When the Obama scandals pile up and Obama's image of integrity starts to enter the shredder, what do the most partisan reporters do to fend off the bad publicity? Try to portray the conservatives as "nutso" impeachers. At The Daily Beast, there was this headline Monday: "The Coming Attempt to Impeach Obama: The idea of impeaching Obama is industrial-strength insane. Republicans will probably try anyway, predicts Michael Tomasky."
Tomasky portrays conservatives as "crazy" and Obama as the most clueless of presidents: he knew absolutely nothing about the Benghazi talking points? Then who elected him expecting a competent executive? Tomasky leads with his heart, with his fervent Obama-loving hope that history does not record these scandals as significant:
When the histories of this administration are written, I hope fervently that last Friday, May 10, does not figure prominently in them. But I fear that it might: the double-barrel revelations that the White House hasn’t quite been telling the whole story on Benghazi and that some mid-level IRS people targeted some Tea Party groups for scrutiny are guaranteed to ramp up the crazy.
But to what extent? I fear it could be considerable, and the people in the White House damn well better fear the same, or we’re going to be contemplating an extremely ugly situation come 2015, especially if the Republicans have held the House and captured the Senate in the by-elections.
Tomasky has come quite a way from boosting the "coming Obama landslide" that never arrived in 2012. He felt compelled to trash the would-be impeachers because he had mentioned the I-word on TV and the U.K. Daily Mail jumped on it:
I always held a squishy spot in my breast for the Daily Mail because of the “Paperback Writer” mention, but as of this weekend they can go stick it up their punter, or whatever it is they say. Impeachment is crazy, the Daily Mail is crazy, and the idea that Obama has any direct culpability in either of these matters is, given what we know today, utter madness. Okay?
Tomasky is not one of those liberals who is willing to concede that the IRS scandal is a real offense, and he's not one of those liberals who might ever concede under moral pressure that Obama bears some personal responsibility for "not quite telling the whole story on Benghazi." In short, he doesn't believe in the principle of a press corps holding a president accountable for his administration's actions.
Instead, Tomasky sounds like he's auditioning for the role of Obama's Sidney Blumenthal, an unpaid attack dog for the White House. If he takes a White House job when the scandals really develop, he, like Blumenthal, should expect some back pay. This would be fitting, since Daily Beast boss Tina Brown also unleashed the unpaid party hack Blumenthal on the "nutso right" at The New Yorker during the Clinton corruption cascades.
Here's the nut graf (or the nutso graf):
I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit. Most Republican members of the House live in districts where it is a given (among the white constituents, anyway) that Obama is a socialist; that’s he bent on bringing the United States of America down, or at least that he definitely doesn’t love the country and the Constitution (nudge nudge) the way they do; that he’s not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office to start with.
Even the MSM is responsible for enabling the nuts: "There is no end to it. And there is no end to Republican figures—and to a distressing extent, the mainstream media—feeding the crazy. When Lindsey Graham calls Benghazi “Obama’s Watergate,” he knows exactly what he’s saying, and so do Republicans in South Carolina, and across the country."
Tomasky, like any yellow-dog Democrat, fears how these scandals could lead to Republicans taking over the Senate in the midterms, and how that might enable the conservatives to feed their paranoia:
They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.
I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. It might crescendo right up to his very last day in office. And yes, a lot of this Benghazi stuff is about Hillary Clinton. But not all of it. And the IRS thing, which Drudge led with for two days in a row and may yet be bigger than Benghazi, isn’t about her at all. If my worst fears are never realized—well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do.
