Getbig Bodybuilding, Figure and Fitness Forums
Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on May 15, 2013, 06:25:31 AM
-
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/15/obama-nixon-doj-ap-pentagon-papers_n_3278303.html
On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney batted away the notion that the Obama administration is behaving like Richard Nixon's.
"People who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history," Carney said.
Try as he might, though, Carney has not been able to tamp down the idea that there is something "Nixonian" about the Justice Department's secret probe of the Associated Press.
Brian Williams, for example led off Tuesday's "NBC Nightly News" this way:
"As a lot of American adults not so fondly remember, the last time the government was found looking into the phone calls of reporters and using the IRS for political purposes, it was the Nixon era, and while times have changed and circumstances are different that subject came up at the Obama White House today as the administration now scrambles on several fronts."
Tuesday also saw james Goodale, who was the lawyer for the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, flatly say that Obama was worse than Nixon in his dealings with the press.
"Obama has all these things that he's done to the press on national security matters that Nixon never did," Goodale told the New York Observer.
Goodale also wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he drove the point home. He cited, among other things, Obama's unprecedented use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers.
Obama, he said, "is fast becoming the worst national security press president ever, and it may not get any better."
The New York Times editorial board also weighed in on Tuesday night, harshly criticizing Obama:
The Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification for secretly combing through the phone records of reporters and editors at The Associated Press in what looks like a fishing expedition for sources and an effort to frighten off whistle-blowers.
-
ANY BETS TILL OBAMA RESIGNS IN DISGRACE?
-
Who's Got a Secret?
Posted: 05/14/2013 9:50 pm
Follow
Yemen , Associated Press , Department Of Justice , Subpoena , Media News
.
3
5
0
4
Get Media Alerts:
Sign Up
.
The Associated Press is outraged that the Justice Department has been secretly rummaging through its telephone records, and who can blame it? But what really matters is what it means for all the rest of us. And if we don't watch out, it will mean that the government keeps more secrets from us than ever before.
From what we've been told so far, the Department sometime last year subpoenaed two months' worth of records covering incoming and outgoing calls on dozens of telephones at Associated Press offices, as well as on private telephones of AP employees. The telephones included some main, switchboard numbers, so the calls may have involved hundreds of reporters. The AP had no idea what was going on until well after it was over because the subpoena went to the telephone company -- not the AP.
The speculation is that the Justice Department wanted all those phone records for an investigation into who leaked information to the AP over a year ago about U.S. government efforts to foil a terrorist plot in Yemen. But we don't really know for sure.
This isn't the media whining. It doesn't take much imagination to see that people won't be keen on talking with reporters if they think that the government may be indiscriminately monitoring thousands of phone calls by hundreds of reporters. And if the reporters can't talk with sources that want to remain anonymous, then the rest of us won't ever know the secrets that they would have told. At the heart of the First Amendment lies this basic paradox: In order to have all the information we need for our democracy to work, people have to be able to keep some secrets.
Of course, the government needs some secrecy as well. It had wanted to keep what happened in Yemen secret just as badly as the AP wanted to keep secret how it had found out. But there's a big difference: The government has the power to issue subpoenas to news organizations and their telephone companies; the press can't subpoena the government for its stories.
Since the time of Watergate, there's been an uneasy truce between the government and the press over how to resolve this tussle over one another's secrets. The Justice Department has a policy saying it will seize news organizations' records only after it has pursued all other avenues first and then only when absolutely necessary. Most important, its own regulations require it to work things out with the news organization in advance whenever possible.
But it looks like the government broke the truce here. The secret that was leaked about Yemen apparently came from within the government itself, so it had its own phone records and other means of determining what its employees had done. The Justice Department says that it interviewed over 500 people and reviewed thousands of pages of documents before subpoenaing the AP phone records. All that hard work doesn't seem to have narrowed the inquiry one iota. If that's not a "fishing expedition," I don't know what is.
Most important, the Department made no effort to talk things over with the AP before it subpoenaed the phone records. The AP never even had the chance to ask what alternatives the department had exhausted or whether there were narrower alternatives (much less to raise these questions with a court) because it never knew its records were being subpoenaed.
All of this would be bad enough if it didn't fall against the backdrop of the remarkably aggressive approach that the Justice Department has taken to prosecuting government leakers for criminal violations. Thus far, the Department has initiated five criminal prosecutions for leaking (in addition to one pursued by the U.S. Army through military channels) compared with a total of three such prosecutions under all prior administrations combined. The pattern we've seen in leak prosecutions and now secret subpoenas of journalists' telephone records has moved the line between government secrecy and the public's right to know to favor the government more than we've ever seen before.
But what does all this mean for the rest of us? This is not really about the press. It's about the people and what secrets they will learn about their government. Every government must hold some things close to the vest if it is to govern effectively. There will always be a back and forth about how much should be known and how much should be kept secret. But make no mistake that, if we as a country decide that the government's secrets are more valuable than those kept by the press, we will pay the price in not learning about secret wrongdoing until it is too late to do anything about it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-westin/whos-got-a-secret_b_3276449.html
-
The new Obama narrative (Nixon 2.0)
The Politico ^ | May 13, 2013 | Dylan Byers
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 12:22:43 PM by 2ndDivisionVet
A Democratic strategist emails:
"The AP phone records thing just sealed the deal for what the newest narrative around the Obama administration is going to be. They are the new Nixon admin when it comes to bullying, withholding info and targeting enemies. The right won't probably call him directly Nixon because you know, Nixon was a Republican, but it will be the basic idea. You will hear claims that there has never been an administration who reached so far to suppress information and dissent."
"While I don't think this is actually the full truth, it is hard to not realize this is fully the fault of the administration that perception has gotten to this point. They have a small window- I'd say 2-5 days- to try and turn this around and hold on to a plausible veneer of not being a group of shadowy thugs. But given how tone def they've been in the past, my money is on this being the lens through which their next 3.5 years are viewed."
BuzzFeed's Ben Smith writes:
"President Obama, elected with the new technology of microtargeting, is now in danger of a new perception: That he’s the president of microtargeted drone warfare and government surveillance. This is a different critique from the loud and ultimately unpersuasive one Republicans have long made, that initiatives like a health care overhaul, tax increases, and background checks for gun buyers represent a broad, unprecedented, and out-of-control new assertion of power by the American government....
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
-
1) way worse, agreed.
2) I cannot understand why - given the stack of items - nobody is talking impeachment. Wimps.
-
1) way worse, agreed.
2) I cannot understand why - given the stack of items - nobody is talking impeachment. Wimps.
We are what one week into this? Wait till evidence keeps mounting that this goes to Holder, Lew, Jarrett, Ploufe, Axelrod, and the entire gang of chicago thugs surrounding obama.
I am so loving this BTW
-
We are what one week into this? Wait till evidence keeps mounting that this goes to Holder, Lew, Jarrett, Ploufe, Axelrod, and the entire gang of chicago thugs surrounding obama.
I am so loving this BTW
His term only has 3+ years left. If what we've seen isn't enough for you, maybe we should wait another 2 years to impeach?
issa waited years on F&F and it fizzled. Ken starr went from accusation to impeachment on monicagate in 11 months.
Sorry, but I don't buy into the "let's just spend a year bitching before anyone start impeachment".
-
His term only has 3+ years left. If what we've seen isn't enough for you, maybe we should wait another 2 years to impeach?
issa waited years on F&F and it fizzled. Ken starr went from accusation to impeachment on monicagate in 11 months.
Sorry, but I don't buy into the "let's just spend a year bitching before anyone start impeachment".
I wanted to impeach him the day he took office remember? ;D
-
ANY BETS TILL OBAMA RESIGNS IN DISGRACE?
He's never even going to make out of the convention
The Dems are going to kick him off the ticket and replace him with Hilary
Either that or he is either going to resign before the election due to - Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the White House Christmas Tree, etc...
-
He's never even going to make out of the convention
The Dems are going to kick him off the ticket and replace him with Hilary
Either that or he is either going to resign before the election due to - Solyndra, Fast and Furious, the White House Christmas Tree, etc...
You should have bounced him off the ticket - he is a complete trainwreck and the rest of his term is effectively over unless he resigns now to Kenya
-
You should have bounced him off the ticket - he is a complete trainwreck and the rest of his term is effectively over unless he resigns now to Kenya
How exactly would I have bounced him ?
Try to keep in mind that he kicked Romney's ass
Try also to keep in mind your multiple prior predictions of his resignation, impeachment, etc..
You'd think from that prior humiliation you would have learned your lesson
-
How exactly would I have bounced him ?
Try to keep in mind that he kicked Romney's ass
Try also to keep in mind your multiple prior predictions of his resignation, impeachment, etc..
You'd think from that prior humiliation you would have learned your lesson
Ha ha ha ha - keep your head in the sand, obama is a lame duck already and done.
-
Ha ha ha ha - keep your head in the sand, obama is a lame duck already and done.
given your track record of being wrong 100% of the time (along with being insane 100% of the time) perhaps the small part of your brain that is not diseased can understand why I laugh at anything you say
-
given your track record of being wrong 100% of the time (along with being insane 100% of the time) perhaps the small part of your brain that is not diseased can understand why I laugh at anything you say
LOL - you really think all these scandals is nothing?
-
LOL - you really think all these scandals is nothing?
As much NOTHING as Solyndra ,Fast and Furious, etc..
still though, your side needs something to get excited about and since they have no interest in actually doing anything to help the country they have lots of free time on their hands for this nonsense
-
As much NOTHING as Solyndra ,Fast and Furious, etc..
still though, your side needs something to get excited about and since they have no interest in actually doing anything to help the country they have lots of free time on their hands for this nonsense
LOL - AP is on "my side"?
-
LOL - AP is on "my side"?
no idea what that even means
-
no idea what that even means
Must really suck to be an obamanite rihght now
-
Obama escaping in the white bronco from scandalpalooza
[ Invalid YouTube link ]
-
I wanted to impeach him the day he took office remember? ;D
it seems many "repubs" are cool with obama's chooming and coke snorting and orgies and battering of baby seals.
-
Must really suck to be an obamanite rihght now
what is an obamanite?
-
it seems many "repubs" are cool with obama's chooming and coke snorting and orgies and battering of baby seals.
Not me - i wanted him impeached and deported where be belongs from the 1st day in office remember?
-
I wanted to impeach him the day he took office remember? ;D
You and all the Repubs
you morons were dying to impeach him based on nothing other than the fact that you didn't like him
New Flash - all these so called scandals are just going to end in more frustration and tears for you but it's fun to what you and the Repubs chase their tails for awhile
-
You and all the Repubs
you morons were dying to impeach him based on nothing other than the fact that you didn't like him
New Flash - all these so called scandals are just going to end in more frustration and tears for you but it's fun to what you and the Repubs chase their tails for awhile
The band on the titanic felt the same way.
-
Not me - i wanted him impeached and deported where be belongs from the 1st day in office remember?
and you were one of the first birthers.
What do you think of republicans who refuse to question his birth certificate or call for his impeachment?
I think if they'd unite, they could defeat obama and his cocaine-fueled frenzy. WHy won't they?
-
and you were one of the first birthers.
What do you think of republicans who refuse to question his birth certificate or call for his impeachment?
I think if they'd unite, they could defeat obama and his cocaine-fueled frenzy. WHy won't they?
They have their own scandals they need to cover up
-
The Day the Obama Administration Went All Nixon On Us
Posted: 05/14/2013 8:46 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/ap-phone-records-whistleblowers_b_3271637.html
Spoiler alert: That day was May 7, 2012... but first a quick history lesson.
Okay, I'm one of those folks who obsesses about the late 1960s and early 1970s, but this time it's really important. Because today that is the rallying cry for any presidential scandal, that this one is "worse than Watergate." But the Watergate break-in happened 41 years ago, which means that more than half of all Americans weren't even born yet, so you can't blame a lot of voters if they don't know much about what Watergate and the related scandals of Richard Milhous Nixon were all about.
One of the biggest drivers of Watergate was the seemingly unending war in Vietnam. As opposition increased to a foreign war that ultimately killed 58,000 Americans, for goals that were murky at best, so did government paranoia. At the core of Watergate was a team of shady operatives that were nicknamed "the White House Plumbers" -- because they went after news leaks... get it? In May 1969, after news reports about U.S. bombing activities in Cambodia, Nixon and his then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger enlisted J. Edgar Hoover's FBI to wiretap journalists and national security aides.
Later, one of the worst governmental abuses occurred after whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked the massive Pentagon Papers that exposed governmental lies about the conduct of the war in Vietnam. Nixon's "Plumbers" broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to dig up dirt to discredit him. Here is what one of Nixon's former aides, Egil Krogh, wrote about it in 2007:
The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation's security demanded it. As President Nixon himself said to David Frost during an interview six years later, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." To this day the implications of this statement are staggering.
No doubt. Luckily for America, not everyone agreed. Over the next couple of years, criminal charges against Ellsberg were tossed because of the government's misconduct, and Nixon resigned facing certain impeachment over the activities of his Plumbers and the ensuing, elaborate cover-up. The nation mostly rejoiced. The system worked... for a while.
Flash forward to 2012. America had at that point been in an undefined "war on terror" for 11 years -- the same amount of time from the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that greatly expanded the Vietnam War to the 1975 fall of Saigon. Just as during the 1960s and early 1970s, this terror war had provided government with an excuse to greatly expand its domestic spying on American citizens -- some of that through a law called the Patriot Act and some of it even more dubious, constitutionally.
Then, on May 7, 2012, the Associated Press published an article about the Obama administration's conduct of its war in a country that we'd never declared war on (it was Cambodia in 1969, but Yemen in 2012) and Obama's Justice Department -- for reasons not yet fully known -- went crazy over the leak. This, then, is a reminder of why history matters so much.
Because if we're not careful... it repeats:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
The AP's CEO said last night that "[t]here can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters" -- and I could not agree with him more. This revelation is deeply troubling -- and has the makings of a major scandal. Sure, you could try to mitigate it by noting, fairly, that accessing these phone records isn't as bad as wiretapping. But that is small solace, indeed. There's every reason to believe that Attorney General Eric Holder signed off on this unwarranted assault on the First Amendment, and if so, he ought to be canned (hasn't he overstayed his welcome, anyway?). Also, you might try to excuse this as a one-off, an ill-advised but isolated incident.
Except that it's not.
Since the day he took office, the Obama administration has undertaken an assault on government whistleblowers -- people informing citizens of what their government doesn't want them to know -- that surpasses anything that Nixon or any other president has done. Since 2009, the Obama administration has brought espionage charges against six whistleblowers. And most of these whistleblowers have been criticizing that way that America conducts its neverending war of the 21st century. One, Thomas Drake, blew the whistle on the illegal warrantless wiretapping that began under George W. Bush. John Kiriakou dropped the dime on illegal U.S. torture -- and was sent away to prison, even as the perpetrators of torture from Dick Cheney to John Yoo continue to walk freely among us.
Nixon had Daniel Ellsberg, and Obama has Bradley Manning of Wikileaks. Okay, so they didn't break into the office of Manning's psychiatrist, but they have detained Manning in a solitary confinement that a UN torture expert called "cruel, inhuman and degrading." Do you feel better about that? Because I don't. The war on whistleblowers, the treatment of Manning, and now this investigation of journalists are all hallmarks of a White House that promised transparency but has been one of the most secretive -- all to the detriment of the public's right to know.
Let's be clear -- this is about Obama... and it is about much, much more than Obama. It is yet another example of how the national security state that has dominated our political life since World War II has corrupted the American soul. It is exactly what Philadelphia's own Benjamin Franklin tried to warn us about -- trading liberty for security, and geting neither. To the conservatives reading this, who warn so much about big government running amok...here it is. To the liberals reading this, who thought that one man named Barack Obama could change the system, he couldn't. Only we, the citizens, can truly change things.
Let's work together. Let's start by repealing the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Force, declare victory in what was formerly known as the war on terror, and resolve that never again will this nation enter into a perpetual and constitutionally dubious war. Let's repeal the most egregious aspects of the USA Patriot Act, hold public hearings on the true extent that the U.S. government has spied on citizens without warrants -- and then bring those practices to an end. And as today's events made crystal clear, let's make America a nation where journalists and other truth-tellers can write stories or reveal information that the government might not like...without fear of intrusion or reprisal. Ironically, many of those type of changes were supposed to happen after Nixon, after Vietnam But they either didn't last, or they didn't come at all.
If greater liberty comes from the latest revelations, Obama's sins -- however bad or not bad they may turn out to be -- will not make things worse than Watergate. This time, it -- the aftermath, anyway -- will be better than Watergate.
This Blogger's Books from
-
AP story looks bad on the surface but I'll bet a dollar that no laws were broken so much ado about nothing other than a bunch of people acting surprised about some of the stuff our government does
-
Not a Crook—Yet: The Obama administration seems more Nixonian by the day.
City Journal ^ | 14 May 2013 | Harry Stein
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 11:44:57 PM by neverdem
The comparisons of the Obama and Nixon White Houses are suddenly coming—pardon the expression—fast and furious, and why not? The IRS investigations; the administration’s fixation on leaks and leakers and its obsession with enemies; the cover-ups, the blame-shifting to subordinates, the defiant chief executive, even the sweating, pathetically dissembling press secretary; it all has the odor of that earlier time. Again, it’s all happening early in the second term, following a triumphant reelection. Again, the operative terms are arrogance, contempt for law, and thuggery.
The growing awareness of administration malfeasance is evident in the numbers on Google: more than 59 million hits for “Obama and Nixon” and 24 million–plus for “Obama and Watergate.” For those interested, the 44th president’s face can already be found morphing into the 37th’s. Then there’s the rising tide of commentary. “Obama knee-deep in Nixon-esque scandal” runs the headline of columnist Joe Battenfield’s piece in the Boston Herald, which notes that Obama’s campaign slogan would have been more appropriate if it were not “Forward” but “Backward”—“All the way to, say, 1972.” “Benghazi, IRS—Son of Watergate?” asks Cal Thomas. “In IRS Scandal, Echoes of Watergate,” observes the Washington Post’s George Will.
Such talk is mostly confined to the Right so far, but a handful of principled liberals have also weighed in. “There’s no way in the world I’m going to defend that,” said U.S. Representative Michael Capuano of Massachusetts of the IRS’s going after the Tea Party. “Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing.” Former Michigan Democratic congresswoman Lynn Rivers echoed him: “For anyone over 50, this news couldn’t help but stir memories of Richard Nixon’s Political Enemies Project. . . . To use Dan Rather’s ‘duck test,’ the IRS probe of ‘hostile’ ideological groups looks like, swims like, and quacks like government dirty tricks.” One of the heroes of Watergate weighed in, too. “This is outrageous, and it is totally inexcusable,” Carl Bernstein raged about the revelation that the Department of Justice had secretly seized the phone records of Associated Press journalists. “There is no reason that a presidency that is interested in a truly free press and its functioning should permit this to happen.”
Thus it is that questions that once seemed unfathomable take on unexpected plausibility. Where and how far will it all go? Is it remotely conceivable that where Richard Nixon led, Barack Obama might follow? The answer, of course, depends primarily on the nature and severity of the crimes committed—if, indeed, they are crimes—and whether presidential culpability can be established.
But such an observation instantly gives rise to two other considerations. Lest we forget, while Democrats led the congressional inquiries into the Nixonites’ misdeeds—Sam Ervin’s committee in the Senate, Peter Rodino’s in the House—in the end, it was principled Republicans, led by Barry Goldwater (who told Nixon he could count on no more than 15 Republican votes in the Senate), who forced the president’s resignation. Can we expect such nation-above-party behavior on the part of today’s Democrats? Can you imagine Patrick Leahy ever deserting Obama? Or Al Franken? Or Barbara Boxer?
Then there’s the role of the press. Unsurprisingly, the media on the far left have circled the wagons in defense of the president. “Desperate for a Scandal, Fox’s Dobbs Attacks Obama’s ‘Inner Nixon,’” read a dismissive headline on Media Matters for America, while DailyKos has harped on previous “GOP-Fabricated Non-Scandals” that went nowhere. And it’s true that, whether it was the president’s associations with his racist pastor or the Fast and Furious boondoggle, such allegations have gone nowhere—but primarily because the press has protected Obama. So it is a given that the media will again play a key role in determining whether the current scandals are pursued to their logical conclusion or are allowed to fizzle out.
Recent history suggests which outcome is more likely.
Benghazi? With a few notable exceptions, such as CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson and CNN’s Jake Tapper, reporters shrugged off the administration’s cover-up in the immediate aftermath of the attack, when it might have harmed Obama’s presidential fortunes. They have at last been forced by whistleblowers to start asking obvious questions, but their impulse to protect Obama is presumably undiminished. The IRS scandal? Reporters have as little sympathy for the Tea Party as other liberals do, but this story can’t be ignored, at least for the moment. Even administration apologist Joe Klein opines: “I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.” But the “specific case” wording is telling; Klein’s piece is generally tepid, arguing that the IRS matter is an exception to what has been a generally scandal-free administration. It is a line that many in the media are apt to adopt.
As Bernstein’s outburst makes clear, the media generally saves its greatest outrage for government attacks on . . . the media. Thus, the DOJ/AP episode may be the most dangerous to the administration of the mushrooming scandals. It’s likely that a prominent head or two will roll, perhaps even Attorney General Eric Holder’s. Reporters are nothing if not creatures of the pack, and the pack has been dissed here, big-time. How hard will they go after the president? Probably not very. Think battered-woman syndrome: he may be an abuser, but he’s still their man—the one they covered for when he was caught with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, the one they played along with on the faux war on women and the anti-Islam video as the cause for the Benghazi attack. With Nixon, by contrast, once the media picked up the faintest scent of blood, they were relentless and increasingly joyous in pursuit.
As George Will writes: “Episodes like this separate the meritorious liberals from the meretricious. The day after the IRS story broke, The Post led the paper with it, and, with an institutional memory of Watergate, published a blistering editorial demanding an Obama apology. The New York Times consigned the story to page 10.” So it’s also the case that, amid all the stunning events of the past few days, the story that will likely prove the most relevant is this one, courtesy of hotair.com: “Top CBS, ABC, CNN execs all have relatives working as advisors for White House.”
Harry Stein is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of No Matter What . . . They’ll Call This Book Racist (soon to appear in paperback as Why We Won’t Talk Honestly About Race) and the forthcoming e-book novel Will Tripp, Pissed-Off Attorney-at-Law.
-
Richard Milhous Obama
By Carl M. Cannon - May 20, 2013
He’s compared himself to Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, evoked nostalgia for John F. Kennedy, sought to emulate Ronald Reagan, (belatedly) praised George W. Bush, and enlisted the assistance of Bill Clinton in his 2012 re-election effort, but as his second term stumbles along, the president with whom Barack Obama finds himself being compared is Richard M. Nixon.
My father, Lou Cannon, covered the White House with distinction for the Washington Post for many years, beginning in the Nixon administration. He employed an easy rule of thumb when fielding phone calls from anonymous tipsters:
If the caller said, “I have a story that will make Watergate look like a picnic,” Dad would hang up on him.
In the past week, Nixon’s name has been invoked often, and not in a way that pleases the current president or his loyalists. Unless it’s a reference to his dramatic 1972 visit to China, Nixon is not the president any of his successors enjoy being likened to -- especially when the suffix “gate” is attached to it.
Barack Obama was only 13 years old when Nixon resigned from office one step ahead of the posse. This is old enough to know that correlations between himself and the 37th president should be contested, which Obama has done.
“I’ll let you guys engage in those comparisons,” he replied when asked at a rainy Rose Garden appearance Thursday how he felt about the Nixon parallel. “You can go ahead and read the history, I think, and draw your own conclusions.”
This response echoed language employed earlier in the week by Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney. “I can tell you,” the White House press secretary told reporters, “that the people who make those kinds of comparisons need to check their history.”
Fair enough. Carney was a colleague of mine in the White House press corps during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years, and he summoned a pretty good institutional memory about the beat. Nixon’s presidency unraveled on the shoals of widespread criminality with no precedent in American politics. So, yes -- by all means, let’s leave Watergate out of it.
Yet, I can’t help but think that Nixon and Obama have more in common than either man’s devotees might imagine.
Richard Milhous Nixon was thin-skinned, felt persecuted by the opposition party, had a penchant for classifying political adversaries -- and journalists -- as “enemies,” and tried to control his image so fiercely that, ultimately, zealous aides committed illegal acts to further his re-election.
But even before that had happened -- and before Nixon himself began directing a coverup -- truth had become a casualty of his administration. This is the parallel between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama.
No evidence has been unearthed connecting Obama, or anyone under his direction, to illicit activities. But the absence of criminality isn’t the only test here. Nixon’s “enemies,” at least in his mind, also included vast swaths of the Fourth Estate. That apparently is how the current president operates, too.
Barack Obama often displays contempt for the proper role of news-gatherers and, by extension, for the value of reporting that seeks to be unbiased. Often, officials in his White House or re-election campaign seem uncomprehending of the concept of straight reporting.
In their Manichean world, there are liberal news organizations (good) and conservative outlets (bad). Some of the news business does work this way -- more than when Nixon was president, for sure -- but what Obama and his political advisers and White House press handlers have done is graft their own hyper-partisanship onto the media.
In the Obama administration, it’s not uncommon for a White House press official to scream profanely over the phone at journalists whose stories they dislike, plant questions from friendly media outlets, and deny access to briefings to reporters who ask tough questions. This administration has aggressively used the Justice Department to ferret out news leaks, declared open season on a media organization out of sync with his philosophy (Fox News), and routinely questioned the professionalism of reporters and the patriotism of the opposition political party. That disquieting sound you hear is an echo from the Nixon years.
And though the current administration’s evasions about last September’s attacks in Benghazi, the partisan 2010-2012 activities by IRS, and the unprecedented scope of the Justice Department’s snooping into Associated Press phone records are all unrelated controversies, there is a common thread.
Those who work for this president have a fetish for stage managing the news. They never simply trust the facts; or maybe a better way of saying it is that they don’t trust the American people to be able to handle the facts. Washington has been consumed in recent weeks about who, exactly, massaged the administration’s “talking points” on Benghazi.
The underlying problem is that there were talking points at all. The phrase was popularized in the 1970s in the State Department. Originally the practice ensured that government officials were employing the precise, but opaque, language required in the field of international diplomacy. But the phrase soon migrated to politics, where it meant something quite different: Talking points were the lines of the day to be employed in interviews by partisan political operatives either to defend their position or attack the other side.
Benghazi represents the merging of two uses of the term. Four government officials were killed and a U.S. facility was attacked. Yes, some Republicans wanted to use that for partisan gain, but most Americans simply wanted to know what happened, and why. They still have not been told.
All politics is local, famed Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill is known for saying. Under Obama, all foreign affairs is domestic politics.
Concerning the IRS scandal, there is no evidence that Obama unleashed tax collectors on opponents, as Nixon did. But after years of comparing congressional Republicans to terrorists and hostage-takers, and characterizing the Tea Party as racists and extremists, what message did the president or the leaders of his party think they were sending IRS managers?
Obama is never content to simply say he thinks he can show how wrong-headed Republicans are about the federal budget. No, he says they should put “country ahead of party,” thereby suggesting they are deliberately hurting the economy to hurt him.
This, too, is Nixonland.
On June 29, 1972, Nixon was talking to Henry Kissinger in a taped conversation about the Democratic Party platform. “These people are so revolting that they have to be smashed,” Nixon tells his national security adviser.
“I don’t mean just beat them,” Nixon adds. “It’s good to beat them. But I mean smashed. They must be, they must be, disgraced, driven right out of public life.”
No tapes are available to know how Obama speaks about Republicans in private. But tonally, he’s not that much different from Nixon when speaking in public. Last week, even after the Benghazi, IRS, and AP controversies crested on the White House steps, Obama found time to blame Republicans at a New York fundraiser.
“What’s blocking us right now is a sort of hyper-partisanship in Washington that I was, frankly, hoping to overcome in 2008,” the president said. “My thinking was when we beat them in 2012, that might break the fever, and it’s not quite broken yet. But I am persistent. And I am staying at it. … If there are folks who are more interested in winning elections than they are thinking about the next generation, then I want to make sure there are consequences to that.”
Get all that? The Republicans don’t merely have a difference of opinion with the president. They are rabid, and craven, and willing to sacrifice their own children’s futures to win elections. This Nixon-esque attitude constitutes a toxic brew: whining, boasting, and name-calling all overlaid with persecution-complex and a profound contempt for his opponents -- along with a determination to make them pay.
Like Nixon, Obama also fancies himself a press critic. Although the man received press coverage in 2008 and 2012 that Nixon would have killed for, there are considerable irritants out there, including radioman Rush Limbaugh, but primarily Fox News, which Obama and his aides have attempted to delegitimize by name.
In so doing, Obama has actually gone places in public Nixon only dared go in private.
As I write this piece, I am looking at a memo written on July 30, 1972, by President Nixon to White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman. That morning, The Washington Post had published a story by Lou Cannon headlined “Nixon Running Scared.”
That article apparently got under Nixon’s skin. His memo to Haldeman runs for three pages. His premise is that the Washington Post “is totally against us.” Making no allowance for the possibility of objective reporting, Nixon starts by telling his top adviser that he understands campaign aides must deal with “media representatives that we know are antagonistic to us.”
Nixon’s second point is that they should not “waste time” with such outlets at the expense of “turning down interviews with media representatives who are our friends.” This seems to be to a false choice, but Nixon -- who would win re-election in 1972 in a landslide -- is just warming to his main point:
“Third, even when our most intelligent people are meeting with people like Cannon they must constantly keep in mind that they are confronting a political enemy and that everything they say will, therefore, be used against us.”
We don’t know if Obama or his minions also keep enemies lists, if only in their heads. But we do know that they view the media with the same with-us-or-against-us mentality that Nixon fostered. And though that attitude can help win elections, it surely impedes good governance.
Richard Nixon thought liberals were out to get him. Guess what? Many of them were. Likewise, Barack Obama thinks the Republicans want him to fail in office. Many of them do. But it’s a poor excuse for bad behavior.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Editor for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/20/richard_milhous_obama_118475.html#ixzz2TqsBCrIm
Follow us: @RCP_Articles on Twitter
-
holy hell just shut the fuck up already.
Benghazi a dud, irs a dud, umbrella a dud, this is a dud.
Defecit shrinking, debt as well, surplus last month, stock market soaring to new heights yet all I hear is this bullshit. Moan about the economy or something useful instead of this sideshow bullshit.
-
holy hell just shut the fuck up already.
Benghazi a dud, irs a dud, umbrella a dud, this is a dud.
Defecit shrinking, debt as well, surplus last month, stock market soaring to new heights yet all I hear is this bullshit. Moan about the economy or something useful instead of this sideshow bullshit.
So you mean the Sequester is working like some of us had no problem with?
-
ANY BETS TILL OBAMA RESIGNS IN DISGRACE?
oh shit hell yeah...
what ever odds you want.. Obama doesnt get impeached nor does he resign.....
LANDSLIDE COMING
-
PLEASE TAKE THIS BET.....
you name the odds... the amount...the everything.....
im betting he neither resigns or is impeached
what you got
-
BUMP
-
BUMP
I'm not betting anything - I have no idea WTF is going to happen considering we have never had such a situation in my memory where such open criminality is tolerated by an entire party like this
-
I'm not betting anything - I have no idea WTF is going on happen considering we have never had such a situation in my memory where such open criminality is tolerated by an entire party like this
correction ;D
-
ANY BETS TILL OBAMA RESIGNS IN DISGRACE?
I'm not betting anything - I have no idea WTF is going to happen considering we have never had such a situation in my memory where such open criminality is tolerated by an entire party like this
wtf bro do you have MPD?
-
bump for 3333 to comment on MPD
-
bump for 3333 to comment on MPD
Probably.
-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-obama-administration-mistakes-news-for-espionage/2013/05/20/0cf398e8-c17e-11e2-8bd8-2788030e6b44_story.html?hpid=z2
Eugene Robinson going to get audited.