CULTURE OF SCANDAL?

Following the recent 3, or maybe 4, scandals at the White House has got me thinking of how we tend to want to blow everything into a major, mushroom cloud producing, scandal. Or at least at this point the Republicans do. When I think back to scandal in the Bush White House it seems that only the most left wing Democrats (Dennis Kucinich,etc) wanted to bring Bush down. And the Bush scandals seem far worse than what we are dealing with with Obama. I mean the rush to the Iraq war with faulty intelligence, Cheney & Haliburton.

So what I am trying to get at is that again we see that Republicans in general are the more demagogic of the two parties. They are very adept at blowing scandals out of proportion and using this to further their agenda, or in this case quash Obama's agenda.

The IRS "scandal" is obviously a small one. No, the IRS agents should not have broken the law by using conservative group by-words to search for applications for tax exemption to scrutinize. But there have been an explosion of these applications recently and we know this coincided with the rise of the Tea Party Bunch and all their splinter groups. Its a good way for people to make money for their basically political group, but save tax by masquerading as a group for the social good.

Benghazi is a tragedy that deserves to be examined and fixed but not exploited. We have a lot of fronts to cover and keep safe in our battle with international Jihadist terror. All diplomatic personnel are aware that they may be in some danger in many of these countries. Its easy to play should-a, could-a, would-a after the fact. I think this one will die down except in the committee headed by Rep Darrell Issa, or as I prefer to call him, the 450 million dollar showboat.

The most disturbing to me is the Attorney General secretly surveilling the Associated Press. I guess they have this power but are supposed to alert the party beforehand. I know it is imperative that they find out who was leaking information from the White House, but freedom of the press needs to be protected at all costs. However, I hardly see this as a Watergate-esque scandal. Of course "gate" is added to the end of any scandal to try to add that extra "umph" that the Republicans want.,

I think we as liberals have to take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves, and gun for the next election, in 2014. If we can take back the house, or even gain seats, this may be the message the conservative side needs to get. Americans want substantive issues tackles. Hey, remember the sequestration? How about tax reform and immigration reform?  Remember those. To our advantage, Republicans seem to want to make the same mistakes of over reaching that they have done before. Their right wing sabotaged them in the last election by pushing unacceptable candidates. Now they are pushing an unacceptable agenda of scandal mongering. Not to be cynical, but it is important to capitalize on there weakness..
-Louwis