It seems to me that the VA scandal — which is a real scandal — would have a lot more oomph and impact if the GOP hadn’t wasted (and continues to waste) so much energy and outrage on phony scandals like Benghazi and the IRS.
They’ve squandered a lot of credibility and induced scandal fatigue because so many Americans believe that anything the Republicans get worked about stems from their visceral hatred of the Kenyan Muslim socialist.
If you like this sort of thing, Salon and MSNBC are having a tiff.
Alex Seitz-Ward wrote a story yesterday calling out the media for falling for the IRS scandal. I quoted from the story on this blog.
Last night, Lawrence O’Donnell did a long “Rewrite” on his MSNBC show, faulting Seitz-Ward for not crediting O’Donnell with recognizing the phoniness of the scandal early on and in 24 (O’Donnell kept emphasizing that 24) segments on his show.
Now Alex Pareene has a post up at Salon slamming O’Donnell — “Lawrence O’Donnell outraged to read story that isn’t about him.”
I’m sure we’ll be hearing from O’Donnell this evening.
From “How the media outrageously blew the IRS scandal: A full accounting,” Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon:
“While the initial reports about the IRS targeting looked pretty bad, suggesting that agents singled out tax-exempt applications for Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, the media badly bungled the controversy when supposedly sober journalists like Bob Woodward and Chuck Todd jumped to conclusions and assumed the worst from day one. Instead of doing more reporting to discover the true nature and context of the IRS targeting, or at least waiting for their colleagues to do some, the supposedly liberal mainstream press let their eagerness to show they could be just as tough on a Democratic White House as a Republican one get ahead of the facts. We expect politicians to stretch reality to fit a narrative, but the press should be better.
“And they would have gotten away with it, too, had their narrative had the benefit of being true. But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones; that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line; that the IG’s report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans’ request; and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn’t even know about it until shortly before the public did.
“In short, the entire scandal narrative was a fiction. But it had real consequences, effectively derailing Obama’s agenda not long after a resounding reelection, costing several people their careers, and distracting and misinforming the public. It’s not that nothing went wrong at the IRS, but that the transgression merited nowhere near the media response it earned. But instead of acknowledging its error or correcting the record, the mainstream political press has simply moved on to the next game.”
The whole piece is worth a read, as Seitz-Wald also calls out David Gregory, Jon Stewart, Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and Robert Gibbs for taking the bait so credulously without doing their homework.
I can’t stand either Mark Sanford or Anthony Weiner.
It’s hard to think of two men who are more different from each other than this good-old-boy South Carolinian and this brash New Yorker, but they both give me the creeps.
Andrew Young, the former John Edwards aide who guy who pretended to be the father of Edwards’ daughter with his mistress Rielle Hunter and the star witness in his corruption trial, is already jeopardizing the case against Edwards.
Judge Catherine Eagles (Legal Eagle?) has ruled that Edwards’ defense team can reveal that Young recently spoke with three other witnesses in the case. They can’t use the term “witness tampering,” but I think the jury will figure it out.
Embattled Farmers 