2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumPriebus Has 'Good Feeling' Issa Will Have 'Quite a Summer' Investigating Obama
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Tuesday promised that "this is just the beginning" of Republicans in Congress investigating President Barack Obama.
Priebus explained to Fox News host Gretchen Carlson that Republicans like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) would continue their probes into scandals involving Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice's targeting of reporters until witness came clean about how the president was involved.
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/priebus-has-good-feeling-issa-will-have-quit
creon
(1,183 posts)Issa needs to carry on
Unto the crack of doom.
NCLefty
(3,678 posts)He was surely targeted for bullying countless times on the school bus as a child. Poor fella's trying to work out an awful lot of issues...
Happyhippychick
(8,379 posts)Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)... with nonstop accusations of wrong doing from the right. The press will dutifully report the accusations; months later, when the charges are proved bogus, the press will reluctantly report that, too. By the end, the voters will be sick of hearing it but will only partially blame the GOP -- the will also hold Obama responsible for opening the door to these bogus scandals.
Proud Liberal Dem
(24,412 posts)for the "scandals" that have already been talked about recently (i.e. Benghazi, IRS, AP) When will people get fed up with our elected *representatives* working so damned hard to dig up dirt on a relatively scandal-free and clean Administration, particularly while people are still struggling to find jobs, get health care, and help their children get a good education and our infrastructure is collapsing, etc.?
Cosmocat
(14,565 posts)and think he is truly brilliant, but even he and Maher, another sharp and super tough guy are folding and "giving" them a couple 'scandals."
THIS is the difference between Rs and Ds.
Rs are absolutely fucking relentless, they will scream their heads off on ANYTHING claiming it is a scandal against Ds while NEVER, NEVER, NEVER admitting any guilt despite how obvious it is they are flat wrong.
Ds ... just limp and pathetic.
vanlassie
(5,675 posts)Proud Liberal Dem
(24,412 posts)just of a different kind
Zoeisright
(8,339 posts)can kiss my ass.
Cali_Democrat
(30,439 posts)Arkana
(24,347 posts)Unfortunately, he won't find shit, and he'll look like an ass in the process. That's the part Priebus left out.
karynnj
(59,503 posts)So far, Issa has really not shown the patience and diligence that would be needed to unearth a real scandal - even if it existed. Every investigation has been nothing other than an attempt to make headlines in the media and a splash with the far right.
The problem with all those scandals is that EVEN accepting what the right wing says happened, they are nowhere near as compelling as the right wing says.
Here goes my attempt to state the WORST thing that could be proven if the right wing is correct.
1) Benghazi - It is interesting that the focus of his supoena is all about the talking points. Note this means that they are really conceding the real possible issues. (The real issues are that there was negligence in responding (an issue already debunked) , and that security in these times should be increased ( already conceded by the Obama administration which quickly had a serious high level investigation whose recommendations they accepted - and now are working to get through Congress. That and the fact that the Republicans cut the funding defuses this issue).
So, what is the worst conclusion - that the State Department wanted the statements to the press to not expose any weaknesses here or elsewhere. This is easily cast as prudent until the full truth was known and until anyone still in danger was moved (the latter is speculation). Is there a law that requires FULL, complete answers on issues of national security on TV shows? Even if you concede that the fact that this was terrorism was minimized (because the President said it was an "act of terror" rather than "terrorism" , is acting political when speaking of national security issues against the law? If that was the case, the Democrats had a better case in 2004, where after the election even Tom Ridge conceded that the terror codes often rose when Kerry was getting any traction. The most notable time was the morning after the Democratic convention when they rose and a terror plot that supposedly targeted a few NYC buildings was announced - the threat was SO real that Jenna and Laura Bush did not cancel a fund raiser the next week at one of them. It was later found to have been a few years old and already debunked.)
2) The IRS - Here the fact that the head of the IRS was a Bush appointee and everyone below him (I think) career public servants makes it hard to see this as really political. The fact that they were mostly tea party groups is likely a function of when it happened. If you look at all the new (political) groups forming applying for that designation that year, I would suspect that the lions' share of them were tea party groups. It seems highly likely that the entire story might be that there was a huge surge of applications and they tried to separate out the political from the non-political. There have already been some articles that point to a small number of left wing groups getting the same questionnaire.
If this reduces to demanding more info from political groups than from the obviously non-political groups that the designation was really meant for, it actually sounds like it was not a bad idea. The problem is that Congress should have been told and the list of key words that put an organization on the list should have been passed through Congress.
Additionally, it might not be bad for Democrats to argue that ANY group that spends more than x% on politics - and that would need to be specified (which is not easy). I also think Democrats need to make it clear that this was not teh IRS targeting individuals at political odds with the President - a la Nixon. (OT - Isn't it interesting how to the right, Nixon is seen as evil - as long as they want to say Obama is like him?) It was looking at the status of groups.
3) Other than the Rand Paul libertarians, I doubt the issue of looking for how national security information was leaked is likely not something that will capture the attention of the public.