The Weekly Screed (#628)

Presidential cycle enters
its “Scandalgate” phase
by David Benjamin

PARIS — The contemporary American presidency is a complete waste of time 93 percent of the time. This is because, dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, some genius in the U.S. punditocracy decided that the first 100 days of any presidential term are his (or her) only chance to accomplish a damn thing.

Barack Obama’s 200 days of honeymoon time were used up last month. According to the Gospel of conventional wisdom, his work is finished and we — the American people — are done with him. Rip the poster off the wall.

The end of Obama’s second 100 days launches the “Scandalgate phase” of his presidency. Suddenly, names like Lois Lerner and Susan Rice are popping up on everyone’s “Most Wanted” list and a damage-control artist named Dan Pfeiffer is doing the full Ginsburg on Sunday morning TV. We’re all looking at a 44-month national nightmare that won’t end ‘til Hillary Clinton’s inauguration in 2017.

Dating back to the Sixties, this has been a recurring nightmare. An eruption of scandals — both real and fanciful — has haunted every presidential second term since LBJ. We’re like a shell-shocked Marine remembering, again and again, the booby-trap in Vietnam that killed Charlie, his basic-training bunkmate.

A political scandal has a lot in common with a conspiracy theory. It can’t be proven true, even if it exists — but it works better if it’s largely fictional, because then the fruitless effort to find proof that can’t be found (but whose existence is an article of fanatic faith among a handful of outspoken and tireless public pests) can go on for years, decades, centuries.

Your ideal scandal is a tissue of suspicion, innuendo and exaggeration spun from a few strands of uncorroborated testimony derived from an unreliable source. It wastes the time of hundreds, if not thousands of people, whose time could be more gainfully spent finding animal-shapes in the clouds or searching the lawn on hands and knees for a four-leaf clover. It diverts the nation’s policymakers from even thinking about policy. It shrivels brain cells (especially among the sort of low-grade pols who can’t spare any) like nightcrawlers on a hot sidewalk.

On Capital Hill, a good scandal, pseudo-scandal, mock scandal — or series of thereof — liberates from any hint of commitment any politician fearful of casting any vote that might put him (or her) on the record as favoring or opposing any actual position of any kind. Congress is free to cancel its entire agenda and launch three years of blessed vacation — during which each pol can raise funds, hang out in dark restaurants over long, clandestine lunches with oil lobbyists and wash his (or her) hands fifty times a day, muttering, “Out! Out, damn responsibility!”

A good scandal affords each happily idle Senator and Congressman many moments to wax wroth with moral indignation and launch hyperbole bombs in the megaton range. A classic of this genre was the froot-loop Congressman from Iowa, Steve King, saying that “The Obama administration’s cover-up of the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack surpasses Watergate.”

As illustrated by King’s statement, which has echoed through conservative media like a rifle shot in a cave, a juicy scandal launches waves of propaganda so overwhelming that normal news and information often disappear for months. Infested by platoons of self-styled Lieutenant Gerards, ringing with righteous cries of “J’accuse! J’accuse!”, the United States looks more like the France of Alfred Dreyfus or China in the dark days of Chairman Mao than it does the land of the free and the home of folks brave enough to mind their own beeswax.

A good scandal — or better yet a phony scandal subject to endless speculation and no need to fuss with the inconvenience of evidence — gives the lazy lemmings of the yellow media acres of hip-deep horse manure to shovel, to sift, to mold into fanciful shapes and to smear on innocent passersby.

A good scandal tends to make a celebrity of the underwear-sniffing committee chief who takes on the role of chief prosecutor. In this case, all the soiled scivvies and blurry photos are funneling through the office of Congressman Darrel Issa, Grand Inquisitor of the House Committee on Unseemly Activities.

The final blessing of a good scandal is that is leaves the president with 265 days of peaceful irrelevance. God knows what Barack Obama is going to do with all this time to kill, while Congressmen Issa, King and their cohorts charge him, day after day, with doing naughty stuff he probably didn’t do, and even if he did some of it, it wasn’t illegal or even improper, and even if it was illegal or improper, the evidence is so thin and inconclusive that it wouldn’t be worth pursuing even by a bloodhound as bloodthirsty as Inspector Javert.

The best hope for Obama’s accusers is that, like Bill Clinton, he gets so bored waiting out all the trumped-up scandals that he blunders into a near occasion of sin like Monica Lewinsky and gives the peeping Toms, at last, something to peep at.

Knowing Obama, not likely. But, at least, with the teapot tempests brewing in Benghazigate, Mitziegate at the IRS, and Associated Pressgate  — and whatever else churns next from the scandal-mill — the president’s opponents can rest assured that this administration’s business is a spent and trampled ideal.

Americans can feel secure in the knowledge that neither Obama, nor Congress, nor any responsible grown-up in Washington will accomplish anything on their behalf — beyond the industrial-scale production of vindictive gossip — ‘til sometime in 2017 when Hillary Clinton kicks off her first 100 days.

Or maybe not. With any kind of luck, Obama’s Scandalgate days will spill over into Hillary’s brand new Congress, whose first act just might be impeaching her for killing those four luckless diplomats in Libya, way back in 2012.

Or Vince Foster in 1993.