2013-08-12 11:01:05 -0400

DN, you’re not seriously trying to promote this idea, are you?



Watergate was matter of criminal behavior being ordered and executed by the highest levels of the Nixon White House. It resulted in jail terms, public repudiation and the only time in history we have seen a President forced to resign in disgrace. It was a gigantic scandal, and there’s a good reason why it and the Nixon Administration are looked at with disdain.



Arguing about the attack on the Benghazi consulate is a different matter. The attack was carried out by a group taking advantage of the total unrest sweeping the region in general and Libya in specific at that time. It’s very strange that the right wing wants to forget about the inflammatory video, when at the time they were crowing about how the whole area was on fire. The day before the attack, Fox News repeatedly ran the video of our embassy in Cairo having its flag pulled down and burned. But once this attack happened, Fox News decided to abandon the earlier approach and go with the meme that the Obama Administration was unable to deal with terrorism. The strategy, meant to help Mitt Romney’s campaign, backfired as we all saw last fall. Given what we’ve seen of the charges being filed and the work being done by the FBI , I wouldn’t be so hasty to call anyone “feeble”. I also find it interesting that the right wing told opponents of George W. Bush’s foreign policy blunders that they were being treasonous. And yet the right wing holds a different standard for their own opposition to President Obama’s foreign policy. So questioning George W. Bush was being disloyal and treasonous in a time of war. But attacking Barack Obama’s foreign policy is proper and patriotic.



The right wing really needs to think about its behavior on these matters. This isn’t the George W. Bush Presidency where you had the Justice Dept getting caught in repeated malfeasance, the Attorney General being forced to resign in disgrace, the President being forced to withdraw a Supreme Court nominee and a major criminal scandal erupting over the Bush Administration’s attack on Joe Wilson. This isn’t the Reagan Administration, where you had a criminal “off the shelf” operation running from inside the White House to illegally fund operations in Central America via the illegal sale of weapons to Iran. (Anyone curious about how bad this got can easily find the material by checking the National Security Archive, which has extensively documented it.) And this isn’t the Nixon Administration, which crumbled under the weight of its own infamous criminality.



It’s fairly obvious that the right wing is frantically searching for some kind of “magic bullet” to accomplish what they’ve failed to do regarding President Obama. They’ve made running the government a miserable prospect, but they haven’t been able to stop it. They’ve tried to hound Obama at every turn, but they have not driven him from office, nor will they. They tried to obstruct him enough to make it impossible for him to win a 2nd term, and he won anyway. They’ve tried to reach for anything they could wave around as a scandal, but that attempt has revealed more about the right wing’s desperation than it has about any real issues. It’s one thing to argue with the Obama Administration over its policies – that’s fair game at any time. It’s another thing to repeatedly attempt to accuse Obama of criminality.