All Posts Tagged With: "scandal"

This makes me feel a little better… TPM reports…

At his presser today, Barack Obama said he’d directed his advisers to assemble all the information about any contacts his team might have had with Governor Blagojevich about his Senate seat, and reiterated that he’d not had any direct contact with Blago himself.

“I’ve asked my team to gather the facts of any contacts with the governor’s office about this vacancy so that we can share them with you over the next few days,” Obama said.

The promise of sharing the info is welcome, both because it could clear up lingering questions about the controversy and could deflate the GOP’s efforts to use the Blago mess to tar Obama’s reformist image and promise of transparency.

“I am confident no representatives of mine would have any part in any deals related to this seat,” Obama said.

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I’m still hopeful that Obama will do the right thing. And for now, I’ll take him at his word.

I voted for him and I support him. But Campbell Brown is right:

Mr. President-elect, we understand there are reasons you have said so little. We recognize you don’t want to do or say anything that might compromise the investigation.

But all too often we have also seen presidents hide behind a “no comment due to an ongoing investigation” when they find themselves or their administrations caught up in scandal.  [Ed. Note — You have to look no further than the current administration for a prime example.]

For that reason, and because you asked us to hold you to a different standard, it is fair to ask you to be more forthcoming.

Be more direct and clear with the American people about what you and the people around you knew, or didn’t know.
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Here’s the video Campbell’s full commentary on last night’s program. (My own thoughts after the video) Continued

So says Patrick Ruffini of The Next Right:

The Obama citizenship smear hasn’t gained traction in mainstream conservative circles, but this is exactly the kind of stunt the left will use to tar all conservatives and silence legitimate criticism of Obama and his policies. We need to be vociferously calling out people who traffic in this nonsense.

Scandal stories didn’t get much traction during the campaign, so if we are smart, I am hopeful we won’t see a repeat of the ’90s opposition to Clinton, which was primarily scandal driven, and tarnished the Republican brand so that only Bush’s big-spending conservatism could save it. Which is got us in the pickle we are in today.

The right end of the dial is all atwitter — borderline messing themselves — with this Blagojevich scandal. Nothing like a good scandal to get everyone all hot-and-bothered.

“Americans voted for change. Barack Obama promised that he would have the most open and honest administration and transition in history,” said RNC chairman Mike Duncan, on a conference call with reporters. “But that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re getting is the same old politics out of Chicago.”

Why all the sudden interest in an “open and honest administration” by the party whose leader for the last eight years was anything but “open and honest”? What short memories the clamorers must have. Wasn’t this the same party who just a couple of years ago faced significant losses in Congress following one of the worst corruption scandals in Congressional history? Does Abramoff ring any bells?

I’m as disgusted as anyone with the Illinois governor’s outrageous behavior. But, as Mike McCarville said, “guilt by association without facts is irresponsible.” Those so quick to pass arbitrary and capricious judgment on Obama were strangely silent — or worse, complicit with their unashamed defense of the indefensible — when their own president and administration, Congressional leaders and party powerbrokers were whole hog in the filth of corruption.

It seems to me that all the hand-wringing about this scandal would be better done with clean hands — something the GOP and its faithful following in the blogosphere cannot rightfully claim.

Attention Fried Green Onions, et al:  Conservative Okie blogger Mike McCarville has some advice for you:

President-elect Obama’s detractors have been quick to try to link him to Illinois Governor Rod Blogojevich’s just-unveiled corruption allegations. Surely, the Obama critics claim, Obama must be involved.

Not so fast.

There is no indication, in the public documents filed thus far, or in the prosecutor’s comments, that Obama is involved in any way. In fact, the prosecutor went out of his way, several times, to say that.

… guilt by association without facts is irresponsible.

… Whether Obama will be tainted by the the sure-to-grow scandal remains to be seen. Meanwhile, journalists and bloggers alike might be circumspect in keeping their fingers off their keyboards when it comes to pointing fingers at Obama.

Of course, that didn’t stop FGO, et al, from latching on to all previous “scandals” — like the quickly failing citizenship conspiracy theories.

Mark Danner examines “frozen scandal“:

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

… Journalists as the self-abnegating seekers after truth, defenders of society’s conscience: had this happy description ever been true, even during Watergate, it now bears little resemblance to the scandal-mongering world of cable news shows and gabfests, for which scandal, the gaudier the better, provides the vast and complicated narratives that are the lifeblood of the twenty-four-hour news cycles. As the first Persian Gulf War begot CNN so did Monica Lewinsky’s pouty lips beget Fox News.

Scandals, the more complicated and richer the plotlines the better, have above all to endure. Scandals provide the fodder for on-air confrontation, the verbal slash and parry—which is what television, a terrible medium for conveying information of any complexity, does best, and does most cheaply. Scandals provide subplots and minor characters and spin-offs. They offer, to the post-Watergate, high-profile, well-coiffed, colleague-of-the-powerful journalist hero of today—could anything be further from the deeply irreverent working stiff cracking wise in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940)?—the true venue for the highest practice of his art, the television studio.

That art relies on, or anyway thrives on, scandal. Scandal denotes success. Scandal shows he is doing his job. Scandal means pay dirt. And scandal represents that media-age dream, the perpetual story. Scandal can be rehashed, debated, photographed, from initial leak, to perp walk, to hearing, to trial, to appeal. Scandal offers an endless stream of what the business is after all supposed to be about: news. As in: what is new. Scandal brings the heart-pumping, breath-gulping surge of stop-the-presses excitement, letting us know that into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene. Scandal represents movement, the audible cracking of the ice. And yet it is all an illusion, for beneath the rapidly moving train of gaudily hyped “breaking news,” beneath all the grave and breathless stand-ups before the inevitable pillars of public buildings, beneath the swirling, gyrating phantasmagoria of scandal lies a kind of dystopian stasis. Everything changes and nothing does.

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Sadly, so very true. But this phenomenon is certainly not confined to the mainstream news outlets — newspapers, network news organizations or the cable news networks. Blogging has facilitated and exacerbated this scandal industry to virtually epic proportions. (The Obama citizenship “scandal” is just the latest example.)

Politico reports that the RNC sent out this bulletin yesterday:

“The Honolulu Star Bulletin reports Barack Obama ate popcorn and watched the 3:40 showing of the Dark Knight in theater 9 yesterday.”

Seriously? This is worthy of a bulletin? It is if you’re desperately grasping for straws for anything to smear your opponent with. Jonathan Martin explains:

Seeing a summer action flick and eating popcorn is hardly elitist, but wait, there is more.

Obama has said, the RNC hastens to note, that Batman and Spiderman are his favorite superheroes, citing their “inner turmoil.”

Ahh, there it is.

Real, red-blooded Americans, evidently, are only supposed to like superheroes because they have nifty outfits and beat up the bad guys. To look beyond the surface or glean some larger meaning from the characters naturally implies Obama has the sort of egghead end effette approach to life that would leaad us to analyze our enemies instead of defeat them.

Or something like that.

It would be easier if he just went wind-surfing.

Let’s forget about the issues. Let’s concentrate all our energy on the innuendo. That’s what helps elect the best person to be the leader of the free world. It’s worked well in the past two election cycles, right?