What's Going On?
While the Benghazi "scandal" has been simmering off and on since last fall, all of the sudden we have new "scandals" popping up all within a rather short amount of time with the IRS and the Justice Department. True, while none of them directly implicate President Obama nor do any of them involve outright criminal behavior (so far), they are all related to executive branch agencies which most people tend to assume- to some degree based on their knowledge about how government works- is linked to the President. So now we will have Congressional Republicans and Fox News nipping at President Obama and Democrats in general with even more intensity and voraciousness than usual. It almost seems like an almost too "perfect storm" for right-wingers seeking to undermine the Obama Administration. Even Jon Stewart joined in on skewering the Obama Administration last night. Why all this? Why now? I have a bad feeling that whatever nuances exist to these stories will, as usual, be lost on right-wingers and members of Congress as they scramble reflexively to put the lid on them.
I'm not going to go too much into the Benghazi situation as it has been discussed frequently and regularly here and I'm not sure I fully understand the situation suffice it to say that I think that the Republicans are just chasing their tails and absent allegations of actual wrongdoing/lawbreaking, it's stuck in neutral IMHO.
President Obama and Democrats have been put in the position where they can't help but apologize for the IRS situation because the IRS has already admitted to some degree of culpability for the matter. Now, the fact that some Tea Party/right-wing groups might really not be legit non-profits won't be discussed but rather the malfeasance of the IRS. Some Tea Party/right-wing groups now are trying to bully/intimidate the IRS into getting tax-exempt status whether or not they might legitimately qualify.
I'm a little murkier on the AP story but it seems as though the Justice Department was conducting a legitimate investigation into a national security leak but that's not the impression that one gets from the breathless reporting of it.
All of the stories do seem to share a common theme, which is the federal government run amok, which helps feed into right-wing paranoia about things like background checks, which, of course, was recently a heated subject of debate and which the Republicans in the Senate were taking a lot of flak for (those that voted against expanded background checks) and, of course, health care reform, which is progressing towards full implementation by next year. I just can't help but feel that all of this are conveniently timed distractions.
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