Peanuts

A lot of people are fretting about the way the president is handling the raft of scandals that have hit him this week. The fact is, Obama's scandals are peanuts compared to W's scandals, not to mention Watergate and Iran-Contra.

Benghazi: four men died because terrorists attacked an American consulate in Libya. Security wasn't up to snuff in part because the Republican-controlled House had stiffed the State Department for years, preferring to spend more money on bombs than on diplomacy. Republicans apparently got the result they were aiming for: they brought a scandal down upon Obama by getting four Americans killed by hamstringing State's budget. Release of emails leading up to the talking points show that there was confusion and disagreement between State and CIA, but no master plan from the administration.

Contrast this with 9/11: 3,000 Americans died in New York just a month after the damning "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo hit Bush's desk and was roundly ignored because he was on vacation. In seven bloody years 5,000 American soldiers died in a pointless war in Iraq, started on a pack of lies sold by Bush and the neocons, who were either duped by Iranian agents like Ahmed Chalabi, or complicit with them. Dozens of American diplomats were killed on Bush's watch in incidents nearly identical to Benghazi.

The real difference? The Bush administration was eager to instantly blame "terrorists," rather than ascertain actual responsibility and plan a response before opening their yaps.

The IRS scandal: apparently some IRS employees took shortcuts, subjecting conservative groups to more questions and longer waits based on their names. This occurred after it was painfully obvious many of these so-called "non-profit social welfare" groups were patterned after Karl Rove's organization and were just fronts for billionaire trying to get taxpayers to foot the bill for their propaganda. The most salient fact is this: no Tea Party groups were denied tax-exempt status. However, the IRS did deny a Democratic group such status.

Obama has (correctly) condemned the Cleveland office's actions and fired the interim IRS director. Maybe if Republicans had let Obama appoint a real director this wouldn't have happened. It's like they're trying to sabotage the administration by preventing them from getting properly staffed and organized.

Contrast this with the Bush administration's handling of the firing of US attorneys. Certain Bush appointees were fired by Alberto Gonzalez because they weren't working hard enough to sabotage registration of voters from certain ethnic groups. The firings eventually resulted in Gonzalez' resignation. But the Bush administration never admitted any wrongdoing.

Republicans have long used the IRS to attack their enemies, going back to at least Nixon.  During the Bush administration the IRS harassed the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a California minister for speaking against the Iraq war.

The real problem here is with the Supreme Court's fallacious Citizens United decision. None of these groups should be tax-exempt. If they are trying to influence elections they should -- be they conservative or liberal -- pay taxes and reveal all their donors. Unless we have that kind of transparency we can never be sure that foreigners aren't buying American elections -- and that's a very serious concern with guys like Sheldon Adelson's mountains of Chinese cash towering over us.

The very existence of the IRS scandal shows how monumentally naive (to be kind), monumentally stupid (to be honest), and monumentally greedy (to be cynical) the Citizens United decision was. Why greedy? One of the very first Tea Party organizations to cash in on this scam was formed by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

The only reason Benghazi gained any traction at all is that the Obama administration has been nearly scandal-free for five years. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Fox News has been trying to shock its viewers to life with Benghazi lightning, but many of the inarticulate creatures on the Fox slab don't even know what country Benghazi is in.

The IRS scandal is much juicier and fits into the scary big government anti-tax motif, so now Republicans have been saved from running out of ridiculous things to be outraged by. Huzzah! Let's celebrate by wasting another couple million dollars of Congressional man-hours to vote to repeal Obamacare for the 37th (literally) time!

Whew! It was beginning to look like they'd have to go back to birth certificates and Saul Alinsky.