By Emily Theroux

Let me get this straight.

1. A recent document dump of emailed Obama administration talking points on Benghazi has provoked an enormous uproar on the right. But Obama press secretary Jay Carney says that these very emails had been given a pass by congressional Republicans months ago.
2. After the classified details of a thwarted terrorist plot were leaked by an unknown government source, the Department of Justice seized the phone records of numerous Associated Press reporters and editors. President Obama claimed he knew nothing about this unconstitutional power play — an admission that led conservatives to dub him “the bystander president.” Meanwhile, news of the DOJ’s actions scared off carefully cultivated sources from talking to journalists.
3. An Internal Revenue Service report revealed that the agency improperly targeted conservative organizations (particularly those with Tea Party affiliations) that applied for tax-exempt 501(c)(4) status during the 2012 presidential campaign.

This triple whammy of bad news hit both the Obama administration PR machine and the right-wing Obama scandal-mongering industry with superstorm force. The president, the attorney general, and IRS officials were left with a toxic omelet on their faces and more than a little explaining to do. The right reaped a bonanza of new fronts to exploit in their ongoing assault on Obama’s integrity as well as his second-term agenda, and loose talk of “the ‘I’ word” — impeachment — was fast-tracked by the extremists around whom the notion first began to coalesce.

The Fourth Estate and indeed, anyone concerned with maintaining a free press, are hopping mad over the AP controversy — and understandably paranoid.  Attorney General Eric Holder claimed he had “recused himself” from any involvement in the matter, thus shirking all responsibility for calling for the AP subpoenas. (Harry Truman must be rolling over in his grave. What happened to “The buck stops here”?)

As for the GOP’s tiresome Benghazi obsession, the right has been trolling since the president’s election for an “Obama Watergate.” First, they seized on birtherism, then the president’s historic health care reform act. Near the end of the 2012 presidential campaign, the right pounced on the consulate attack in Benghazi, even though 12 terrorist attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities occurred during the Bush era, with numerous fatalities, and Republicans issued nary a peep about any of them.

Darrell Issa will undoubtedly forge ahead with his House Oversight Committee’s Benghazi witch hunt. The right’s main event, however, seems to be pivoting to exploitation of the IRS “crisis,” along with a generous side helping of denial that the much-reviled “Obamacare” reforms have already begun contributing to the reduction of the deficit. (And sure enough, just before the 38th vote by Boehner’s GOP House majority to repeal the Affordable Care Act, batcrap-crazy Michelle Bachmann stepped up to the mic to conflate Benghazi hysteria with what she considers Obamacare’s “government overreach.”)

Shades of Casablanca! The GOP is “shocked — SHOCKED!” that the IRS would use seemingly underhanded tactics against an administration’s political enemies. Never mind that the IRS has employed similar tactics during Republican administrations — or that it is the agency’s job to investigate tax-exempt  groups that appear to be pursuing primarily political goals.

Not that conservative groups are the only culprits. Both Republican and Democratic super-PACs have exhibited  a penchant for flouting the rules that govern assignment of tax-exempt status (although it’s the proliferation of applications by conservative groups that has attracted so much recent IRS attention).

Both camps have been guilty of exploiting the laxity and chaos created by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, taking advantage of the confusion to set up political organs that masquerade as “social welfare” groups —and, as 501 (c)(4)s,are able to raise stupendous sums of money without being required to disclose the identities of their donors.

Yet while John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, and Rush Limbaugh rant on, blowing the brouhaha out of all reasonable proportion, they conveniently ignore the fact that during Dubya’s tenure, the agency went after liberal organizations, including the NAACP, Greenpeace, and a progressive Pasadena church.

* * *

Is this triple threat a tempest in a teapot? Not necessarily, but journalists can bet their White House press passes that members of the GOP/wingnut media circus will flog it for all they’re worth, right up to Election Day 2014.

The Obama team has swung into damage control mode. At the IRS, one head has rolled, although likely not the right one. The president is no longer calling the Benghazi hearings “a sideshow,” and though he’s offered no apology for the DOJ’s AP snooping, he has cynically attempted to “make nice” by proposing a dead-in-the-water federal journalist shield law that the president of the Society of Professional Journalists has branded “a blatantly political move.”

Meanwhile, the Bobbleheads babble randomly and pose nonsensical paradoxes. “Is the president too passive and too reactive?” one pundit asked another. Is Obama “Nixonian”? Has “the narrative” undergone a sea change, or is this just “same-old, same-old”? Does the Obama White House have a “transparency issue”?  Is the right merely proposing “retreads”?

Is there really no “there” there?

At this early stage in the game, I’ve been able to make neither elephant’s trunks nor donkey’s asses of this mind-boggling travesty. So I decided to toss the “three-headed hydra” (salutations to MSNBC’s Alex Wagner) into an acronym salad in verse, served up with extra-tart vinaigrette dressing. (My humblest apologies to Calvin Trillin, who uses longer lines to much better effect — and nails both rhyme and meter every time.)

No ‘There’ There

Triple scandal!
How to handle?
Nonchalantly;
Doesn’t daunt me.

“I just heard it
Same day you did.”
Who disclosed it?
“Don’t know who did.”

POTUS aloof.
Colbert spoofs.
McConnell drools;
He’s no fool.

Wingnut right
Spoils for fight.
All they see:
Benghazi.

Congress bickers;
Cantor snickers.
Boehner rails,
“Who’s going to jail?”

Secrets leaked.
AP tweaked.
Press freaked.
Villain “seeked.”

Brewing tea?
Iced for me.
Effect’s chilling.
Colbert’s killing!

IRS —
What a mess!
Nixon did this?
Couldn’t care less.

Hypocrites!
Issa snits.
Bachmann conflates.
Rand Paul’s irate.

House votes.
Sh-t floats.
Obamacare?
“No there there.”

POTUS steps up,
Doesn’t fess up.
His D.O.J.
Is M.I.A.

Buck passed.
Freepers pissed.
Don’t know what
To make of this.

AG recuses;
Press refuses
To back down,
So POTUS loses.

Term Two derailed.
Epic FAIL!
White House snoozes:
Electorate loses.

By Jeffrey Page

There he goes again. Mitt Romney, who never allows the truth to stand in the way of what looks like a lethal blow against an opponent, told a whopper at the Tuesday night debate. But he was caught. And I am left wondering what it is about the protocols of presidential politics that seems to require a debater to say, “Governor, that’s not true” rather than “Governor, that’s a damned lie.”

This time, the issue was Romney’s shameless – and ultimately fact-less – politicization of the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Romney smelled blood in the water. He would nail President Obama for not responding quickly enough to the attack and specifically for failing to label the assault – in which four Americans including the ambassador to Libya were killed – an act of terrorism.

For weeks before the debate, he hinted that Obama somehow had dismissed the incident as the spontaneous actions of demonstrators enraged by the making of the 14-minute movie “The Innocence of Muslims,” which maligns the prophet Mohammed, rather than as a planned act of pure terror.

Now, the fact is that you know the truth about Obama’s behavior after the attack, I know the truth, the president certainly knows the truth, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton knows the truth, and anybody who was paying attention on Sept. 12 knows the truth. Maybe even Romney knows the truth, or maybe he’ll say anything, do anything, suggest anything – anything at all – to get elected.

It took too long for Obama to conclude this was an act of terror?

As it turns out, President Obama and Secretary Clinton appeared in the White House Rose Garden the day after the attack on the Libyan mission to express their sorrow to the families of the dead, their anger at the killers, their concern for American-Libyan relations, and their resolve to bring the killers to justice.

And there it was. “No acts of terror,” Obama said, “will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” Poor Mitt.

At the debate, Romney was flabbergasted when the question of what the president said and when he said it, was raised. “I think [it] interesting the president just said something, which is that on the day after the attack he went into the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror.”

Obama: “That’s what I said.”

Romney couldn’t believe it: “You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack, it was an act of terror, it was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you’re saying?”

A moment later, Romney, still confounded, said: “I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”

Obama: “Get the transcript.”

In stepped Candy Crowley, the moderator: “He did call it an act of terror. It did as well take – it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea [of] there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.”

This wasn’t good enough for Romney, or else he didn’t care about the veracity of his criticism of Obama. Or maybe it was Romney’s secret message to the American people in which he revealed his personal pathetic inadequacy. It’s Mitt Romney who has sworn that on his first day in office as president he would label the Chinese as “currency manipulators.” First day leaves little time for discussion and reasonableness.

The first debate revealed a lot about Romney. Tuesday night’s meeting confirmed it. There’s his casual relationship with the facts and the truth. There’s his constant smirk. There’s his contempt for authority, such as his interrupting the moderator to try and set his own rules of engagement. There’s his dismissal of the rules of the game. There’s his continual attempt to get the last word even when the last word is not his to get.