The Commentariat -- May 14, 2013

"There's No There There." Michael Shear & Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "President Obama, facing re-energized Republican adversaries and new questions about the administration's conduct, on Monday dismissed a furor over the handling of last year's attacks in Benghazi, Libya, as a political 'sideshow' but joined a bipartisan chorus of outrage over disclosures that the Internal Revenue Service had singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny.... Mr. Obama called the I.R.S. reports 'outrageous' and 'contrary to our traditions,' adding his voice to those of Republicans and isolating the agency as the House scheduled a hearing on Friday in what is likely to be an extensive Congressional review of the agency's actions." ...

... Here's the President's joint press conference -- in which he made the remarks about the controversies -- with U.K. PM David Cameron:

... Mark Landler of the New York Times: "President Obama, his troubles piling up in Washington, traveled to Manhattan for a busy evening of fundraising for the Democratic Party, telling audiences that progress was being stymied by a persistent wave of 'hyper-partisanship' in the Capitol." ...

... MEANWHILE, chief sideshow barker Darrell Issa keeps plugging along, Kathleen Hennessey of the Los Angeles Times reports. ...

... Alex Seitz-Wald of Salon profiles Victoria Nuland, the former Cheney aide at the center of the fake talking points scandal. ...

... Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post: "... by the ABC account, every draft of the talking points says that the attacks 'were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault....' That's what Rice said. It might have been wrong, but it was the intelligence assessment at the time. So what, exactly, is the scandal?" ...

... Joan Walsh of Salon: "Just like in the '90s, the American people may see through the GOP's effort to undermine Clinton and Obama. But just like in the '90s, they're not getting enough help sorting fact from fiction from Beltway reporters who can't resist a good scandal, even if it's fake." ...

... FreakOut Nation: "There are 16 issues which Republicans have brought up during various times suggesting they are worthy of impeaching President Obama -- including the fact he exists (seriously), and since we've observed their wrath over super important things such as the 'real birth certificate' ... While they're investigating the attack in Benghazi, in which 6 hearings have already been held with no conclusion to their favor, [maybe Issa should investigate this:] ... President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001, according to a study released by two nonprofit journalism groups...." Thanks to Jeanne B. for the link. ...

... Juliet Eilperin & Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post: "Internal Revenue Service officials in Washington and at least two other offices were involved with investigating conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, making clear that the effort reached well beyond the branch in Cincinnati that was initially blamed, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.... The White House is legally prohibited from contacting the IRS about a tax matter, under a prohibition adopted after the Watergate scandal. And although it can contact the Treasury Department about tax issues, neither Treasury nor the IRS can disclose specific taxpayer information. The IRS can release information only about a petition for tax-exempt status once it has been approved." ...

... Kim Barker & Justin Elliott of ProPublica: "The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year." ...

... New York Times Editors: "... this is a far cry from President Richard Nixon’s interest in intimidating his political enemies through selective audits of personal tax records. There is no evidence President Obama knew about the audits by the I.R.S. The groups involved were seeking not to pay taxes on large amounts of income by claiming that they promote social welfare. No one has an automatic right to this tax exemption; those seeking one should expect close scrutiny from the government to ensure it is not evading taxes. For many years, however, the I.R.S. hasn't provided it. Democratic groups were the first ones to start abusing their social-welfare tax status in the 2004 election; the Republicans followed suit and became the biggest players in this field beginning in 2008. Far bigger than any Tea Party group, Crossroads GPS nakedly violated the tax code by spending tens of millions on behalf of Republican candidates, claiming it wasn't political because it ran only 'issue ads.' It never lost its tax exemption." ...

... Alec MacGillis of The New Republic has a good take on the IRS scandalette. ...

... This straight news report by Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times backs of MacGillis's critique: "The I.R.S. has done little to regulate a flood of political spending by larger groups -- like Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies co-founded by [Karl] Rove, and Priorities USA, with close ties to President Obama -- as well as Republican leaders in Congress and other elected officials. And an agency that is supposed to stay as far away from partisan politics as possible has been left in charge -- almost by accident -- of regulating a huge amount of election spending." ...

... Jonathan Bernstein, in the Washington Post: "Want a real Washington scandal -- one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans...: Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are -- deliberately, in several cases -- preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws."

Mark Sherman of the AP: "The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a 'massive and unprecedented intrusion' into how news organizations gather the news.... In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies." ...

... Justin Sink of The Hill: "The White House on Monday distanced President Obama from the Department of Justice's seizure of Associated Press telephone records. 'Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the AP,' White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement." ...

... Kevin Drum: "The government has been obtaining phone records like this for over a decade now, and it's been keeping their requests secret that entire time. Until now, the press has showed only sporadic interest in this. But not anymore. I expect media interest in terror-related pen register warrants to show a healthy spike this week. That could be a good thing. It's just too bad that it took monitoring of journalists to get journalists fired up about this."

Obama 2.Bro. Al Kamen of the Washington Post: "Commerce Department general counsel Cameron Kerry -- brother of Secretary of State John Kerry -- has been named acting secretary of Commerce when the outgoing acting secretary, Rebecca Blank, leaves at the end of this month. This may be the first time ever -- we're checking -- that two brothers served in the Cabinet at the same time.... Given the much-anticipated and likely lengthy Senate tussle over the nomination of Penny Pritzker to be Commerce secretary, Cam Kerry may be 'acting' for quite some time."

Local News

"Today, Love Wins." Rachel Stassen-Berger of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "With deafening cheers and overwhelming emotion, the Minnesota Senate voted 37-30 to legalize same-sex marriage.... The vote, on the heels of a vote last week in the House, brings to a close a decade of debate over marriage.... The measure next moves to Gov. Mark Dayton, who will welcome it with his signature in a celebratory ceremony at 5 p.m. Tuesday on the south steps of the Capitol."

More Evidence the Death Penalty Is a Travesty. Lizette Alvarez of the New York Times: "Seven years after he was sentenced to death in the fatal stabbings of two Florida women, Clemente Javier Aguirre appeared in a Seminole County courtroom on Monday to present DNA evidence that could win him a new trial."

News Ledes

ABC News: "Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell agreed today to serve two life sentences and waive his right to an appeal in order to avoid the possibility of being condemned to death. Gosnell was convicted of first degree murder on Monday in the deaths of three babies who were born live and then killed by severing their spinal chords with scissors."

New York Times: "Billie Sol Estes, a fast-talking Texas swindler who made millions, went to prison and captivated America for years with mind-boggling agricultural scams, payoffs to politicians and bizarre tales of covered-up killings and White House conspiracies, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Granbury, Tex. He was 88."

New York Times: "... American ... Ryan C. Fogle, who had been officially posted in Russia as the third secretary of the political department of the United States Embassy, was ordered to leave the country by the Russian government, which officially declared him 'persona non grata.'" Russia accused him of being a CIA spy whose mission was to recruit a Russian security official.

The Commentariat -- May 13, 2013

Robert Pear of the New York Times: "Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has solicited sizable donations from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and H&R Block, the tax preparation service, as part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to ensure the success of President Obama's health care law, administration officials said Sunday, even as a leading Senate Republican raised questions about the legality of her efforts.... The senior Republican on the Senate health committee, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, said the fund-raising 'may be illegal.' He likened it to efforts by the Reagan administration to raise money for rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, after Congress had restricted the use of federal money.... Administration officials said private donations were needed because Congress had provided much less money than Mr. Obama requested to publicize the new law and get people enrolled in health plans subsidized by the government." CW: yes, educating Americans about affordable health coverage is just like funneling money to rebels fighting another sovereign nation.

Joseph Stiglitz, in the New York Times: "America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities.... Total student debt, around $1 trillion, surpassed total credit-card debt last year.... merica — home of the land-grant university, the G.I. Bill and world-class public universities from California to Michigan to Texas — has fallen from the top in terms of university education. With strangling student debt, we are likely to fall further. What economists call “human capital” — investing in people — is a key to long-term growth." ...

... Here's One Reason for the High Cost of Higher Ed. Tamar Lewin of the New York Times: "... the median total compensation for the presidents of public research universities was $441,392, up 4.7 percent from the previous year’s $421,395. The median base salary, $373,800, was up 2 percent from $366,519 the previous year." The highest paid of all last year (largely because of his plum severance deal): "Graham B. Spanier, the president of Pennsylvania State University, who was forced out in November 2011 over his handling of a child sex abuse scandal involving a football coach." Creep.

Jonathan Weisman & Matthew Wald of the New York Times: Republicans plan to turn up the outrage machine over disclosures that some IRS personnel were targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. Also, looks as if the IRS (run, don't forget, by a Dubya appointee) didn't quite come clean, providing more material for the outrage machine. ...

... John McKinnon & Siobahn Hughes of the Wall Street Journal have more details on the extent of the IRS's targeting practices & what IRS honchos knew & when they knew it. ...

... Kevin Drum: "... even if, as seems likely, this whole thing turns out to have been mostly a misguided scheme cooked up by some too-clever IRS drones, it doesn't matter. Conservatives are right to be outraged and right to demand a full investigation.... What's really unfortunate about all this is that ... more than likely, though, Congress will step in to neuter them completely on this score, and the current Wild West character of 501(c)4 fundraising will continue unabated."

Peter Baker of the New York Times: Darrell Issa will be subpoenaing (a) any person who can spell Benghazi, (b) any person who cannot spell Benghazi but know it is not the name of a tiny dog. Also, Issa got into an on-air fight with former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering -- a Bush Pere appointee. CW: consider the foregoing a paraphrase. ...

... Kevin Liptak of CNN: Thomas Pickering, "the leader of a panel charged with reviewing September’s attack in Benghazi, Libya, said Sunday that criticism of his report was unfounded and did not accurately reflect how his review was carried out." ...

... Jake Miller of CBS News: "Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, [a Republican,] forcefully defended the Obama administration on Sunday against charges that it did not do enough to prevent the tragedy in Benghazi, telling CBS' 'Face the Nation' that some critics of the administration have a 'cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces.'" With video. ...

... Igor Volsky of Think Progress: "Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) tore into Fox News’ Chris Wallace and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) for obsessing over the talking points U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice used when talking to the media in the days following the attack in Benghazi, Libya rather than focusing on identifying the perpetrators of the killings." With video.

... Jordan Chariton of Mediate: John McCain isn't ready to impeach President Obama over Benghazi, but he'd like to see the House pre-emptively impeach Hillary Clinton. Or something. With video. ...

... Michael Tomasky of Newsweek expects Congressional Republicans to try to impeach President Obama over Benghazi. ...

"SIX POINT THREE TRILLION DOLLARS!" Bill Keller: the Heritage Foundation's anti-immigration report "is an unusually stark sign of the transformation of Washington’s think tank culture into a more partisan archipelago of propaganda factories."

Alan Cowell of the New York Times: "A potentially toxic clamor for Britain to consider quitting the European Union appeared to be spreading within the dominant Conservative Party on Monday, even as its leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, prepared to meet with President Obama in Washington as an advocate of closer trade ties between the United States and the European bloc."

"E Pluribus Me." Tim Egan: Ted Cruz may consider himself to be the smartest guy in the room -- no matter what the room -- but his positions are illogical & inconsistent. "Senator Cruz probably doesn’t mind the title that’s been hung on him — most hated man in the Senate. I suspect he also relishes being called a 'wacko bird' (John McCain’s term) because, for now, it’s the avian wing that dominates his party."

Judd Legum of Think Progress: "Two major tech leaders have resigned from Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group, FWD.us, in protest of the organization’s controversial decision to bankroll ads supporting Keystone XL and drilling in the Arctic National Refuge.... The strategy has alienated Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors and David Sacks, the founder of Yammer."

Speaking Ill of the Dead

Maureen Dowd is right about this much:

... in this hottest of hot spots, the State Department’s minimum security requirements were not met, requests for more security were rejected, and contingency plans were not drawn up, despite the portentous date of 9/11 and cascading warnings from the C.I.A., which had more personnel in Benghazi than State did and vetted the feckless Libyan Praetorian Guard. When the Pentagon called an elite Special Forces team three hours into the attack, it was training in Croatia — decidedly not a hot spot.

Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Chris Stevens were rushing to make the flimsy Benghazi post permanent as a sign of good faith with Libyans, even as it sat ringed by enemies.

The hierarchies at State and Defense had a plodding response, failing to make any superhuman effort as the siege waxed and waned over eight hours.

This isn't new or newsy. In December,

an outside accountability review board has released its report on the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.... Former Ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired the outside accountability review board.... Overall, the report found that, 'Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies resulted in a security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.' ...

In a letter that accompanied the full report, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called it 'a clear-eyed look at serious, systemic challenges that we have already begun to fix.' She said she accepted all of the recommendations. The report didn't single out specific individuals, but three State Department officials ... resigned....

(The unclassified version of the report is here.)

Dowd goes on to theorize about the Benghazi talking points, and here too her suppositions may be partially right:

In the midst of a re-election campaign, Obama aides wanted to promote the mythology that the president who killed Osama was vanquishing terror. So they deemed it problematic to mention any possible Qaeda involvement in the Benghazi attack.

Looking ahead to 2016, Hillaryland needed to shore up the mythology that Clinton was a stellar secretary of state. Prepared talking points about the attack included mentions of Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan militant group, but the State Department got those references struck.

But Dowd undercuts her own hypothesis when she reveals that the State Department staff who "got those references struck" was "Victoria Nuland, a former Cheney aide." Raise your hand if you think a former Cheney aide was totally into bolstering Hillary Clinton's presidential creds. No, I don't think Nuland was a Cheney mole determined to undermine Hillary's future political career. But Nuland's first inclination, having worked on the dark side, would certainly be toward more opacity, not less.

However, since we're looking for motivations, we should acknowledge that the talking points are a subject of discussion whose sole purpose is political. They were first an issue Fox and Friends raised to undermine President Obama's chance for re-election in 2012. Mitt Romney's debate meltdown put an end to that. (And thanks again, Candy Crowley.) So now, the National Republicans Congressional Committee and Karl Rove are moving on dot org to 2016:

Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg News explains, at least in part, why Darrell Issa, et al., have been so enamored of Susan Rice's talking points:

Unlike Whitewater, a convoluted, shady-sounding and quite possibly greasy real-estate investment deal, Benghazi consists of a discrete event, a brief aftermath and not much of a paper trail. After all, how much paper is produced in the course of a frantic night of violence in a faraway place?

So paper production is the first order of business. We will need lots and lots of documents citing multiple sources whose large and small discrepancies in memory, perspective and testimony can subsequently be magnified, scrutinized and exploded into controversies.

What's a scandal without a paper trail? A Congressional scandalmonger needs something to subpoena, preferably something that the executive branch can claim is privileged or too classified for the likes of Darrell Issa to view. Hooray! More wrangling with the administration. More facetime on Fox!

Forget all that. The real question goes back to the beginning: WTF was Ambassador Chris Stevens doing at an unsecured consulate in Benghazi -- "this hottest of hot spots" -- on September 11? It suits no one's political purpose to lay the blame where it belongs, so Stevens is portrayed, even in the Accountability Review Board (ARB) Report, as an heroic martyr to Libyan democracy and American values.

In fact, Chris Stevens was a hotdogger who put himself, his staff and his security personnel at undue risk. He is a tragic figure only in the classical sense: he was directly reponsible for his own death and -- the deaths of three others. The ARB obliquely acknowledges this: "Embassy Tripoli did not demonstrate strong and sustained advocacy with Washington for increased security for Special Mission Benghazi" and describes the facility as having an "insufficient ... security platform." The Benghazi staff consisted of

relatively inexperienced American personnel often on temporary assignments of 40 days or less.... Plans for the Ambassador's trip [to Benghazi] provided for minimal close protection security support and were not shared thoroughly with the Embassy's country team, who were not fully aware of planned movements off compound. The Ambassador did not see a direct threat of an attack of this nature....

Notice how the report employs the passive voice and substitutes "Embassy Tripoli" for "Stevens." What the Board means is that Stevens put inexperienced temps in a dangerous facility with an "insufficient security platform," then popped off to join them (or whatever) without a proper security detail and without even telling staff where he was going and what he was doing because, you know, he just didn't think anybody in an unstable Muslim country would want to kill an American ambassador on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The evidence is that Chris Stevens saw himself as a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia, with "his knowledge of Arabic, his ability to move in all sectors of the population, and his wide circle of friends, particularly in Benghazi." Well, maybe not "all sectors" and maybe his circle of friends was not quite as wide as he imagined. As the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Stevens had a primary responsibility to protect Americans in Libya. But that responsibility conflicted with his dream of a horde of enthusiastic Libyans shouting, "Ste-VENS! Ste-VENS! Ste-VENS!" He put his personal ambitions before the safety of those in his charge. Stevens -- and other Americans -- are dead only because Stevens himself was woefully irresponsible.

The real scandal is the one that dare not speak its name.

P.S. Please feel free to use the Comments section to vehemently disagree with me.