The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Experience Matters: Old Man Schieffer Puts Young Punk Pfeiffer in His Place

Posted on | May 19, 2013 | 13 Comments

“It looks like they’ve lost Bob Schieffer,” says John Hoge, which might be a slight exaggeration. Schieffer is a liberal, but he’s also a veteran Washington journalist who has seen enough scandals to know what a scandal looks like, and he was having none of the Jedi mind trick — “These are not the scandals you were looking for. Move along.” — from Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer today. Right off the bat, Pfeiffer tried to cast the argument in partisan terms, which every scandal-plagued politician does, claiming that any suggestion of wrongdoing is a manufactured artifice, the creation of one’s political opponents:

“[T]he Republican playbook here . . . they don’t have a positive agenda, try to drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped up hearings and false allegations.”

Schieffer was highly dubious of this excuse, and reminded Pfeiffer of how familiar his excuse-making sounded:

I don’t want to compare this in anyway to Watergate. I do not think this is Watergate by any stretch. But you weren’t born then, I would guess, but I have to tell you that is exactly the approach that the Nixon administration took. They said these are all second-rate things. We don’t have time for this. We have to devote our time to the people’s business. You are taking exactly the same line that they did.

Exactly right. Bob Schieffer was born in 1937, he was working for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the day JFK was shot, and he’s not likely to be impressed by a 37-year-old “senior advisor.” And when it came to Benghazi, Schieffer didn’t let Pfeiffer bulldoze him:

The bottom line is what [Susan Rice] told the American people [Sept. 16] bore no resemblance to what had happened on the ground in an incident where four Americans were killed. . . .
[T]hat was just PR, that was just a PR plan to send out somebody who didn’t know anything about what had happened. Why did you do that? Why didn’t the Secretary of State come and tell us what they knew and if you knew nothing say we don’t know yet? Why didn’t White House Chief of Staff come out? I mean I would, and I mean this is no disrespect to you, why are you here today? Why isn’t the White House Chief of Staff here to tell us what happened?

Pfieffer didn’t have a good answer for that. In fact, Pfeiffer had no answers for any real questions at all Sunday. Pfieffer tried to use the “doctored e-mails” distraction that Jazz Shaw discusses at some length, and which doesn’t have any bearing on the real issues about the Benghazi attack, which can be summarized simply: If the administration had nothing to hide, why were they lying?

One can agree with Schieffer that this isn’t Watergate “by any stretch” and still be curious about why, if everything was on the up and up, the administration was acting so shady. And why did Pfeiffer refuse to say where Obama was during the Benghazi attack?

Schieffer gave a little lecture later on Face the Nation about the IRS scandal that’s worth quoting in its entirety:

You heard Dan Pfeiffer earlier in the broadcast say that he wasn’t born when Watergate happened. Well, it will come as no news to anyone that I was. And when the burglars broke into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate, a lot of us back then found it hard to believe. Why would anyone break in to a political headquarters? What did they hope to find–bumper stickers? Yard signs? Nobody is dumb enough to pull a stunt like that. But they were. I admit I had about the same reaction when I first heard the IRS had gone after the Tea Party last year, the Tea Party? Surely no one could be dumb enough to think you could get away with something like that in an election year. But they were. So welcome to dumb and dumber. It did take a while for the news to get to some quarters. We heard that the President say that he didn’t find out about it until last week, last week, which qualified him for Washington’s fastest growing club, the longer and longer list of officials who suddenly don’t know much about a lot of unpleasant things from Benghazi to the Associated Press investigation. At this point, just spare me the talking points and the excuses. No matter whether Republicans or Democrats are doing this kind of thing, this stuff is not just wrong it’s really stupid. And it will take more than firing a few temps and low-level bureaucrats to fix it. The President won reelection with a smart political team, but the election is over. Maybe he should look now for people of substance who know about other things who could help him govern.

As they say in Texas: Hell to the yes, Bob.

 

Category: CBS, Journalism, Scandal

@SpeakerBoehner, Sir, Please Don’t Bore Me With Mere Talk Of Jail

Posted on | May 19, 2013 | 19 Comments

by Smitty

Speaker Boehner on the IRS scandal:

Sure, there are malefactors who should be jailed.

But the larger issue, sir, it the system itself. The IRS has now become Checkov’s Gun.

If all that’s done is a appoint a special prosecutor, locate one or two more flagrant folks, and jail them, a major point stands missed.

Let’s break it down:

  • Our tax code has completely gone to seed.
  • Taxation is not directly tied to a balanced budget.
  • Anything you do short of total reform is tacitly agreeing to a fundamentally broken system.

So, Speaker Boehner: don’t let a crisis go to waste in the face of a need for fundamental reform, rationalization, and rebuilding of integrity.

Category: Uncategorized

Shorter Dan Pfeiffer: ‘Your Partisan Questions Are So Largely Irrelevant and Offensive, I’m Not Going to Answer Them’

Posted on | May 19, 2013 | 26 Comments

When the White House sent Obama’s senior adviser out to do five Sunday shows, his orders were obviously to claim that (a) only Republicans care whether the administration is lying about Benghazi, and (b) the answer to any question about Benghazi is “largely irrelevant”:

Wallace repeatedly asked Pfeiffer where the president was and what he was doing while terrorists were attacking the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Pfeiffer refused to answer Wallace’s question of whether Obama entered the White House Situation Room during the Sept. 11 attack, saying, “I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night, and that’s a largely irrelevant fact.” . . .
On CBS Sunday, Pfeiffer said that the question of who edited the administration’s “talking points” about the Benghazi was “largely irrelevant.”

The Obama answer to everything: “Shut up, Republicans!”

Notice who is included in the Memeorandum aggregation on Daniel Halper’s Weekly Standard story: Rick Moran at PJ Tatler, Scott Johnson at Power Line, Ann Althouse, Doug Brady at Conservatives4Palin, Dan Riehl at Riehl World News, William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection and Andrew McCarthy at National Review. In other words, not a single liberal blogger or journalist considers it newsworthy that Obama’s senior adviser refused to say where the president was on the night of the Benghazi attack. This strategy of ignoring the obvious functions as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: If Democrats don’t pay any attention, interest in the administration’s scandals is therefore, by definition, strictly a Republican affair, and . . . “Shut up, Republicans!”

Tautologically confining any scandal to the category of “partisan fishing expeditions” (another Dan Pfeiffer talking point) does not, however, work as an explanation: If the answers to these questions are “largely irrelevant,” why won’t Pfeiffer answer the questions?

“Shut up, Republicans!”

 

Category: Barack Obama, Libya, Scandal

‘Diversity Is Our Strength’ — And Also Leads to Hate-Crime Murder in New York

Posted on | May 19, 2013 | 19 Comments

Dan Riehl points out that “three Hispanic males” were implicated in the murder of a gay black man in Greenwich Village, a potentially relevant fact that the New York Times couldn’t be bothered to mention in maundering on about the historic vicinity of the crime:

Mark Carson did not hide that he was gay, and when he went out on the town he would often head to Greenwich Village, where years before he was born, much of the struggle for gay liberation unfolded. Yet late Friday night, just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, among the most important landmarks of that struggle, he was confronted with a man screaming antigay slurs, who then stalked him before pulling out a silver revolver and fatally shooting him, the police said. . . .
“There was a time in New York City when two people of the same gender could not walk down the street arm-in-arm without fear of violence and harassment,” said Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, whose district includes the Village and who hopes to become the city’s first openly gay mayor. “We refuse to go back to that time.”

No, Ms. Quinn, we are going forward to that time: A deluge of immigration, the breakdown of the family, the failure of public education, economic malaise — pious liberal sermonizing cannot eliminate the sources of social friction that lead to crimes like this.

Tres hombres decide to go swaggering muy macho through the West Village on Friday night, looking for somebody to fight:

According to Mr. Kelly, the gunman was in the neighborhood with two other men shortly before midnight when he urinated in front of the Annisa bar and restaurant on Barrow Street at West Fourth Street.
The man then went inside and angrily confronted the bartender with antigay slurs, the police said, pulling up his gray hooded sweatshirt, and revealing a silver revolver in a shoulder holster. He threatened the bartender that if he called the police, he would be killed, the police said.

Gun-control laws, hate-crime laws — none of New York’s laws could protect a “fabulous gay man” from Harlem and his boyfriend:

Both the victim and another man with him were wearing tank tops, cutoff shorts and boots.
“Do you want to die here?” Morales asked the victim.

Does this involve the Men on Strike phenomenon?

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. . . . [M]en aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers.

In a culture where the ordinary sources of male self-esteem are stigmatized, doesn’t violent machismo become more common?

 

 


Category: Crime, Culture, Gays, Racism

FMJRA 2.0: All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down

Posted on | May 18, 2013 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Sunday: In The Heat Of The Night

The Fate of Basseley Nakoula

#Gosnell Convicted: Quick Reactions

FMJRA 2.0: All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight

A Short Lesson in Liberal Media Bias: Has Alex Koppelman Forgotten Fitzmas?

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.13.13

World’s Youngest Blogger: Did You Love Momma Today?

My Wife Is a Soldier’s Mom

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.14.13

‘People Need to Be Sent to Jail’

The Obama Presidency, in One Tweet

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.15.13

ObamaGate Scandal Mania!

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.16.13

President Cosmic Lightworker Expresses Disappointment in Mere Mortals at IRS

One More Jump …

As You Can Perhaps Imagine, This Has Been a Rough Week for Charles Johnson

CNN Now Aiming for Zero Ratings

LIVE AT FIVE: 05.17.13

‘Hate-F*ck’ Hoaxer Meg Lanker-Simons Has Criminal Record for Gun Incident

Jahar, the Teen Idol Terrorist

Obama #IRS Scandal Amnesia

Our Lawless President: Obama’s IRS Thuggery Certainly Was No Coincidence

He Gets His Wings Tonight!

Apparently there was a shortage of people wanting to get drunk and get loud in the blogosphere last week.

Top linker of the week, and still champeen:

Rick’s Rants (22 the hard way)

There were a couple of near misses, but people seem more inclined to tweet or like posts on Facebook. This makes the wombat sad. Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA (and turn your favorite marsupial’s frown upside down) is Friday, May 24. No slacking off just because it’s Memorial Day weekend, now.

 

 

Category: FMJRA Award

Should IRS Standards for 501(c) Groups Require Proof of ‘Social Welfare’ Purpose?

Posted on | May 18, 2013 | 12 Comments

That’s what “many Democrats” seem to be saying:

“Partisanship or the perception of politics has no place in the IRS,” acting commissioner Steven Miller said in a brief opening statement to the Ways and Means Committee . . .
And many Democrats turned to what they saw as the bigger issue: A tax code that doesn’t make clear what kinds of political activities a tax-exempt social welfare organization can participate in.

Hmmm. My memory must be playing tricks on me these days. The phrase “tax-exempt social welfare organization” rings a bell, but for some reason I’m having trouble thinking of an example.

See, this “social welfare” aspect is very important to the IRS:

“. . . a paid employee of one of the nonprofits, Justice Through Music Project, a 501c3 ‘educational’ nonprofit. . . . Both JTMP and the other group, Velvet Revolution US, a 501c4 “action” nonprofit, are headquartered in . . . Bethesda, Maryland.”

“Justice Through Music . . . is a co-founder . . . of the Election and Media Reform organization, VelvetRevolution.us.”

“Election and Media Reform” are obviously the kind of social welfare purposes which legitimate 501(c)4 groups pursue.

An effort to “Prosecute Rove” is neither “transparently partisan” nor the action of a “tax-exempt  . . . racket,” right, Brad Friedman?

As the IG’s report details (to those who actually bothered to read it!), all of this was a part of the federal agency’s poorly executed attempt to screen a flood of incoming applications for tax-exempt 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) status in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. That infamous ruling, essentially paving the way for unrestricted money for campaign spending, resulted in an exponential increase in political organizations attempting to take part in a tax-exempt “social welfare organization” racket which illegally flooded the 2010 and 2012 election cycles with transparently partisan spending on direct political advertisements and other related efforts — in violation of the (unenforced) law.

Yes, it’s a terrible thing when people violate laws.

“Sandi Barton’s youngest daughter . . . was 14 when her grandmother, 65-year-old Julia Scyphers, was murdered — a crime that remains officially unsolved to this day.”

If only there were someone to call attention to these issues . . .

 

Category: Scandal, Taxes, The Kimberlin Files

Benghazi and Other ‘Concocted’ Scandals

Posted on | May 18, 2013 | 10 Comments

U.S. consulate, Benghazi, Libya, Sept. 11, 2012

“Fraud flows from the top down, not the mid-level up. Mid-level officials in the White House and the State Department do not call the shots — they carry out orders.”
— Andrew McCarthy

Well, that’s just “common sense,” but what does common sense count for nowadays? In an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN Thursday, Jay Carney dismissed the Benghazi scandal as a Republican “concoction.”

Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom caught JournoLister Ezra Klein offering a similar argument that these aren’t really scandals, which sounds a bit like Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” talk:

“We lied about a terrorist attack that killed four Americans, the Justice Department secretly seized phone records for the Associated Press, and the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to punish the president’s Enemies List, but these aren’t really scandals. Besides, those bitches deserved it. Shut up, Republicans.”

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard pointed out the pervasiveness of the media’s “Not Really Scandals” meme.

As is usual when this kind of elite “consensus” groupthink agenda gets rolling, the consensus is itself cited as tautological proof that skeptics are irrational, biased and therefore untrustworthy. You’re a Flat Earther or a Tinfoil Hatter if you think there was a deliberate effort by the White House to suppress the ugly truth, or if you believe that such a cover-up would actually amount to a scandal.

“Polls show that nobody cares! Shut up, Republicans!”

But no matter what the polls say — low-information voters care more about celebrity mastectomies than about politics — it’s obvious the administration is lying about pretty much everything. For example, IRS officials tried to blame the problems on an alleged “surge” in non-profit applications that didn’t actually happen, and this bogus rationale was offered via a dishonest ruse that they lied about.

OK, so if the first public excuse was a lie,  and we then learn that this was revealed via a phony set-up question, and if every new fact we discover — “Tell us about your prayer meetings” — tends to make the situation seem worse . . . Well, what would we know if we knew everything?

We don’t know, and thus we must be cautious in asserting that we’ve found the “smoking gun” that will result in federal indictments, the resignation of a half-dozen Cabinet secretaries, perp walks for White House staffers and the Impeachment of the President.

On the other hand, when the best excuse Obamaphiles like Ashley Banfield can come up with is that the President of the United States doesn’t know anything about anything and his administration is plagued by rampant stupidity, we should probably keep asking questions.

“In the Obama era, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid. It’s whether you’re paranoid enough.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Libya, Scandal, Taxes

He Gets His Wings Tonight!

Posted on | May 17, 2013 | 49 Comments

The back of this T-shirt asks, ‘What do you do?’

So the final jump of Airborne school was supposed to happen Thursday night and graduation was supposed to be noon Friday. But the C-130 was grounded by mechanical problems, so my Army son didn’t get to make his fifth jump until about 5 p.m. Friday, and the graduation is supposed to happen about 10 p.m. tonight.

He finally got to be first out of the plane on this jump. Private McCain was Number 15 in his “chalk” and was supposed to jump first, but they kept messing around with the jump order, and he didn’t get to be first man out of the plane until this time. The jump was “awesome,” he reports, although the landing was the hardest yet, but he was uninjured and so he made it through.

Saturday, about noon, Private McCain boards a bus for Fort Bragg, where he reports for Special Operations Preparation Course (SOPC), which is designed to get him ready for Special Forces Assessment/Assignment and Selection (SFAS). These are extremely rigorous courses, and the attrition rate is very high. But he’s made it through basic, advanced infantry and now Airborne school, so he’s already pretty doggone elite.

Eventually, I hope to get my own T-shirt: “I Could Tell You What My Son Does for a Living … But Then I’d Have to Kill You.”

HOOAH!

 




 

 

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