By Robert Parry

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has popped up on TV recently affirming a key Republican talking point, likening the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s Benghazi talking points to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which Woodward helped make famous.

But, as he joins in hyping the GOP’s Benghazi scandal-mongering, Woodward doesn’t appear to know that new documentary evidence has transformed our understanding of Watergate and especially its tie-in to the Vietnam War – and how those documents make comparisons between Watergate and Benghazi both ludicrous and obscene.

Journalist and author Bob Woodward.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on May 17, Woodward compared the administration’s development of talking points for TV appearances by UN Ambassador Susan Rice in 2012 to Nixon’s mendacious editing of his Oval Office tapes to conceal the role of his reelection campaign in the break-in at the Democrats’ Watergate headquarters in 1972.

“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” Woodward said. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al-Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there were warnings.’”

Then, noting that four U.S. diplomatic personnel died in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, Woodward added, “I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed.”

But Woodward appears to have been relying on Republican talking points in his understanding of why Obama administration officials decided to leave out some details from Rice’s talking points, specifically a concern that divulging certain specifics would compromise the ongoing investigation to catch the Islamic terrorist believed responsible.

At the time, there also remained genuine confusion over the connection between the Benghazi attack and angry demonstrations sweeping the Middle East over an American video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, the recently released e-mails buttress then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s testimony about concerns over the possibility of harming the investigation.

By contrast, Nixon systematically reviewed tape transcripts of his Oval Office conversations to remove sections that incriminated him and his top aides in a felonious cover-up. We also now know what Nixon’s most dangerous secret was, i.e., why he hired ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to organize an espionage team in the first place.

Nixon was terrified that a missing file might surface revealing FBI wiretaps of his 1968 campaign’s sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks, a politically motivated case of obstruction that Johnson privately called “treason.”

In other words, the ultimate secret of Watergate – one that apparently still remains a mystery to Woodward – was that Nixon was terrified that the American people might learn that he had extended the Vietnam War for an additional four years to get an edge in a political campaign.

As a result of LBJ’s failed peace initiative, some 20,000 more U.S. soldiers died along with an estimated one million Vietnamese and countless more dead in Cambodia. The war also tore apart America’s political and social fabric.

So, to put the flap over the Benghazi talking points in the same sentence with Nixon’s Watergate crimes suggests either a complete lack of proportionality or some self-serving agenda. It’s possible that Woodward doesn’t want to acknowledge the new evidence because it would show that he missed the most important element of a scandal that made his career.

Recognition of the fuller Watergate scandal also would shatter a favorite saying of Official Washington, “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” That surely wouldn’t be true if the Watergate scandal were understood to encompass Nixon’s treacherous scheme to block Johnson’s Vietnam peace deal.

Memoirs and Documents

We now know based on memoirs of principals and documents available at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, that in 1969, Johnson ordered his national security aide, Walt Rostow, to remove the wiretap file on Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage from the White House and that Nixon later learned of the file’s existence from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

However, Nixon’s senior advisers, Henry Kissinger and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, were unable to locate the missing file, not realizing that it was in Rostow’s personal possession. Nixon’s concern about the incriminating wiretaps grew into a panic after June 13, 1971, when the New York Times began publishing the top-secret Pentagon Papers, which detailed the mostly Democratic lies that had drawn the United States into the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967.

As those stories dominated the front pages of newspapers across the nation and the world, Nixon realized something that few others knew, that there was a sequel that was arguably even more scandalous, a file containing evidence of his campaign’s successful sabotage of Johnson’s peace talks, which could have negotiated an end to the war in 1968.

As the Pentagon Papers dominated the news, Nixon summoned Kissinger and Haldeman into the Oval Office again on June 17, 1971, and ordered them to redouble their efforts to locate the missing file. Nixon’s panic is captured on an Oval Office tape that was made public decades ago but not fully understood.

“Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman about Johnson’s file. “I’ve asked for it. You said you didn’t have it.”

Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”

Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”

Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”

Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”

Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file on it.”

Nixon: “Where?”

Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a file on it and it’s at Brookings.”

Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”

Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”

Nixon: “I want it implemented. … Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need to –“

Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”

Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t know for sure that we don’t have them around.”

But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he had ordered Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.

On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.

“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. … Just go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”

Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”

Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.”

For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place. Also unclear to historians was the full significance of the missing file. They knew that it had a connection to Johnson’s peace initiative in October 1968 but they assumed, mistakenly, that it was a file containing policy papers, not wiretap evidence.

The ‘X’ Envelope

The missing link to the story was filed away at the LBJ Library, where Rostow eventually deposited what he labeled “The ‘X’ Envelope.” Rostow transferred the file to the library after Johnson’s death in 1973 but with instructions that it not be opened for 50 years. Library officials eventually overrode Rostow’s mandate but not until 1994 when the envelope was opened and declassification of its contents began.

But the two-decade delay caused serious damage to the historical record because, in the interim, a distorted narrative of the Watergate scandal had taken shape and solidified. Not knowing the contents of the missing file – the one that Nixon thought might be at Brookings – led Woodward and other Watergate reporters to concentrate on the cover-up, not the underlying crime.

Because of that mistaken focus, an entire generation of journalists cut their teeth saying, “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” There also grew an animosity toward evidence suggesting that Republicans would go behind the back of a Democratic president to undermine an important foreign policy initiative like, say, trying to end the Vietnam War. Somehow disclosing such facts was deemed not “good for the country.”

So, my discovery of the missing piece of the Watergate mosaic in 2012 was unwelcome news in many quarters, easier to ignore than to explain. However, the false narrative of Watergate is not old news; it has become a current reference point for Republican efforts to undermine another Democratic president on a foreign policy incident.

Because of the lack of proportionality – made possible by the distorted Watergate narrative – Sen. John McCain and other leading Republicans can breezily call the Benghazi story “worse” than Watergate. Then, by recycling some bad history, Bob Woodward contributes to the problem. [For details on Rostow’s “X Envelope,” see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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It turns out there was, in fact, a cover-up surrounding the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. But it’s not what you think.

Meanwhile, the inquisition continues. Late last week, Republican chairmen from five separate House committees met in private with speaker and hilarious crier John Boehner to discuss the party’s investigative strategy on Benghazi. Five committees. Five chairmen. Each is ensconced in an investigation of the administration’s response to the attack, obviously desperate to uncover the Benghazi-Gate conspiracy and cover-up that several other investigations apparently missed.

Crazy Caucus member Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said on Friday, “The Obama administration’s cover-up of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack surpasses Watergate.” No one really knows what the cover-up is all about, least of all the Republicans who, I think, just like to say “cover-up.” (I do not think it means what you think it means.)

On the same day as King’s remarks, Watergate reporter and apparent senile-dementia sufferer Bob Woodward compared the edited Benghazi talking points with the edited White House tapes during the Watergate investigation. Throughout the wingnutosphere, the chant continues: “Obama lied. People died.” I’m still not sure they understand how the line is supposed to work since no one is really saying Obama lied before Benghazi about Benghazi. The line is about causality and it’s — ah, hell, never mind. Anyone who repeats that line is an idiot, full stop.

As for King, Woodward and the Republicans, they clearly didn’t watch CBS News the night before — last Thursday evening — when Major Garrett, a former Fox News reporter by the way, broke the news that Republicans had leaked the summaries of the CIA/State Department emails published by ABC News. Whoa, wait. What? So not only did ABC News and Jonathan Karl (who claimed his own report “rocked the political world“) mislead the nation about whether he actually had copies of the emails — he didn’t, just summaries provided by an unnamed source — we now know that it was the congressional Republicans who leaked selectively edited versions of the emails to ABC News.

Among other details, Garrett reported:

Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: “We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don’t want to undermine the FBI investigation.”

But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department. [...]

Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland.

Right off the bat, I have to echo what Chez Pazienza wrote on Friday: CBS News and Major Garrett should be applauded for being so explicit about the deceptive emails and how the Republicans were behind it all. Secondly and more importantly, I can’t underscore enough: this is an absolutely remarkable turn of events in the so-called Benghazi scandal.

Republican members of Congress endeavored to indict the Obama administration in the court of public opinion by releasing deliberately misleading versions of the emails via an obvious exploitation of the weak journalistic standards of Jon Karl and ABC News. This is the only substantive “bombshell” and “cover-up” in the Benghazi aftermath: the Republican plot to cover up how the administration and CIA performed during and immediately following the September 11 attack. They conspired with ABC News to deceive the public with what can only be described as a cynical attempt to score political points on the backs of four dead American officials.

It’s not the first time the Republicans have marketed in deceptively edited material. The entire Republican National Convention was constructed around a theme, “We Built That,” which was drawn from a selectively and deceptively edited video of the president talking about small businesses. As I’m sure you recall, the president was remarking that small businesses didn’t build the surrounding roads and infrastructure. But the Republicans didn’t include that distinction and made it seem as if the president said that business owners didn’t build their own businesses. They also used selectively edited videos provided by professional clown-wrangler Andrew Breitbart and flimflam artist James O’Keefe as convenient yet artificial excuses to destroy ACORN and de-fund Planned Parenthood.

But this is actually worse because it’s not just selectively edited — the Republicans literally added words that weren’t in the emails, such as the addition of “State Department” noted above. To repeat: they added new and false content to the emails and claimed that administration officials like Victoria Nuland wrote things they actually hadn’t written.

In lieu of ideas and policy substance, this is what they do now. The Republicans, more than anyone else, are genetically tied to the dirty tricks and “ratfucking” of the Nixon era, and it’s clearly continuing today. It was popularized with Nixon’s Plumbers and the tradition has been perpetuated and enhanced by Lee Atwater under Reagan and Bush 41, and Karl Rove under Bush 43 who gave us, among other things, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame for no other reason other than political retribution.

So the irony here is that the leaks of erroneous email by congressional Republicans is more reminiscent of Watergate than anything else pertaining to Benghazi.

We should demand to know who lied about the content of the emails and why Jon Karl was so willing to not only accept it as fact but why he didn’t make it clear in his report for ABC News that the emails had been summarized by a Republican (or several Republicans) on the Hill. Who leaked the edited content of the emails, and who altered the key language as a means of fabricating a cover-up? I want answers. I also want to know how one of the two major political parties in this country can repeatedly get away with this treachery and still be taken seriously in the press and by voters. They clearly don’t deserve it.

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One of the most inexcusable problems with the modern press is that it collectively allows politicians and political parties who traffic in bullshit to do so unchecked. The whole idea of the Fourth Estate, the reason it’s specifically protected within the Constitution, is that it’s supposed to stand as a bulwark against leaders who would ostensibly lie their asses off to our faces if they could. These days, they can — and they know they can — because the media that’s supposed to protect us spend most of their time sleeping the day away under the guise of being fair and impartial. We see this constantly, most obviously whenever a news outlet simply parrots each side of the political debate rather than dissecting what’s being said to find out who the hell is telling the truth and who’s entirely full of shit.

Well, last night, as Josh Marshall over at TPM reports, something surprising and pretty impressive happened: CBS News’s Major Garrett called out the Republicans for trying to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes when it comes to the ridiculous ongoing non-story that is Benghazi. Last week, Republicans on the Hill breathlessly claimed to have found a smoking gun in their silly seven-month-long witch hunt aimed at hitting on something that would stick not only to President Obama but also to Hillary Clinton, who they know is likely going to clean their clocks in 2016. They claimed to have gotten access to a series of White House e-mails which showed that the talking points the Obama administration was going public with following the September attack had been edited and watered down in an effort to make the White House and the State Department look blameless leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Someone on the inside issued quotes to the press from these supposed e-mails and of course the political press — specifically ABC’s Jonathan Karl — being the lapdogs that they are, ran with them. The result was that, yes, the GOP looked like it was kind of right all along and the White House was hiding something.

Here’s the thing, though: The actual e-mails were released a couple of days ago, and — surprise, surprise — it turns out the Republicans had exaggerated what was in them to the point of just about creating an entirely fictional narrative. The gambit the GOP was engaging in by “leaking” the e-mails to the press was the height of political cynicism: It knew that what matters is what’s reported first, that corrections generally don’t even happen and when they do no one really pays much attention since the damage is already done. It’s impossible to un-ring the bell when you’re talking about people frothing at the mouth to believe anything negative about Barack Obama and his administration. With that in mind, the press often just stays quiet, even with the sudden uncovering of new revelations, and lets the original narrative stay in place because, well, what the hell.

Last night, though, Major Garrett reported on the information in the real White House e-mails, the information that proves that what was leaked last week — likely by a Republican staffer who’d only taken a brief look at the e-mails and was quoting them from “memory” — was mostly nonsense. The reality of what the White House was saying in the communications about Benghazi was nowhere near as damning or damaging as the right would have you believe. This should come as no surprise at all, given that these days the Republicans are the party of birth certificates, and teleprompter jokes, and straight-faced claims that Benghazi was worse than 9/11 and a non-scandal at the IRS is an impeachable offense that makes Watergate and Teapot Dome look like a pair of free tickets to a ball game provided to the local police chief, and on and on and on.

CBS did something that should be standard for any news organization, but which, let’s face it, isn’t these days. So good for Major Garrett and good for CBS. If more journalists followed their lead, the political hucksters of today’s Republican party would be forced to clean up their acts or go out of business.

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By Beverly Bandler

Appropriate questions should be asked and answered about the controversies over the IRS screening of 501-c-4 applications, the subpoenas for AP phone calls, and the Benghazi attack. Abuse of power should be checked with vigor, but hysteria should be avoided. These issues require calm and reasoned perspective. Outrage should be reserved for real scandals of which there are plenty.

However, as some commentators rush to judgment especially about the IRS “scandal,” a review of some genuine scandals – past and present – may be in order:

A real scandal is the lying to the American people by George W. Bush and his administration about non-existent WMD that led us into the illegal and immoral Iraq War (and the related scandals of torture, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan). Bush’s actions caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of horrific injuries and the destruction and destabilization of Iraq. The United States will pay for that scandal for generations, not only in money but in loss of respect.A real scandal is the complicity of Ronald Reagan in “grotesque human rights crimes including genocide in Central America, his tolerance of drug trafficking by his anticommunist clients, and his support for sophisticated propaganda operations to destroy troublesome journalists and other investigators,” as journalist Robert Parry reported after Reagan’s ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, was found guilty of genocide in an extermination campaign backed by Reagan in the 1980s.

A real scandal is the extent to which radical right-wing conservatives have managed to corrupt, to some extent, every single agency in the Executive Branch, for instance: restrictions placed on the Center for Disease Control by the National Rifle Association, the constant right-wing threats against the Environmental Protection Agency, and the latest threat of the GOP to render the National Labor Relations Board inoperative. There’s also been the ideological corruption of the Judicial Branch.

A real scandal is the magnitude of air and water pollution across the nation along with worsening threat of global warming, while government efforts to address these problems are obstructed by GOP corporatists.

A real scandal is the conservatives’ use of one “study,” the Reinhart/Rogoff report to push for an austerity budget when the “study” has now been exposed as fraudulent – and the austerity theory itself revealed to be fraudulent – while the rich get richer and millions of Americans face long-term unemployment.

A real scandal is the extent of poverty in the United States with almost half of Americans dying close to penniless, in a nation in which the top one-hundredth of one percent average some $27 million per household while the average income for the bottom 90 percent is a little over $31,000.

A real scandal is how consistently the United States lags in international measurements for education (17th in the developed world) and for health care (37th out of 191 countries). Increasingly, ignorance shapes the national discourse with many Americans who rate the Benghazi case a major scandal not even knowing where it is.

A real scandal is the deliberate misinterpretation of the Second Amendment by the Right for political purposes and to serve the firearms industry, a distortion compounded the failure of the Left and centrist politicians to challenge the falsehoods. General citizens and corporate journalists apparently don’t read history and the Constitution – or are unfamiliar with the English language.

A real scandal is the continued takeover of the United States political and economic system by the military-industrial complex and by corporations, a power grab facilitated by five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court and their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision also laid the groundwork for the current IRS “scandal” because so many right-wing groups rushed to exploit the 501-c-4 tax-exempt “social welfare” category to carry out their political agendas.

The “social welfare” category was established for civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare. In 1959, under the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the meaning of this section was changed dramatically when the IRS decided the word “exclusively” could, in effect, be read as “primarily.”

“For 54 years, the IRS has gotten away with the crime of changing the word ‘exclusively’ to ‘primarily,” said Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word Monday. “The IRS took a hard, clear word like ‘exclusively’ and changed it into a soft word ’primarily’ and then left it to the IRS agents to determine if your organization was primarily concerned with the promotion of social welfare.”

Thus, when the Supreme Court issued Citizens United in 2010 — prompting a flood of new 501-c-4 applications — some IRS bureaucrats sought ways to detect which of the applicants were likely exploiting the loophole. That led to the controversial use of word searches that were viewed as targeting Tea Party groups.

“The IRS does need some kind of test that helps them weed out political organizations attempting to register as tax-exempt 501(c)4 social welfare groups,” wrote Ezra Klein in the Wonkblog Monday. “But that test has to be studiously, unquestionably neutral.”

A real scandal is how the Bush administration and the Republican Party cratered the economy, giving the nation a full decade without net jobs growth and leaving behind a crippling depression. A real scandal is how the Republican Party held the debt ceiling hostage in 2011 and may well try it again.

A real scandal is how the GOP has been taken over by anti-democratic, anti-rational, anti-science, neo-confederate, nihilist, obstructionist, corporatist forces – becoming a political party unlike one ever seen in U.S. history. Conservatism is one thing, crazy is another.

Former Republican Mike Lofgren describes the GOP as “less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and … more like an apocalyptic cult,” one that is “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and ardently opposed to the established social and economic policy regime.”

It is also a party of liars and one ruthlessly determined to destroy a president because he’s a Democrat – along with the Democratic Party – to impose an authoritarian, neo-fascist regime on the United States.

A real scandal is how the right-wing propaganda juggernaut has manipulated the corporate media and exploited American naïveté, lack of information and fear, and how the listless Left with its “learned helplessness” has let right-wing extremists get away with it by failing to “step up to the plate” with an effective investment in public outreach.

Below, I have provided a list of links related to the IRS story. I don’t pretend to have them all, but have tried to provide a decent selection. ThinkProgress and Mother Jones are particularly informative and rational as usual. I hope they are helpful to you.

Oh, by the way, the Congressional Budget Office reports that the deficit “crisis” is solved for the next ten years. Now there’s a story.

Beverly Bandler’s public affairs career spans some 40 years. Her credentials include serving as president of the state-level League of Women Voters of the Virgin Islands and extensive public education efforts in the Washington, D.C. area for 16 years. She writes from Mexico.

Beckel, Michael. “IRS Employees Back Obama. Democrats.” The Center for Public Integrity, 2013-05-15.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-public-integrity/irs-employees-back-obama_b_3278655.html
Bernstein, Jared. “Blame Citizens United for the IRS scandal. The real outrage is why these political groups have tax-exempt status in the first place. Salon, 2013-05-15. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/blame_citizens_united_for_the_irs_scandal_partner/
Bouie, Jamelle. “Is the IRS ‘Scandal’ Even a Scandal?” The IRS made a political blunder, but not a bureaucratic one. The American Prospect, 2013-05-15. http://prospect.org/article/irs-scandal-even-scandal
Dickerson, John. IRS, AP, EPA, President Obama is doing more to help the cause of conservatism than anyone since Reagan.”
2013-05-14. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/05/barack_obama_irs_and_associated_press_scandals_the_president_s_administration.html [I find Dickerson’s hyperbole ridiculous, but I’ll include it for reference.]
Figueroa, Alyssa. WATCH: “Stewart Ridicules Obama for Apparent Cluelessness on Administration’s Latest Scandals.” Obama on when he learned about IRS targeting conservative groups: “I think it was on Friday.” AlterNet, 2013-05-15. http://www.alternet.org/economy/watch-stewart-ridicules-obama-apparent-cluelessness-administrations-latest-scandals
Goodman, Peter S. “The IRS Was Dead Right to Scrutinize Tea Party.” The Huffington Post, 2013-05-15. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-s-goodman/irs-tea-party_b_3280063.html
Hartmann, Thom. “The Real IRS Scandal.” Campaign for America’s Future, 2013-05-15. http://blog.ourfuture.org/20130515/the-real-irs-scandal?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-real-irs-scandal
Klein, Ezra. “The IRS report: Insubordination and incompetence, but not much of a conspiracy.” Washington Post, 2013-05-14. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/the-irs-report-insubordination-and-incompetence-but-not-much-of-a-conspiracy/
_______ “CBO says deficit problem is solved for the next ten years.” Washington Post, 2013-05-14. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/cbo-says-deficit-problem-is-solved-for-the-next-10-years/
Kroll, Andy. “5 Things You Need to Know in the Inspector General’s IRS Tea Party Scandal Report.” How and why IRS staffers subjected conservative nonprofits to special scrutiny. MotherJones, 2012-05-15. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/irs-tea-party-ig-report-congress
_______“Ex-IRS Director: Tea Party Groups Deserved Scrutiny, But IRS Bungled the Job.” Mother Jones, 2013-05-15. http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/05/irs-director-marcus-owens-tea-party-scandal
_______“The IRS Tea Party Scandal, Explained.” It’s Washington’s new outrage. What exactly happened and who is responsible?MotherJones, 2013-05-14. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/05/irs-tea-party-scandal-congress-nonprofit-obama
Maddow, Rachel. VIDEO. IRS “scandal.” Rachel Maddow & Dan Rather discuss. 2013-05-15. http://americablog.com/2013/05/rachel-maddow-irs-scandal-dan-rather-video.html
Matthews, Dylan. “Everything you need to know about the IRS scandal in one FAQ.” Washington Post, 2012-05-14.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/14/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-irs-scandal-in-one-faq/
Nuzzi, Olivia. “Joe Scarborough and Other Republicans’ Complete Hypocrisy on the IRS and Political Speech.” ‘Morning Joe’ once demanded IRS investigate NAACP. AlterNet, 2013-05-15. http://www.alternet.org/joe-scarborough-and-other-republicans-complete-hypocrisy-irs-and-political-speech
Palmer, Brian. “Taxing One’s Enemies: A brief history of scandals at the IRS.” Slate, 2013-05-14. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2013/05/irs_targeting_the_tea_party_a_history_of_tax_agency_scandals.html
Parry, Robert. “The Right’s ‘Scandal’ Funhouse Mirror.” ConsortiumNews, 2013-05-14. http://consortiumnews.com/2013/05/14/the-rights-scandal-funhouse-mirror/
Rayfield, Jillian. “Holder: IRS probe to look at possible civil rights violations, false statements .” Salon, 2013-05-15. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/holder_irs_probe_to_look_at_possible_civil_rights_violations_false_statements
_______ IRS: Two “rogue” employees targeted the Tea Party. Acting IRS chief Steven Miller reportedly blamed two “overly aggressive” employees for the reviews. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/irs_two_rogue_employees_targeted_the_tea_party/
Rich, Frank. Frank Rich on the National Circus: “The IRS, Benghazi, and the Republicans Who Cried Wolf.” New York Magazine, 2013-05-13. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/frank-rich-gop-finds-a-new-watergate.html
Rosenfeld, Steven. “The Real Scandal: Official Washington Goes Nuts Over IRS Doing Its Job.” Voter intimidation groups say they were intimidated by the IRS. AlterNet, 2013-05-14. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/real-scandal-official-washington-goes-nuts-over-irs-doing-its-job
Seitz-Wald, Alex. “When the IRS targeted liberals.” Under George W. Bush, it went after the NAACP, Greenpeace, and even a liberal church. Salon, 2013-05-14. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/when_the_irs_targeted_liberals/
Sirota, David. “Stop holding Democrats to a different standard.” The recent IRS flap shows an obvious double standard in Washington’s reactions to Bush era and Obama era misconduct. Salon, 2013-05-14. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/14/on_scandals_obama_held_to_higher_standard_than_bush/
Stein, Sam. “Obama on IRS Scandal: ‘I have No Patience’ for It.” The Huffington Post, 2013-05-13. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/obama-irs-scandal_n_3266577.html
Toobin, Jeffrey. “The Real I.R.S. Scandal.” The New Yorker, 2013-05-14. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/irs-scandal-tea-party-oversight.html
Walsh, Joan. “Meet the group the IRS actually denied: Democrats!” Although Tea Party applicants got unfair IRS scrutiny, only one known group had status revoked. They’re Democrats. Salon, 2013-05-15. http://www.salon.com/2013/05/15/meet_the_group_the_irs_actually_revoked_democrats/
Weigel, David. “Here’s the Troublesome Part of the IG Report That Rescues Top Democrats from the IRS Scandal.” Slate, 2013-05-15. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/05/15/here_s_the_troublesome_part_of_the_ig_report_that_rescues_top_democrats.html
Weisman, Jonathan and Matthew L. Wald. “I.R.S. Focus on Conservatives Gives G.O.P. An Issue to Seize On.” New York Times, 2013-05-12. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/us/politics/republicans-call-for-irs-inquiry-after-disclosure.html?gwh=03147B1C5B13A21B8DD76700F48AA2E1

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Monstrous liar Dick Cheney is at it again (spirit of america / Shutterstock.com)

Dick Cheney will rightly go down as one of the most despised figures in American political history. The ruthlessly cold neo con was one of the major architects of the Iraq War and the ‘War on Terror’, and used his power in office to do an astonishing amount of damage at home and abroad. Cheney represents cartoon character evilness – a sinister, lying bastard who would sell his own mother if it meant more power.

After his turn in office, Cheney has thankfully disappeared for the most part. But the Dark Lord has returned to offer his poisonous opinion on the so called Benghazi scandal, adding to the mounting bullshit coming from Republicans in a pathetically obvious attempt to smear Obama. Speaking with Sean Hannity via phone, Cheney told the Fox News host that he thought Benghazi was “One of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career.”

It seems Cheney may have forgotten one small event that happened on his watch (here’s a clue):

Never one for self reflection, Cheney continued, “It put the whole capability claiming the terrorist problem solved once we got Bin Laden, that Al Qaeda was over with. If they told the truth about Benghazi, that it was a terrorist attack by an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, it would destroy the confidence that was the basis of his campaign for re-election.”

Never mind the fact that there is absolutely no proof of this WHATSOEVER. As Max Read at Gawker points out after State Department memos were released:

The memos don’t make the State Department look noble, but they also show that before and throughout the revision process the top talking point across all memos was still about spontaneous protests—and that the motivation was more inter-agency cover-your-ass jockeying than protecting Obama.

So Cheney has literally pulled this out of his ass.

Not satisfied with the accusation that the Obama administration were attempting to gloss over events in Benghazi, Cheney went on to claim that the White House told direct lies to the American public about what happened. “They lied,” he went on. “They claimed it was because of a demonstration video, that they wouldn’t have to admit it was really all about their incompetence. They ignored repeated warnings from the CIA about the threat. They ignored messages from their own people on the ground that they need more security. They reduced what was already there.”

Again, if you look at the facts, this is utter horseshit. The released emails show that the CIA itself originally believed it to be a spontaneous attack. As Salon notes:

While references to terrorism were removed at the behest of the State Department, the CIA’s original draft of the talking points stated that the attack was “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.” In fact, all 12 drafts did.

It’s clear now that some people in the administration, including those on the ground, believed it was a terror attack from the get-go, but the CIA’s job is to synthesize disparate and often conflicting intelligence and make its best guess about the truth. So even if there was conflicting intelligence, the White House was correct in saying they were merely following the intelligence community’s lead, as they have maintained all along, by blaming the attack on a protest.

But no, facts will not suffice for Mr Cheney who insists on creating a totally new reality where actual evidence is disregarded in favor of whatever he wants it to be.

“The cover up included several officials up to and including President Obama and the cover up is still ongoing,” said Cheney.

So desperate to cover up the scandal that they released all the emails  to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees….

The memos released do show that there were mistakes made in regards to the events in Benghazi – there’s clear evidence that there was a lot of inter-agency back and forth between the State Department, the White House and the CIA that resulted in references to terrorism being removed from initial public briefings. But so what? As the administration learned more, it accepted the facts that it was indeed a terrorist attack and told the public so.

The truth is that some people believed it to be a terrorist attack from the get go, and some didn’t. The White House waited for the State Department and the CIA to give them a briefing to run with, and that happened to be one without reference to terrorism. And that’s about it.

Cheney running with this line of attack is particularly annoying for anyone living in the real world given the monstrous lies he told while in office. As WashingtonsBlog notes, Cheney:

• Falsely linked Iraq with 9/11 (indeed, the entire torture program was aimed at establishing such a false linkage; and Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. The former director of the CIA said Cheney oversaw American torture policies)

• Falsely claimed that spying on Americans, torture, the Patriot Act, the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war and the “war on terror” were all necessitated by 9/11 … when all of them started or were planned before 9/11

• Falsely stated that an attack such as 9/11 was unforeseeable, when Al Qaeda flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon was something which American military and intelligence services – and our allies – knew could happen

• Falsely pretended that he was out of the loop during the 9/11 attacks

• Falsely blamed others for 9/11, when Cheney was in charge of all of America’s counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11. See this Department of State announcement and this CNN article

So it’s no surprise that the liar Dick Cheney is telling lies about other people telling lies.

It’s what he does.

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A hall of mirrors. (Photo credit: ŠJů)

By Robert Parry

The modern American news media operates like a giant right-wing funhouse mirror reflecting back some large things as small and some small things as large. The Right gets to decide which items will be misshapen in which ways – and the mainstream press then reinforces the distortions.

Though not very funny, this funhouse mirror has been in operation since at least the 1980s and is now so well established that most mainstream journalists and many politicians assume the exaggerations and minimizations are the way things really are.

This funhouse effect was first noticeable during the scandals of Ronald Reagan, when it didn’t seem to matter how much evidence was compiled about his complicity in grotesque human rights crimes including genocide in Central America, his tolerance of drug trafficking by his anticommunist clients, and his support for sophisticated propaganda operations to destroy troublesome journalists and other investigators.

The Right, as it built this hall of mirrors during those years, was determined to transform Reagan’s shocking crimes into something insignificant. Meanwhile, careerists in the mainstream news media learned to behave as if these distortions were just normal, the way things should be seen. If you insisted the funhouse reflections weren’t real, you quickly became an outcast.

For instance, the New York Times’ Raymond Bonner detected politically motivated massacres in El Salvador, including the extermination of entire villages in the area of El Mozote, but the Reagan administration and its right-wing allies simply explained that there had been no massacres and that Bonner was just a biased reporter who needed to be removed, which he soon was.

You might think that a cover-up of mass murder in El Salvador – as also was occurring in nearby Guatemala – would be a big scandal, especially since President Reagan was facilitating the slaughters by providing modern equipment to the killers and by discrediting brave journalists who tried to reveal the truth. But that was not how things appeared in the funhouse mirrors of Official Washington. The troublesome reporters were just getting what they deserved.

Similarly, Reagan’s Nicaraguan Contra rebels appeared – to human rights investigators and other independent observers – to be thugs who swept through Nicaraguan towns killing peasants, torturing prisoners, raping women and engaging in a variety of practices that one might, in other circumstances, call terrorism. But reflected in the funhouse mirror, these ugly images were made to disappear, along with well-documented evidence of Contra cocaine smuggling.

Even when reality occasionally intruded on Official Washington with outside disclosures about Reagan’s White House illegally shipping weapons to the Contras (because one of the U.S. planes was shot down over Nicaragua) and about Reagan’s team paying for some of those weapons by secretly selling missiles to Iran (as revealed by a Lebanese newspaper), the Iran-Contra scandal was quickly downsized into a legalistic dispute over whether it was ever okay to lie to Congress.

Trashing Gary Webb

The mainstream Washington news media became so accustomed to the funhouse mirrors that when Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News revived the Contra-cocaine story in 1996, the big newspapers – the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times – knew exactly what to do: reshape Webb from a respected investigative journalist into a conspiracy nut.

That distortion remained in place despite a CIA inspector general’s report that not only confirmed that the Nicaraguan Contras were deeply involved in the cocaine trade but that the Reagan administration knew about the problem and systematically covered it up. But Webb lost his job at the Mercury News, could not find a decent-paying position anywhere in journalism and, in 2004, committed suicide. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Warning in Gary Webb’s Death.”]

The funhouse mirror even affects how Official Washington understands historic scandals like the two October Surprise operations – the one in 1968 when Richard Nixon’s campaign sabotaged President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks to give Nixon an edge in that tight election and the one in 1980 when Ronald Reagan’s campaign used similar tactics to frustrate President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 American hostages then held in Iran.

Again, no matter how much proof is piled up, Official Washington won’t see what’s lying there in front of it – even though the two October Surprise cases also appear to have been the starting points for the Watergate scandal for Nixon and the Iran-Contra scandal for Reagan, respectively. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rethinking Watergate/Iran-Contra” or Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]

The Right’s funhouse mirror also means that tiny or fabricated scandals implicating Democrats and progressives are turned into something huge. When Bill Clinton was in office, it was Whitewater and “Clinton’s Mysterious Deaths.” After Barack Obama took office, it was “Fast and Furious,” the Benghazi talking points and now the Internal Revenue Service asking extra questions to Tea Party groups that wanted to get tax-exempt status.

Yet, even as the Republicans insist that the IRS asking Tea Party groups some extra questions is equal to or worse than Watergate, it’s been noted that Republican voiced no such protests in 2004 when George W. Bush’s IRS – responding to Republican demands – instigated a two-year audit of the NAACP and threatened to take away the historic civil rights group’s tax-exempt status because NAACP chairman Julian Bond had criticized Bush’s Iraq War and his trampling of the Constitution.

In other words, even in parallel cases (although asking a couple of dozen extra questions isn’t nearly as intrusive or expensive as a two-year audit), the funhouse mirror makes right-wing political groups the victims of “tyranny” under President Obama while the NAACP was just getting its comeuppance under President Bush.

But the larger question is: Can a democratic Republic long survive with such systematic distortions of reality. What will happen if one side of America’s political equation – the Right – continues to possess a vast and sophisticated media apparatus, a vertically integrated structure meshing newspapers, newsmagazine and books with radio, TV and the Internet in a synergy that spreads the right-wing message and maximizes profits, while the other side – the Left – has nothing comparable, just scattered and underfunded outlets that have to fend for themselves?

Compounding this situation is the fact that the careerist mainstream media knows that there’s no risk – and a great benefit – to leap onto the Right’s “scandal” bandwagons when they roll by and there’s virtually no upside and a big downside to report on real scandals that get in the Right’s way.

There have been too many good reporters, like Raymond Bonner and Gary Webb, crushed under the wheels of the right-wing juggernaut. For average Americans, the only advice is that they must realize that they are inside a media funhouse and that the mirrors don’t reflect the real story.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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Call me a hopeless dreamer, but there ought to be a rule in politics banning anyone who caused a crisis from later bitching about the crisis. For the last four years, we’ve witnessed the Republicans, who voted for every Bush-era spending bill and irresponsible tax cut, crapping their cages over the size of the resulting deficit and debt — again, a deficit and debt that they themselves created without uttering even a shrug of protest during eight years in which a surplus transformed into a record deficit. Not a word — except to condemn the Democratic president who was unfortunate enough to inherit the chaos.

Likewise, as we observe the mayhem surrounding the dueling “scandals” of Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press phone records subpoena, the Republicans, true to form, are tripping over each other in a mad dash to scream “Impeach!” into the next nearest cable news video camera. There’s only one problem: when it comes to the IRS situation and the AP phone debacle, the Republicans created the chain-reactions that led to these scandals.

Let’s begin with the IRS scandal first.

While it looks really, really bad for one of the most feared agencies within the Democratically-controlled executive branch to have been exclusively scrutinizing conservative groups, we only need to rewind to the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Citizens United decision to figure out why all of this is going on. The conservative Roberts court not only opened the floodgates allowing unlimited and unregulated corporate money to flow into campaigns, but it also blurred the line between independent 527 political groups and non-profit social welfare groups, which are classified with the designation 501(c)(4). These social welfare groups can also apply for tax-exempt status from the IRS, a designation that used to be the strict privilege of groups that didn’t engage in political speech. But since Citizens United, it’s much more challenging to determine which social welfare groups are dealing in predominantly political speech.

So the IRS is faced with the unenviable challenge of filtering out groups that are stepping over the line and flagrantly abusing the social welfare moniker.

Now, yes, I get it. The IRS staffers shouldn’t have used exclusively right-wing search terms to weed through the applications. They should’ve broadened the criteria to include terms across the political spectrum. But without the conservative, pro-Republican movie created by the infamous Citizens United group in 2008, not to mention the conservative, Republican-affiliated Supreme Court deciding in its favor, we might not be talking about this right now. Furthermore, the Republican-created deficit and the subsequent histrionic demand for austerity led to government cut-backs, including at the IRS where, within the Exempt Organizations Division, the staff has been significantly reduced, thus increasing workloads. Toss into the mix a considerable rise in tax exempt applications and there it is: a formula for negligence. Thanks, Republicans.

On to the AP scandal.

Right off the bat, it might surprise you to learn that it was a cabal of 31 Republican senators who demanded the investigation that eventually led to the subpoena of the AP’s phone records. So there’s that.

In a broader sense, however, I can’t help but to laugh whenever I hear a Republican scream about government overreach on national security and civil liberties. For eight years, the Republicans established an infrastructure under the banner of fighting evildoers at home and abroad — an infrastructure that included a wide variety of trespasses against civil liberties.

They seized phone records from reporters without subpoenas, they spied on liberal groups, they established the usage of body scanners and heightened security measures at airports, they loudly and in some cases tearfully demanded the ability to wiretap American citizens without warrants, they passed the USA PATRIOT Act and ultimately created the modern American surveillance state. The Bush era gave us this counter-terrorism Frankenstein, and now they’re suddenly alarmed about it.

But now that they’re not longer in charge, they melodramatically collapse onto their group fainting couch every time the Justice Department or the president ventures into the same territory — or, ironically enough, whenever the president doesn’t do enough along those lines. Whatever the Obama administration does, they’re against it. And so it is with the AP phone records situation. Once again, as with the IRS scandal, the cries for investigations and even impeachment are loud and plentiful.

For example, Bush’s former attorney general Michael Mukasey described the AP phone records situation by saying, “It’s reprehensible conduct.” This is the same attorney general who took over a Justice Department that had seized phone records from four journalists — without subpoenas — without even flinching. Mukasey was also directly involved with warrantless wiretapping of Americans citizens. And when it appeared as if Congress might pass legislation preventing this egregious activity from continuing, Mukasey literally burst into tears during a speech in which he demanded the power to continue the eavesdropping program or else there would surely be another 9/11. I’m not making that up.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that the post-9/11 fear-mongering and massively exaggerated counter-terrorism hysteria manufactured an atmosphere of capitulation and resignation to flagrant government overreach and violations of privacy and personal dignity.

And who’s to blame for the fear-mongering? People like Matt Drudge, of course, who aided in the effort to scare the crapola out of us about the so-called “terrorist threat” and yet ran a screamer headline on his front page in which he cleverly conflated the AP story with wiretapping: “GOVT TAPS PRESS PHONE RECORDS FOR MONTHS.”

But during the Bush years, Drudge, along with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel and the highest ranking Republican officials in Congress, demanded that all of Washington buy into the notion that you can’t have a Constitution if you’re dead. How do we know this? Well, because they actually said it. Over and over. A few examples for the record:

“You have no civil liberties if you are dead.” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS)

“Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us.” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)

“None of your civil liberties matter much after you’re dead.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX)

“Our civil liberties are worthless if we are dead! If you are dead and pushing up daisies, if you’re sucking dirt inside a casket, do you know what your civil liberties are worth? Zilch, zero, nada.” Rush Limbaugh

Now, years later, these very same Republicans insist that “Big Sis” (Drudge’s nickname for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano) and the “little black man-child” are forcing us to “grab the ankles” and submit to fascist authoritarian policies. Never mind that all of these policies were invented by Republicans and ballyhooed by Drudge in an atmosphere of manufactured fear during conservative control of, well, everything.

Throughout the duration of the Bush years, any and all opponents of these policies were shouted down as being with the terrorists — undermining American security and endangering the troops, while evildoers were lurking under our beds ready to spring forth and crash airplanes into everything. In those years, patriotism was defined by the speed and vigor by which we gave up our civil liberties in lieu of a lot of extra security. This mantra was defined, branded and codified by the Republican Party.

The post-9/11 maxim “either you’re with us, or you are with the terrorists” wasn’t the concoction of Michael Moore or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Janet Napolitano. It was entirely the purview of the Drudge-ruled authoritarian universe of fear and cowardice. And make no mistake: cowardice is precisely what it was — cry-baby cowardice masked by flag-waving machismo in support of a military-industrial-security complex that earned billions in profits on investments ranging from the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the production and deployment of body scanners. Rather than standing firm and upholding American values, the far-right embraced cowardice and set us on a course that’s become so deeply embedded into our political culture that it’s going to take many more years to unravel.

So as you observe the coming months and years of brain-melting scandal coverage surrounding these topics, blame a Republican. It’s okay. They deserve it.

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Public Policy Polling asked a selection of Republicans and Democrats what they thought about the so called scandal in Benghazi and found some entertaining interesting results:

41 percent of Republicans say they consider this to be the “biggest political scandal in American history” compared to only 43 percent who disagree. Only 10 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of independents agreed.

Of the 41 percent of Republicans who consider Benghazi to be the worst political scandal in American history, 39 percent are unaware that Benghazi is located in Libya. 10 percent said it’s in Egypt, 9 percent in Iran, 6 percent in Cuba, 5 percent in Syria, 4 percent in Iraq, and 1 percent each in North Korea and Liberia, with 4 percent unwilling to venture a guess.

While this is quite funny, it should be remembered that America has developed a nasty habit of attacking a) the wrong country and b) places most of its citizens couldn’t find on a map.

So watch out Slovakia. Republicans are still pissed about Monica Lewinksy. Or was that in Sweden?

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