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Barack Obama can relax and get to work on his hook shot and his putting. The presidential legacy he has fretted over is now clear, well established, safe and secure. The presidential historians can fire up their laptops and let the processing of words begin.
It’s too early to conclude, as some Republicans have, that the dam has broken, that the sleeping mainstream media has begun to come out of its sleeping-sickness stupor, and that even Democrats are about to leap out of the way. Not yet. But the dam has clearly sprung a leak.
Benghazi is no longer “the b-word,” to be relegated to furtive whispers behind the potted plant, spoken like the f-bomb and the n-word, the ugly burps in the language of the uncivilized and the indecent. “For a long time,” concedes Alex Koppelman in the New Yorker, “it seemed like the idea of a cover-up was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.”
And it’s not just Benghazi. The scandal at the Internal Revenue System frightens everyone, given that an IRS audit and a heart attack are the twin terrors of the wee hours of the night. “Previous presidents,” writes Joe Klein in Time magazine, “including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.”
Maureen Dowd, the dowager queen of spleen at The New York Times (where Mo’s toxic rants are applied to Republicans and other conservatives in the absence of waterboards), says the nation’s capital is “in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined . . . as damage control that goes like this: ‘It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.’ The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: ‘Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.’ . . . [But] now that the IRS has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.”
This late evidence that the rhinestone glitteries of the media do, after all, inhabit the same planet as the rest of us is reassuring, even if the glitteries are nevertheless still anxious to protect President Obama from his emerging legacy. “It’s terrible,” Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal a generation ago, says of the IRS targeting conservatives for audits: “Outrageous. Heads ought to roll. Simple as that. From what we know so far, some high-up heads.”
