by Doug Porter
05.17.2013
Columns
The Scandal Trifecta That Isn’t
By Doug Porter
After five years of waiting and hoping, Republicans of the Tea Party persuasion have finally reached a hysterical critical mass. Here, they’re saying, is the proof of what we’ve been trying to tell the public all along—that the President of the United States is unfit for office.
Yesterday, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann hijacked a press conference with Senator Mitch McConnell that was supposed to be a pity party for some tea partiers who were allegedly targeted by the IRS, by announcing that her constituents were demanding impeachment.
As Brian Beutler at TPM noted, “You could hear the crunch of McConnell’s intestines turning to ice from across the capital.”
The mother of all these ‘scandals’, Benghazi ran into trouble yesterday as Republicans were fingered in the national news media for mischaracterizing leaking two isolated tidbits from classified emails. The unnamed ‘Congressional GOP sources’ belief they could get away with such a deception was undone by the Obama administration’s decision to release more than 100 pages of previous classified emails.
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by Doug Porter
09.06.2012
Activism
“Now, people ask me all the time how we got four surplus budgets in a row. What new ideas did we bring to Washington? I always give a one-word answer: arithmetic.”
Former President Bill Clinton took the stage at the Democratic National Convention last night and systematically dismembered the Republican Party’s memes, schemes and misrepresentations that make up the body of their work in building a case against the Obama administration and for electing the men at the top of their ticket. In a fifty minute speech that strayed significantly from the version released in advance to the press, the former chief executive effectively used all the rhetorical skills in his arsenal to argue for another four years of Democratic control of the White House.
I have plenty of reservations about Bill Clinton’s tenure as President; his role in de-regulation of the financial industry and his shortsightedness about the repercussions of NAFTA immediately come to mind. But when it comes to his ability to mount a political offensive, nobody in recent memory can top the combination of ah-shucks populism and wonk-like command of facts that was on display last night.
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