IRS bullshit: This morning Marco Rubio, the Great Latino Hope of the GOP, whined on FOXNews that President Obama hasn’t yet asked the Department of Justice to begin an investigation into the so-called IRS scandal. However, since the DOJ announced they’d opened an investigation into the matter on Tuesday, there’s no need for Obama to ask.

Marco Rubio – willing to make an ass of himself

Obamacare bullshit: Today the U.S. House of Representatives will debate and vote on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It has no more chance of passing today than it did the previous 36 times Republicans demanded a debate and a vote on repealing the law. Let me repeat that. This is the 37th time this has been debated and voted on, and Republicans know it can’t pass. It’s estimated it’ll cost about US$1.75 million taxpayer dollars to hold this pointless debate and vote today. Given that this is the 37th time the issue has been voted on, it’s reasonable to assume these votes have cost taxpayers about sixty-five million dollars.

John Boehner – also willing to make an ass of himself

Related bullshit: The House of Representatives will only meet in session for two days this week. Two days. One of which will be pissed away on the pointless debate and vote on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. , and one of those sessions is today’s debate and vote. Speaker of the House John Boehner doesn’t rule out having still more pointless debates and votes to repeal Obamacare. And you thought Republicans were opposed to government waste.

Darrell Issa – an ass

Benghazi bullshit: Republican Darrell Issa has held 11 Congressional hearings on the Benghazi tragedy. In recent weeks, Issa has criticized the report of the Accountability Review Board that investigated the attack. That review board was led by Thomas Pickering (a former US Ambassador) and Admiral Mike Mullen (a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). On a recent talk show, Issa stated Pickering had “refused to come before our committee” to testify. After Pickering replied that he’d actually requested to appear at the most recent hearing, Issa’s staff backtracked, claiming the request had come too late to fit Pickering into the schedule.

Now both Pickering and Mullen have written a letter to Issa requesting a public hearing at which they could explain and defend their report. Issa’s response: he’d consider inviting them to testify, but in a closed hearing, out of the public view. Why? Issa says he thinks Pickering and Mullen’s testimony would be too partisan. By which he apparently means their testimony won’t correspond with his conspiracy theories.

There’s a LOT more bullshit, of course. But it’s not yet noon and I’ve already exceeded the daily recommended dosage of bullshit.

On my way to the coffee shop just now I saw a copy of USA Today, the lite newspaper. The headline read:

IRS GAVE LIBERALS A PASS

Which is pretty dramatic. It’s also a lie. As are all those headlines comparing President Obama to President Nixon.

I don’t want to minimize what the Internal Revenue Service did by targeting political groups for extra scrutiny. That was absolutely wrong, no mistake. But comparing this event to what Nixon did?  That’s just plain stupid. Aside from the fact that the IRS is involved, the two cases are utterly different.

President Richard Nixon, crook

Nixon and his staff actually made a list of his political enemies. They weren’t exactly open about the list, but neither was it a huge secret. These guys even wrote memoranda about the list — like this one from John Dean, the White House Counsel, to Lawrence Higby, the Assistant Chief of Staff to President Nixon:

This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.

Nixon and his crew were deliberately using the IRS to ‘screw’ people they identified as their political opponents. The investigation of individuals and groups Nixon opposed (or who opposed Nixon) was initiated BY the White House. Now THAT is a scandal.

According to the Inspector General, the current IRS issue was initiated by mid-level bureaucrats within the IRS, and done without the knowledge of the White House. It was a violation of policy and procedure. It’s not a scandal.

So why did these bureaucrats target certain political organizations for extra scrutiny? Because legislation (passed through the efforts of Republicans, by the way) made it possible for individuals to contribute money to certain types of political action committee without their names being disclosed. Donations to PACs whose purpose is political are NOT tax deductible; donations to PACs whose purpose is general social welfare ARE tax deductible.

And guess what. The IRS is actually obligated BY CONGRESS to do just that. They’re legally required to review every application for tax-exempt status to insure the group requesting the exemption isn’t partisan, political, or designed to generate private gain. The only problem is the bureaucrats chose to use some pretty vague and inappropriate keywords to determine which political groups should be given a closer look. They cast too wide a net.

Obviously, what happened in the IRS is nothing at all like the crimes committed by the Nixon White House — though you wouldn’t know that from the reporting or the ranting of Republicans in Congress. Nor, if you read the headlines of USA TODAY, would you be aware that liberal groups were also unfairly targeted. And in fact, the ONLY targeted group to be denied tax exempt status during the 18 months of the extra scrutiny was Emerge America, a group that helps train Democrat women who are running for political office. None of the conservative or Republican groups were denied tax exempt status. So the headline in USA TODAY is not only incorrect, it’s not only lazy reporting, it’s the exact opposite of the truth. It’s a lie.

So much for that ‘liberal media’ myth.

Oh my god, oh my god, now I get it. Now I understand why President Obama must be impeached. He called the assault on the US mission compound in Benghazi “an act of terrorism.” He didn’t say it was “a terrorist attack.” It’s so clear to me, now that Darrell Issa has explained it:

“An act of terror is different from a terrorist attack. The TRUTH is, this was a terrorist attack.”

According to Issa, Ambassador Stevens, before he was killed, made a telephone call in which he said “We are under attack.” Did he say “We are currently experiencing an act of terror”? No sir, he did not. Obama must be impeached for misleading the American public and for using Socialist Grammar techniques he learned as a Muslim boy in Kenya.

According to Issa, President Obama personally made three three fundamental mistakes. First, the US mission compound in Benghazi needed more security, but didn’t get it. Okay, maybe it’s true that Congressional Republicans voted to reduce Obama’s budget request for the two agencies responsible for providing security to embassies and ambassadors by nearly half a billion dollars over the last two years. But that was just to trim waste, and besides it was Obama who actually made the cuts — so clearly it’s his fault

Second, the attack lasted seven hours and there was no military response. None at all. Except for the well-trained six-member CIA assault team sent in to rescue the American personnel. But other than that, nothing. “You can take off from Washington, DC on a commercial flight,” Issa said, “and practically be in Benghazi at the end of seven hours.” And yes, maybe he was off by a wee bit. Okay, maybe it would take closer to twenty-seven hours. But Issa was just making a point; there’s no need to get fussy about details.

And third, Issa says “the American people deserve real time information” on these crisis events. Real time. Sure, that may not even be possible, but dammit the American people deserve it anyway. And yes yes, feeding real time information to the public might actually exacerbate a crisis and add to the confusion, and yes maybe providing real time information to the public would also provide real time information to the people carrying out the act of terrorism terrorist attack. But hey, the American people deserve it and if there are any unfortunate consequences, they’d be worth it in order to…to…you know. Benghazi socialist Muslim birth certificate.

There you go. Maybe now you understand why it was so vitally important to have held eleven hearings on Benghazi in the last eight months. If the Republicans in Congress weren’t doing this, they’d have to…I don’t know…govern or something.

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. We’ve all heard that. It was originally said by Dr. Samuel Johnson in April of 1775, and recorded that same evening by his biographer James Boswell. What usually gets left out, though, are the rest of Boswell’s comments.

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.

It’s that last bit that matters most. That ‘cloak of self-interest’ business. By that measure, Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, is a patriot.

Senator Lindsey Graham, cloaked in self-interest

Graham is regarded by the right wing conservative Christian branch of the Republican Party (which, let’s face it, is the main branch these days) as a closeted ‘Nancy-boy’ who is a Republican In Name Only. Since he’s facing re-election next year, and is alarmed at the notion of being forced to run against a Tea Party candidate in a primary election, Graham has been trying to butch up and present himself as more conservative. One way he does that is by talking tough on terrorism and immigration.

Graham has said he wants Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving member of the brothers accused of the Boston Marathon bombing, to be treated as an enemy combatant. He specifically tweeted that position:

The Law of War allows us to hold individual in this scenario as potential enemy combatant w/o Miranda warnings or appointment of counsel.

The phrase ‘enemy combatant,’ by the way, isn’t just a generic description; it’s a legal term of art. It has a specific legal definition which is too tedious to repeat, but here’s how it’s generally defined by the U.S. Department of Defense:

In general, a person engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners during an armed conflict.

Graham is a lawyer; he knows this. What happens if Tsarnaev is declared an enemy combatant? Two important things. First, the status and rights of an enemy combatant are different than those of an accused criminal. As Graham said in his tweet, enemy combatants are held according to the Laws of War — they don’t get lawyers and they aren’t charged with crimes; they can be grilled for intelligence about the enemy, though, and then like the captured pieces in chess they’re removed from the board until the game is over.

Basically, Graham wants to Gitmo this kid’s sorry ass. And an awful lot of people agree with him. They seem to believe that because the Tsarnaev brothers were Muslims and because their parents are Chechens, that the bombing must be related to Islamic extremism and ethnic nationalism. From what I’ve read about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, that may accurately describe his motivations. From what I’ve read about Dzhokhar (who by most accounts is a stoner who switched colleges because he preferred the party atmosphere of the new school), it doesn’t seem to describe him at all.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

The second reason a move to designate Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an enemy combatant is important is because it removes him from the criminal justice system. If, as Graham wants, we treat this kid as an enemy combatant, we’re required to view him as a soldier in a war rather than as a criminal who committed a crime. To my mind, that elevates Tsarnaev’s actions; it gives them a dignity they don’t deserve. A soldier who infiltrates enemy territory and commits an audacious assault is a hero to his people. This kid wasn’t attacking enemies; he was just killing and mutilating innocent people. He doesn’t deserve to be treated as a warrior; he deserves to be treated as a common criminal.

For people like Lindsey Graham, the problem with being a common criminal is that accused criminals have rights. They have, among others, the right to remain silent, the right not to be forced to incriminate themselves, the right to legal counsel, and the right to a speedy trial by a jury of their peers. And if those rights are to have any meaning at all, they have to be given to every person accused of a crime, even if that person is blatantly and obviously guilty of an exceedingly heinous crime.

This what offends Graham and his cohort — the notion that we, as a nation, have to provide and protect the rights of a person who committed a horrific crime. They apparently interpret this approach as protecting the guilty. It’s not. Not really. It’s protecting the innocent. I’m not suggesting Dzhokhar is innocent; I’m saying that in order to protect the truly innocent, the rights of the accused have to be afforded to everybody accused. It’s not about protecting the guilty, it’s about protecting society. It’s about protecting the things we believe in.

What Graham believes in is getting re-elected. So he’s talking tough. He’s not thinking (or he doesn’t care) about the larger reality. If we were to put this kid in Guantanamo, he’d become something of a martyr. If we put him in prison, he’s just another criminal.

I happened to watch an old episode of the second season of The West Wing last night. The episode takes place shortly after an attempt is made to murder the President’s body man, a young African-American. Some of the White House staff are angry because the law protects the people who tried to murder their friend. One of the characters shakes his head and asks “What can you say about a country that protects the very people who trying to destroy it?” After a dramatic pause, another character responds, “God bless America.”

I don’t believe in God. But despite all the many reasons not to, I do believe in the United States of America. I believe in it enough to protect the rights of its citizens, even if that citizen is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — even if it’s his brother Tamarlan. I believe this nation is made stronger by protecting those rights. And I believe Lindsey Graham is a patriot. At least by Johnson’s definition.