missouri. But state law makes an exception for state or federal law enforcement investigations. So the sharing was legal, although technical glitches ultimately stopped the investigator from accessing the list.

Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, tried to tamp down the fires by halting the scanning of concealed carry permits. But the opportunity to rile up gun owners is too rich for Republicans to pass up....

Now it could be argued that it's inappropriate for the government to share this information with a private firm handling driver's license applications. But, um, which wing of American politics insists that all government functions can be handled more efficiently by private contractors? Hint: It ain't liberals.

No -- the real problem is that the list was shared with the evil feds. Who were investigating crime, but hey, that's not a sufficient reason for the sharing.

So now (assuming the governor signs the bill) there'll be no scanning of such documents anymore. But I bet the gunners' demands won't stop there.

Eventually, I imagine that concealed-carry permits and other gun documents will be like Snapchat photos -- it will be possible for another human being to view them, but they'll disappear after a few seconds. (Though there'll probably be a non-Snapchat provision in the law saying that if the viewer attempts to make a copy of the permit, the permit holder can respond with lethal force -- even if the viewer is a cop. Stand your ground and all that.)

Ultimately, I imagine that no human being will be allowed to file, review, or even touch any document relating to a gun permit, which will mean that all gun permits will be on the honor system -- technically, you'll still need supporting documents, but since no one will be allowed to see them, if you say you have them the government will just have to take your word for it.

One day, the sacralization of everything to do with guns will probably lead to gunner protests resembling the worldwide protests against mishandling of the Koran. You won't be able to mock a gun, or even a picture of one. You won't be able to put an image of a gun on the floor. Riots will ensue if you do.

DELAY-GATE!

Yesterday, President Obama took steps to deal with the scandals he's facing -- he released Benghazi e-mails and the acting commissioner of the IRS got a pink slip -- and even Politico is giving him good marks. However, a few of the folks Politico quotes wonder what the hell took so long, because, after all, it's been days:

Ideally, Obama would have acted earlier, [Democratic strategist Phil] Singer said.

"You don't want to sit back and let events control you. You want to take control of events," he said....

[Robert] Gibbs, the former Obama press secretary, said earlier this week to say that Obama should have spoken out on the IRS issue last Friday or over the weekend, and that the president should've been more forceful when he finally did speak on Monday....

Yes, he had to act nownownow, not work out his response over the course of, um, five days, because his approval rating had dropped 30 points and people trapped under the scandal rubble were about to bleed to death in a matter of hours and a meteor was about to destroy earth that could be steered off course only if Obama acted immediately. No, wait -- none of that was happening.

Look, this guy likes to take a little time when preparing a response. And it always makes Beltway insiders freak out -- or at least it does at the time, though afterward it's hard for anyone, including those same insiders, to recall what the fuss was about. Remember Obama's horrible, unconscionable, unthinkable delay in deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan? REmember all the fussing and fretting about that? No? You don't remember? Well, neither does anyone else now.

In the case of the current scandals, Obama has finally started to act, and the critics are finally calming down, according to Politico ... right?

Moving ahead, Democrats agree that Obama needs to try to change the subject....

And the White House has "got to do it soon and quickly, because we've got to get back to immigration, the debt, energy," [frormer Pennsylvania governor Ed] Rendell said. "He's got a limited window to take action on the real challenges of the country...."

Sigh.

CAN'T STOP, WON'T STOP

If you're a sane person, you might think this takes what wing there is out of the sails of the #BENGHAZI!!! "scandal":

The White House released more than 100 pages of e-mails on Wednesday in a bid to quell critics who say President Barack Obama and his aides played politics with national security following the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

The exchanges detailing discussions between top Obama administration officials from multiple agencies suggest the CIA took the lead in developing talking points to describe the attack last September 11 that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans....

So the talking points weren't massaged to protect Hillary Clinton's reputation. And, as jonathan Bernstein notes, it's absurd to argue that any spin the White House was doing could have had any impact on the 2012 election:

You want to know what would have been a coverup? If the administration had maintained that Ambassador Chris Stevens slipped and hit his head on the sink on the way to a celebration of Libya's love for the United States (and if it then paid off those on the scene to go along with the story). In other words, trying to pretend that no policy fiasco had happened. Or if it later emerges that Osama bin Laden, alive after all, was personally leading the attack. That really would have contradicted an important campaign story line.

That it was an act of terror, instead of terrorism? That it was extremists, instead of terrorists? That it was planned or spontaneous, a reaction to an immediate event or something coordinated in advance? There’s not a single voter who would have cared at all. Not one.

So will Republicans just drop this now?

Nahhhh....

BTW there are at least 25,000 docs they have but won't give us @jaketapper @cnnsitroom #benghazi

— Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) May 15, 2013

"Release all the Benghazi Emails." For a WH that claims to want the whole story told, where's the transparency? weeklystandard.com/blogs/release-…

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) May 14, 2013

Obama released #Benghazi emails to distract from #IRS # AP scandals. @ericbolling @greggutfeldMommy Jarrett strikes again Told Yah!

— Snipr (@SniprFire1) May 15, 2013

What is so bad about #Benghazi that Obama let the #IRS and #AP stories surface to distract us from it? #tcot #OpSLAM #ocra #p2 #uniteblue

— Greg Howard (@GregWHoward) May 15, 2013

Lt Gen Mclnerney on #Benghazi Scandal: ‘There Is Only One Person Who Can Say-Stand Down – And That’s The President’thegatewaypundit.com/2013/05/lt-gen…

—SpreadButter (@SpreadButter) May 15, 2013

Yes it's ultimately about the stand down orders.. it's unconscionable. No lying can be as bad as leaving our men to die. #Benghazi #TheFive

— Kathryn S. (@kayms99) May 15, 2013

If Barry's daughter was at the #Benghazi consulate, think there would've been a stand down? #BenghaziGate #p2 #tcot #p2moron> @herbdoom

— BarrysLies (@BarrysLies) May 15, 2013

The first two tweets above are from a right-wing congressman and a right-wing reporter. The others are from random wingnut citizens. Yeah, random citizens post all kinds of nonsense online. But the GOP is still all about stirring up the base and then pleasing the base by focusing attention on whatever ridiculous thing has been ginned up to stir up the base.

So more attention will just shift to whatever hasn't been released, and -- especially -- to the absurd notion that the president could have saved four lives and refused to do so. I don't think Republicans can restrain themselves -- they're going to keep at this.

THE OBLIVIOUS AWFULNESS OF MAUREEN DOWD

The second half of today's Maureen Dowd column concerns Christine Quinn, New York's city council speaker and likely next mayor. In an interview published in yesterday's New York Times, Quinn discussed her past struggles with bulimia and alcoholism -- which brought out the Mean Girl in Dowd:

Quinn ... wanted to sprinkle some humanity on an image that took [a hit] ... when she was skewered in an article in The Times in March about her screaming fits and volatile bursts of wrath and retaliation. [Quinn] has a bloody penchant for threatening to cut off the privates of those who get on her bad side....

"I hope that what I share in this book is helpful, particularly to young women and girls who feel stuck," Quinn said.

And she certainly hopes the book is helpful to one 46-year-old woman who feels stuck, castigated as an arrogant bully....

I bring this up because -- in the two paragraphs immediately following -- Dowd writes this:

With Chris Christie, his admission that he had lap-band surgery under an assumed name to curb his obesity is a second-tier story. The first-tier story is that he's a Jersey guy who takes no guff.

Christine Quinn needs a first-tier story.

Notice what Dowd doesn't consider as a possible "first-tier story" for Christine Quinn? The fact that she's a New York gal who takes no guff. Chris Christie regularly yells at people and threatens them -- and that means he's a charming tough guy. Christine Quinn yells at people and threatens them -- and that makes her an evil, unlikable bitch.

Jesus, Mo, at least pretend that you hold men and women to a single standard.

****

And while we're on the subject of Dowd, let's turn to the Dowd reference in that damn Politico story about how all the Kewl Kidz hate Obama now:

The dam of solid Democratic solidarity has collapsed, starting with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s weekend scolding of the White House over Benghazi....

Maureen Dowd as part of a "dam of solid Democratic solidity" in support of Obama? Seriously?

Do you know when Dowd first sneeringly referred to Obama as "Obambi"? In 2006. Shortly afterward -- nearly a year before the '08 Iowa caucuses -- Dowd was showing her Obama solidarity thus:





Yeah, she's always had Obama's back, hasn't she?

ACTUALLY, AMERICANS HAVE A SLIGHTLY MORE FAVORABLE OPINION OF THE IRS THAN OF THE TEA PARTY

I absolutely don't want to dismiss the IRS scandal -- it's utterly wrong that IRS staffers seem to have targeted would-be tax-exempt groups by ideology (although I question USA Today's premise that the average American, or even the average government bureaucrat outside D.C., viscerally associates the words "progress" and "progressive" with politics as readily as the highly publicized "tea party" and "9-12" are associated with the right, and should have targeted lefty groups accordingly). I think what these IRS employees did, if not malicious, was ignorant. Nothing like this should ever happen. Scrutiny should be evenhanded.

On the other hand, I question the premise that every American automatically sides with the targeted groups and comes to this story automatically despising the government agency whose employees did the targeting. Josh Marshall says of the scandal, "It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands." Libby Spencer says, "Everybody loves a scandal and hates the IRS." Rachel Maddow says:

There is a reasonable fear by all of us, by any of us, that the kind of power the IRS has could be misused, that the IRS, as an agency of the federal government, could be used by the federal government to retaliate against political enemies or to try and shape political outcomes in some way. It's been done before, we're all reasonably worried it will happen again.

But "all of us" aren't political. Most Americans hate politics. Most Americans don't form (or join) political organizations.

Also, the victims here are not well liked -- and the villains are hated much less than you'd think.

Polling Report's survey results on the IRS aren't particularly recent, but the agency polls better than you'd expect. Here's how people rated the job being done by the IRS in a 2009 Gallup poll:

Excellent 5%; Good 35%; Only fair 36%; Poor 20: Unsure 5%

Not a resounding endorsement -- but did you think even 40% of respondents would say "Excellent" or "Good"? Did you think anyone would?

In a 2007 AP poll, 14% gave the IRS a "Very Favorable" rating and 42% a "Somewhat Favorable" rating. In a 2003 Fox News poll, 12% had "a great deal" of confidence in the IRS and 50% had "some" confidence. (By contrast, the numbers for "the news media" were 9% and 43%, and for "major business corporations" they were 6% and 43%.)

By contrast (again according to Polling Report), a 2013 CNN survey says that only 28% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the tea party, while 48% have an unfavorable opinion. There were similar numbers in a September 2012 ABC/Washington Post poll: 32% favorable, 46% unfavorable. And only 23% of Americans consider themselves tea party supporters, according to an April 2013 AP/GfK poll, while 62% aren't supporters. CBS, March 2013: 22% support, 65% not supporters.

I'm not saying this to argue that it doesn't matter what these IRS employees did, because who cares about the misuse of government power against a bunch of teabaggers. I'm saying that we shouldn't assume the general public looks as the teabaggers and says, "Hey, that could be me."

Those of us who are either political pros or mavens sometimes forget how apolitical most Americans are. And political pros based in D.C. or other big cities automatically assume that heartlanders see the teabaggers as just like them -- when the polls suggest otherwise.

So if there are few new revelations, and if wrongdoers are punished, the impact of this could be limited. Yes, those are big ifs. But this is not likely to be seen as IRS Versus the Real America just yet.

DO ALLEN AND VANDEHEI HAVE TO MARRY BEN BRADLEE NOW?

From "D.C. Turns On Obama" by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, published this evening by Politico:

The town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House....

Obama's aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

This White House's instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness have all worked together to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support system....

This is a pretty good cover version, but I preferred the 1998 Sally Quinn original:

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.... people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable....

THIS IS THEIR HOME. This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.

"It's much more personal here," says pollster Geoff Garin. "This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work.... Clinton's behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern."

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

The irony of the Quinn piece is that the two living Americans most admired for their work in D.C. politics are both named ... Clinton. If we extend the definition of "D.C. politics" to include D.C. political journalism, that's still true. (Sorry, Bob Woodward. And Ben Bradlee.)

At this moment, it's hard to imagine that Barack Obama will leave office as widely admired as Bill did in 2001 and Hillary did earlier this year. But I hope it happens, just so Allen and VandeHei can choke on it.

THAT'S NOT HOW REPUBLICANS ROLL

Saw this tweet from The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza early this afternoon:

"OK, let's go all in on the IRS scandal." -- a lot of Republicans this afternoon.

— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 14, 2013

Lizza was presumably responding to Jake Tapper's publication of a White House e-mail that turns out to be much less inflammatory than the press told us it was last week when news of it was leaked.

But give up on Benghazi? Republicans? Really?

Um, no:

House Republican members are defying Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and five committee chairmen by endorsing a measure that would set up a special panel to investigate the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

A growing number of members on the committees with jurisdiction over the Benghazi matter -- Intelligence, Judiciary, Oversight and Government Reform, Armed Services and Foreign Affairs -- have signed onto Rep. Frank Wolf's (R-Va.) resolution.

Boehner and the chairmen of those committees do not support the legislation. Instead, they have worked together to investigate the Obama administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 assault.

Despite that resistance, Wolf has garnered a sizable majority of the GOP Conference as co-sponsors since introducing the measure in January. It has 146 GOP co-sponsors, with more than 80 Republicans backing it over the last month....

Not one Democrat has co-sponsored the Wolf resolution....

More:

Wolf ... wrote in a letter to Boehner Thursday that he remains convinced a special committee is "the only mechanism to ensure that the complete truth comes out."

Wolf wrote that last week's hearing in the House Oversight Committee was a "positive step" but "also made clear that a thorough inquiry will require witnesses from across government - including the Defense Department, State Department, Intelligence Community, Justice Department and even the White House. Only a Select Committee would be able to bring the cross-jurisdictional expertise and subpoena authority to compel answers from these agencies."

Republicans don't let issues go -- they damn sure don't let anything go at the first sign of a setback for their side. This is what Republicans do: they ratchet up whatever they're doing.

As Republican red-meat issues go, Benghazi is prime rib. Republicans enjoy any opportunity to attack and harm a Democrat, but nothing is as delectable as an opportunity to accuse a Democrat of being weak and betraying those who wear the uniform in defense of America. This goes back to where everything goes back for the right: to the 1960s, when the archetypical evil lefty opposed the Vietnam War and was skeptical of "law and order."

Recall that, in Obama's first term, the scandal Republicans worked the hardest, with no success whatsoever, was Fast and Furious. In Republicans' eyes, that was a conscious effort to weaken border security and get immigration agents killed in order to spread gun control (which to Republicans, of course, weakens America further).

That was the domestic aspect of their lefty archetype -- contempt for law enforcement. Benghazi, in their eyes, fits the foreign policy aspect of the archetype. The fact that a rescue didn't happen was, to them, like Jane Fonda sitting on that cannon in North Vietnam. It was like putting flowers in gun barrels. It was hippies dancing in the mud at Woodstock.

They'll never let Benghazi go. Their view of it is practically in their DNA.

A LIBERAL GROUP TARGETED BY THE IRS?

A political blogger for the New York Daily News says a liberal-leaning media group he used to belong to was targeted by the IRS office in Cincinnati:

... For two and a half years, I was part of a small media nonprofit, the Chicago News Cooperative CNC), that produced Chicago content for the Midwest edition of the New York Times....

We ran out of money and closed shop last March but not before our own frustrating dealings of more than two years with the same IRS office in Cincinnati that looked into groups with "Tea Party," "patriot" or other possibly ideological-driven words in their names.

Just like those conservative groups, we were seeking tax-exempt status, in our case so-called 501(c)(3) status. And we waited and waited and waited for resolution of a request that, we were told by our lawyer, should have taken perhaps six months.

But for more than two years we cooled our heels seeking adjudication. We heard zilch. The IRS foot-dragging prompted foundations to look at us skeptically and wonder what the heck was taking us so long to get our IRS tax-exempt status....

The questions thrown our way by the Cincinnati office almost entirely involved political matters, such as whether we would endorse candidates....

Apart from the biggest problem here -- that the IRS targeted small fish while largely ignoring Republican- and Democratic-leaning big fish -- I have to wonder whether the keyword targeting was the way it was simply because there were far more right-leaning groups applying for 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status than left-leaning groups, and lots of them had the same words in their names. If, say, 90% of the groups posing as social-welfare organizations but actually engaged in politicking were GOP-leaning, then it would have been appropriate to focus 90% (though not 100%) of the enforcement energy on the right.* And let's face it, there's a hell of a lot more grassroots (and Astroturf) energy on the right than on the left. The proportions really could be that lopsided.

In any case, I'm wondering if we'll hear that more left-leaning groups went through this. I suspect so.

(Via Elizabeth Drew.)


* ... And yes, I'm an idiot, because the percentage being discussed is 25%.

SHAKING MY HEAD

As you probably know, the Justice Department's seizure of phone records in a probe of the Associated Press was in response to a May 2012 AP story that revealed the existence of a second underwear bomb plot, based in Yemen. The leak to which Justice was responding was blamed by some on John Brennan:

The government would not say why it sought the records. Officials have previously said in public testimony that the U.S. attorney in Washington is conducting a criminal investigation into who may have provided information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a foiled terror plot. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an al-Qaida plot in the spring of 2012 to detonate a bomb on an airplane bound for the United States.

In testimony in February, CIA Director John Brennan noted that the FBI had questioned him about whether he was AP's source, which he denied. He called the release of the information to the media about the terror plot an "unauthorized and dangerous disclosure of classified information."

(That May 2012 story is here.)

So there was a leak, and John Brennan was susected of being the leaker. But at the time, according to Mark Hosenball of Reuters, Brennan (then the top White House counterterrorism adviser) responded to the leak by apparently leaking more information:

White House efforts to soft-pedal the danger from a new "underwear bomb" plot emanating from Yemen may have inadvertently broken the news they needed most to contain.

At about 5:45 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 7, just before the evening newscasts, John Brennan, President Barack Obama's top White House adviser on counter-terrorism, held a small, private teleconference to brief former counter-terrorism advisers who have become frequent commentators on TV news shows.

According to five people familiar with the call, Brennan stressed that the plot was never a threat to the U.S. public or air safety because Washington had "inside control" over it.

Brennan's comment appears unintentionally to have helped lead to disclosure of the secret at the heart of a joint U.S.-British-Saudi undercover counter-terrorism operation....

Richard Clarke, who was one of the people briefed, went on to tell the press that our side had someone inside the plot. And as a result, according to Hosenball, the operation had to be shut down prematurely.

What's disturbing about this is that it fits into the right-wing narrative about the White House attitude toward news involving Al Qaeda. The White House was saying that there were no plots to fear around the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. But then AP revealed that there was a plot. And then Brennan, according to Hosenball, got the word out the plot was nothing to worry about because the U.S. and Brits and Saudis had a guy in on it, so it could never actually go forward. So relax, America. Al Qaeda won't hurt you.

This is what the right says the Benghazi aftermath was about: sending the message that Al Qaeda is neutralized -- in an election year.

Is that what was going on? If so, it was nuts. President Obama didn't have to worry that anyone (except insane right-wingers) was going to see him as a sandal-wearing peacenik. He'd ordered bin Laden killed. He was overseeing frequent drone strikes. And -- see the poll results I cited over the weekend -- the public doesn't expect 100% security from terrorism. The public expects terrorists to ind a way through our defenses at times. People just want to the government to work hard at preventing attacks. Obama had that covered, in the public's eyes.

So if the government -- or certain specific people in it -- wanted to control the narrative to make it seem as if Al Qaeda was not a threat at all, the process squandered moral authority for nothing.

BUT REPUBLICANS WOULD NEVER POLITICIZE THE QUESTION OF TAX-EXEMPT STATUS!

This happened a couple of months before the 2008 presidential election:

Keeping patients who don't need emergency care out of the emergency room seems like a good idea. But a program aimed at doing that has earned University of Chicago Medical Center a question-filled letter from Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has been looking into whether big-money nonprofit hospitals are doing enough to keep their tax-free status....

It’s a particularly charged issue because Barack Obama’s wife Michelle Obama, an executive at the med center, was one of the leaders of the project, known as the Urban Health Initiative. Grassley's letter cites a front-page story from the Washington Post that looked at work David Axelrod did on the project before he became chief strategist of Obama's campaign....

Hmmm ... a hospital with ties to a Democratic presidential candidate getting its tax-exempt status scrutinized by a top Republican. Nothing unseemly there, right?

EXPLAIN THIS ONE TO ME, RIGHT-WINGERS

Fox News, June 23, 2011:

CAIR Appealing to IRS After Tax-Exempt Status Revoked

The largest Muslim advocacy group in the country plans to appeal to the IRS to regain its tax-exempt status after that status was revoked over an apparent problem with its paperwork.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, as well as the offshoot CAIR Foundation, was included earlier this month on a massive list of 275,000 organizations that the IRS said were losing their tax-exempt status because they did not file required annual reports....

CAIR and the thousands of other groups were cited after the IRS claimed they failed to file annual reports for three consecutive years as required by law....

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper told FoxNews.com that the organization's accountant says CAIR "filed promptly in the last several years." But he said the status problem stems from "questions" over filings dating back to 2006 or 2007.

"We'll be doing whatever's necessary ... to rectify the situation," Hooper said....

Must have been an evil, devious Kenyan/Muslim/socialist trick by the Obama administration to throw true patriots off the scent.

(CAIR's tax-exempt status was reinstated, but the reinstatement took more than a year. None of the conservative groups at the center of the current IRS revelations ever had their tax-exempt status revoked.)

SQUIRREL!

I know what Public Policy Polling should ask in its next national poll, based on results from the latest PPP poll:

... there's no doubt about how mad Republicans are about Benghazi. 41% say they consider this to be the biggest political scandal in American history to only 43% who disagree with that sentiment. Only 10% of Democrats and 20% of independents share that feeling. Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate, by a 74/12 margin that it's worse than Teapot Dome, and by a 70/20 margin that it's worse than Iran Contra.

This poll was conducted Friday through Sunday. I bet if you polled Republicans today through Wednesday, they'd have a completely different answer -- because they'd say that the IRS scandal is the biggest political scandal in American history. (Please, PPP, survey that, and prove me right.)

But yes, over the weekend, Republicans were at Defcon-1 about Benghazi. However:

One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don't actually know where it is. 10% think it's in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.

Cuba! Love it.

Meanwhile, among non-insane Americans:

PPP's newest national poll finds that Republicans aren't getting much traction with their focus on Benghazi over the last week. Voters trust Hillary Clinton over Congressional Republicans on the issue of Benghazi by a 49/39 margin and Clinton's +8 net favorability rating at 52/44 is identical to what it was on our last national poll in late March. Meanwhile Congressional Republicans remain very unpopular with a 36/57 favorability rating.

So I think Benghazi's going to fade soon. And hey, weren't we liberals and Democrats all being Antichristed for Kermit Gosnell a couple of weeks ago? Whatever happened to that?

THE GOOD ANGEL ON THE GOP'S SHOULDER THAT ONLY BELTWAY JOURNALISTS CAN SEE

From a New York Times story about the Republican response to recent IRS revelations:

Since last year's elections, Republicans in Congress have struggled for traction on their legislative efforts, torn between conservatives who drove the agenda after their 2010 landslide and new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Obama's re-election and the loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate.

Really? In the Republican Party? Who are these "new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Obama's re-election and the loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate"? I haven't encountered any. Have you?

Oh, sure, certain members of the GOP are pursuing immigration reform -- but they're doing that for their own party's benefit, not because they want to cooperate with the president. And yes, Republicans have refrained from destroying the full faith and credit of the United States since the election -- but that's at the request of their wealthy donors, not because they want to play nice with the White House. And yes, admittedly, one -- one -- Republican, Pat Toomey, seemed to work hard on a gun bill, but he's in a state Obama won by 5 points and the state has an extremely unpopular Republican governor.

These "new voices counseling a shift in course to reflect President Obama's re-election and the loss of Republican seats in the House and the Senate" are having no ultimate impact on budget and tax issues, on guns, and now on whether the GOP should go Javert on the president for the next three and a half years. Who are these voices? Why can only Beltway journalists hear them?

YIKES
(updated)





(From the Facebook page of the shooting sports magazine AmmoLand. School Shield is the recent NRA task force proposal for the mass arming of teachers and other school personnel with weapons ranging from "sidearms, to shotguns, to AR-15s.")

****

UPDATE, MONDAY: Commenter Chris Ekman says:

That's a Mike Peters cartoon, only it originally was anti-NRA - AmmoLand just swapped the before and after panels, and stuck in the School Shield logo to hide Peters' signature. Hacktacular!

True -- the original is here and here.





Sue, Mike, sue.

****

UPDATE, TUESDAY: AmmoLand has removed the plagiarized, reworked cartoon.

REPUBLICANS HAVE DONE MORE HARM TO THE TEA PARTY LATELY THAN THE IRS HAS

What's ironic about the GOP's latest scandalmongering effort -- raising a ruckus about IRS scrutiny of tea party groups' tax-exempt status -- is that the GOP is using this scandal to help nullify Barack Obama's reelection, while not turning to the tea party movement itself to do the nullification work, as the party did four years ago.

The GOP in 2013 has the same goals it had in 2009 -- to deny Obama the opportunity to govern and fire up the base in the two years leading up to midterms -- but the party has decided that it's going to accomplish this goal using insiders only; it's long since stopped encouraging teabaggers to take to the streets. The party and its insider allies are going to pursue a "This is worse than Watergate!" Beltway strategy instead. Hence this scandal, and hence Benghazi. The focus will be congressional hearings, not town meetings. No heartlanders in tricorner hats need apply.

In 2009, the GOP felt it needed the fig leaf of a seemingly independent, grassroots movement to block Obama initiatives and gin up outrage in advance of midterm elections -- presumably because Obama was just taking office and nothing had happened on his watch that could be ginned up into a scandal suitable for hearings and impeachment threats. So GOP-friendly groups financed and promoted the tea party movement. But once the 2010 midterms were over, the movement had outlived its usefulness. Going into 2012, the GOP wanted to motivate swing voters, not just the base (a task it still hasn't quite figured out how to accomplish). The GOP and its media wing (Fox News, talk radio, blogs) sidelined the tea party, with predictable results: turnout at recent tea party rallies has been embarrassingly low.

Now might seem to be the time to bring the teabaggers back. But now President Obama has been in office for four years, so there's a record to pick apart. As a result, the GOP has decided that this year's teabaggers are going to be members of Congress.

If Hillary Clinton or some other Democrat is elected in 2016, maybe the GOP will bring the teabaggers out of mothballs -- the new president won't have done anything potentially impeachable yet, so heartlanders angry about the new White House agenda might be needed to nullify the 2016 election results. But for now, the tea party movement is sidelined by the GOP even as the GOP identifies it as a victim.

THE ALL-POWERFUL ANTICHRIST

Let's see if I've got this straight.

The Obama "scandals" are: a pre-election "cover-up" of the truth about the Benghazi attack in which the administration acknowledged every fact said to have been covered up within less than two weeks after the attack (and more than a month and a half before the election); heightened scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of right-wing groups by the IRS that led to no revocations of tax-exempt status and happened while a Republican ran the agency; all of this following a "gun grab" that has led to exactly zero federal gun control because no bill could even pass the Democrat-controlled upper chamber of Congress; and a further "gun grab" said to be in the works in conjunction with the UN that involves a treaty that can't possibly be ratified in the Senate, and wouldn't do what the opponents say it does anyway, even if it did pass.

Have I summarized the dangerous Satanic power of Barack Obama accurately?

*****

... Sorry, forgot to mention that Obama deliberately failed to rescue Americans in Benghazi even though a rescue would have been literally impossible.

THE PRIMAL BLAME IMPULSE

We've all had problems with Glenn Kessler in the past, but his argument that the editing of the Benghazi talking points is the product of a turf battle between the State Department and the CIA makes a great deal of sense:

... This basically was a bureaucratic knife fight, pitting the State Department against the CIA.

In other words, the final version of the talking points may have been so wan because officials simply deleted everything that upset the two sides. So they were left with nothing....

First, some important context: Although the ambassador was killed, the Benghazi "consulate" was not a consulate at all but basically a secret CIA operation....

So, from the State Department perspective, this was an attack on a CIA operation....

The talking points were originally developed by the CIA....

The clear implication is that State screwed up, even though internally, it was known that this was a CIA operation. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland especially objects to the reference to previous warnings, saying it "could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings."...

And on and on.

Wee see this kind of infighting and blame-shifting all the time. Elsewhere, Boston's police department has grumbled that the FBI didn't share critical information regarding the Marathon bombing. Before that, it was the cops in New York complaining about lack of information sharing regarding the Tsarnaevs. The Cleveland cops are being blamed for failures in the Ariel Castro kidnapping case, and now there's grumbling (presumably from those cops) that an FBI suspect sketch wasn't shared for seven years (the sketch bears a close resemblance to Castro).

Finger-pointing is what people do in these circumstances. If you've ever worked at a big or even moderate-sized company or organization, you know that everyone's first impulse after any screw-up is to think, "Can I be blamed? Can my department be blamed? What evidence is there that this is some other department's fault?"

The key bit of supposedly politicized scrubbing is being blamed on Victoria Nuland -- who, yes, was a Hillary Clinton aide, but prior to that was, among other things, Dick Cheney's deputy national security adviser. Why would she cover up on behalf of the Obama campaign?

And please, explain to me why the alleged cover-up story would be more reassuring to the public than the truth.

Here's the alleged cover-up story: If someone makes a video that insults Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad, our diplomats in the Muslim world are at risk of being killed by spontaneous rioters. What ordinary American would find the possibility of that kind of violence less unsettling than the possibility of Al Qaeda launching an attack on a diplomatic (or CIA) outpost of exactly the same level of lethality?

Dave Weigel addresses the question of whether Benghazi could have gotten Mitt Romney elected in 2012 and says it couldn't have happened, because the American people care only about attacks on U.S. soil. But we've just had a terrorist attack on U.S. soil and President Obama's poll ratings haven't suffered at all. Even stateside, the American people don't believe 100% of all attacks can be prevented. Here are CNN poll numbers over the years:





So voters don't even count on 100% success here. Why would they expect 100% success against anyone, Al Qaeda or otherwise, overseas? Why would any rational campaign feel the need to defend an indefensible claim of abolute security that the public doesn't believe anyway?

SIX-PLUS MONTHS OF WALL-TO-WALL RIGHT-WING BENGHAZI COVERAGE HAS RAISED OBAMA'S DISAPPROVAL ... BY 1%

Is it working? Not really:

Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of the way President Barack Obama has handled the aftermath of last September's attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and many think that the administration intentionally misled the American people about the attack, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll.

The poll found that 42 percent of Americans said they disapprove of the way it has been handled, while 27 percent said they approve.

Sounds bad until you look at this:

. In another HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted last October, respondents disapproved by a similar margin, 41 percent to 32 percent.

That was a few weeks before Obama was reelected.

So is this working? Well, Obama's approval on the issue down 5%, and his disapproval is up 7% among independents. So maybe -- to a limited extent. And we'll see what today's news does to public opinion. But no, the outrage is not building.

DEFINING WINGNUTTERY DOWN

This sort of thing has almost become a cliche:

... Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman is showing off his Second Amendment fervor by doing what some consider unthinkable: giving away a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle....

His campaign - not his government office, spokesman Donny Ferguson told MailOnline - is offering the unusual prize to entrants who join his online mailing list.

Twitter erupted late Wednesday after the congressman announced the prize giveaway by tweeting: 'Want to win a FREE AR-15? Congressman Steve Stockman is giving one away! ... Grab this gun before Obama does!' ...

Everybody's giving away AR-15s these days: Joe the Plumber, Townhall columnist Doug Giles, the Tennessee Firearms Association, the National Association for Gun Rights. The Daily Caller had a weekly gun giveaway before the election. Gun giveaways are all the rage. (Here's a list of a couple dozen recent giveaways.)

Among politicians, Stockman's a trendsetter now -- but I bet he won't be for long. I bet there'll be at least half a dozen Republican congressional candidates giving away guns in the 2014 election cycle.

And by 2016, I bet at least one GOP presidential candidate will do this. If Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Allen West all run, I suspect all three will give away guns. We'll barely regard it as unusual.

And Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or whoever wins the nomination will be described by the press as a moderate conservative just for not giving a gun away during the campaign.

CLINTONS SABOTAGING THEMSELVES IN ORDER TO DENY OBAMA A THIRD TERM! ... OR, UM, SOMETHING LIKE THAT

So ABC News is telling us that Hillary Clinton's State Department was more involved in removing references to Al Qaeda from the original Benghazi talking points than previously reported.

But I don't get it. The right-wingers are now saying that Hillary deceived the public during a tough reelection campaign for President Obama so Obama could continue touting his successes against Al Qaeda. But a few months before Benghazi, right-wingers were telling us the Clintons wanted Obama to lose:

Does President Obama have a mutiny on his hands orchestrated by President Bill Clinton? "I totally believe this is intention," Sean Hannity told Michelle Malkin and Herman Cain...

And from Dick Morris:

A former adviser says the 65-year-old Clinton does not want Obama to win the November election.

"He never liked him, they never got along," Dick Morris, now a Republican strategist, told Fox News this week of the pair's famously complex relationship.

And Glenn Beck:

Bill Clinton is out to sabotage Barack Obama's reelection chances, right? It seems pretty clear at this point that he doesn't want to see Obama in office come 2013, and is trying to stop him in the most passive agressive manner possible. Why else would he be undermining the President's campaign at every turn?

First, he said that Romney had a sterling business record when he was at Bain. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is trying to paint Romney as a ruthless CEO who sought to maximize profits at the expense of people. That's a pretty significant disconnect.

Now, Clinton is out their touting his own record over Obama's....

And Malkin's Twitchy:

Schadenfreude-licious: Clinton clobbers Obama, continues campaign sabotage theme

Ahhh, but, according to NewsHounds, Hannity now thinks there'll be after-the-fact Clinton sabotage:

All of this is merely the tip of a very large iceberg when it comes to Hillary Clinton's culpability. In other words, Benghazi is her new Whitewater. It is the scandal that threatens her political future. What happens when the Clintons' backs are against the wall? Well, they come out swinging. And they throw whoever they have to throw under the bus so that they survive. Now that includes Barack Obama. And with 2016 fast approaching, and Benghazi quickly becoming her biggest liability, well the president may just want to keep his guard up. Just a thought.

So let's see: The Clintons wanted Obama to lose, so when Benghazi happened, Hillary and her aides did something that could potentially hurt her own reputation so Obama would win. Am I following this so far? Or maybe they were playing a really, really long game, which involved deceiving the public to help Obama win, after which Hillary would be embroiled in scandal, at which point she'd throw Obama under the bus, for which she'd also be attacked by the right, because doing all that would really help her chances in 2016. Now do I have it right?

THIS WEEK IN TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE

My favorite story of the week:

The lead singer of a successful Christian heavy-metal band told at least two people at a gym recently that he wanted to have his wife killed, a prosecutor said in court Thursday.

Timothy Lambesis, 32, of the band As I Lay Dying, met with a person he believed was a hit man -- but was actually an undercover detective -- and handed him an envelope containing $1,000 cash, his wife's address and the gate security codes. He told the agent he wanted his wife "gone," said Deputy District Attorney Claudia Grasso....

Well, he told his wife while they were breaking up that he no longer believed in God, so I'm sure the Jesus fans will tell us that this guy wasn't one of theirs anymore, and God's failure to give him strength was his own damn fault, or the fault of Satan becaue he and his band hung out with that Satanist Ozzy Osbourne years ago.
Me, I'm blame Jerry Falwell, or online learning, or both. According to Lambesis's Wikipedia page, he

majored in Religious Studies at Liberty University, a private Christian college that offers classes online.

Liberty University was founded by Falwell in 1971.

Or maybe we should blame the dietary supplements?

The wife ... filed for divorce in September, citing "irreconcilable differences" and alleging that her husband had become obsessed with bodybuilding and going to the gym.

Yes -- when Lambesis wasn't alternately professing and losing his faith in a heavily metallic way, he was either at the gym or working on a gym-related side project: Austrian Death Machine, an Arnold Schwarzenegger-themed metal band.





God (or Satan, or testosterone) works in mysterious ways.

RICHARD BLUMENTHAL IS A HERO. MIKE LEE IS A LYING EXTREMIST.

The Hill tells us about Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal's decision to interrupt this reprehensible bit of ideological theater from a Republican Party that will do anything except govern in the people's interest:

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tried to pass a Senate resolution that would have condemned illegal abortion practices.

Lee asked unanimous consent to pass his resolution on Wednesday in reaction to the case of Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion doctor who is on trial for performing illegal and unsafe abortions.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) objected, saying he’d prefer to pass his own resolution that condemns all illegal and unsanitary medical acts, including abortions. But Lee objected saying he didn’t have time to read the resolution before it was offered.

What a lie. Blumenthal's resolution is 219 words long. The complete text is posted below. How poor a reader is Senator Lee that he can't read that in a minute or two?

The Hill story goes on to quote Senator Lee:

"It is difficult to imagine why anyone would object to a non-binding resolution calling on Congress to investigate these alleged disturbing, horrific and illegal abortion practices committed by Kermit Gosnell and others," Lee said.

No, it isn't "difficult to understand why anyone would object" to your resolution, Senator Lee, and you know it, because you wrote it as a blatantly partisan screed, implicitly equating abortion with slavery and Jim Crow, asserting a 20-week fetal-pain threshold as established scientific fact, and essentially declaring all abortions to be un-American. Some excerpts:

...Whereas the Declaration of Independence sets forth the principle that all people are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

Whereas the dedication of the people of the United States to this principle, though at times tragically marred by institutions such as slavery and practices such as segregation and the denial of the right to vote, has summoned the people of the United States time and again to fight for human dignity and the common good;

Whereas the people of the United States believe that every human life is precious from its very beginning, and that every individual, regardless of age, health, or condition of dependency, deserves the respect and protection of society....

See? There you go -- the people of the United States do not universally believe that every human life is precious from its very beginning, at least not in the way Senator Lee and other abortion absolutists mean it (i.e., from conception).

More:

Whereas women and children in the United States deserve better than the 56,145,920 abortions that have been performed in the United States since the Supreme Court rulings in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, and Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179, in 1973; and

Whereas there is substantial medical evidence that an unborn child is capable of experiencing pain at 20 weeks after fertilization, or earlier....

Gosh, it's just a harmless, middle-of-the-road statement of the national mood, isn't it? (I left out the paragraphs and paragraphs about Gosnell.)

By contrast, here's Senator Blumenthal's resolution in its entirety, from a link at his Senate site:

Expressing the sense of the Senate that all incidents of abusive, unsanitary, or illegal health care practices should be condemned and prevented and the perpetrators should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Whereas in recent years there have been rare and tragic incidents of willful violations of law, human dignity, and standards of care across a variety of health care settings that have exposed trusting patients to death and disease, and shocked the conscience of the United States, including--

(1) a physician at the Women’s Medical Society of Philadelphia who is rightfully facing multiple criminal charges related to horrific practices;

(2) health care practitioners at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada who exposed 40,000 patients to hepatitis C through unsanitary practices;

(3) an Oklahoma dentist who exposed as many as 7,000 patients to HIV and hepatitis B and C through unsanitary practices; and

(4) a nursing director at Kern Valley nursing home in California who, for her own convenience, inappropriately medicated patients using antipsychotic drugs, resulting in the death of at least 1 patient: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That it is the sense of the Senate that all incidents of abusive, unsanitary, or illegal health care practices should be condemned and prevented and the perpetrators should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Why does Senator Lee oppose this? Is there any reason not to conclude that he's in favor of severe medical malpractice against those who've already been born?