By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--June 4, 2013
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"Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today," Plouffe tweeted on Sunday, linking to a video of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman on CNN's "State of the Union"calling Carney a "paid liar"who was "making things up" about the IRS scandal.
Issa has been one of the leading voices in Congress criticizing the White House over the scandal, in which an IRS inspector general found that employees targeted nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status for more scrutiny if they included words like "tea party" or "patriot" in their tax documents. Issa is a successful businessman whose is the nation's largest manufacturer of anti-theft devices in vehicles. Though he and his brother were charged with stealing a car in the 1970s, prosecutorslater dropped charges,and Issa said he was a victim in the incident, according to a New Yorker profile of Issa from 2011. After a suspicious fire at his business's factory, the company's former owner said he suspected Issa set the fire for insurance, but a cause of the fire was never determined and no charges were filed, according to the profile.And the MSM pounces, almost uniformly singing the praises of Obama debate assistant Candy Crowley for jumping all over Issa during an interview on Sunday, but taking it way, way beyond that. According to the National Journal's Ron Fournier, who is the official transcriber of Beltway Conventional Wisdom, Issa is Joseph McCarthy:
See what he's doing? "We understand" and "in all likelihood" are weasel phrases couching accusations and assumptions that Issa can't support. But don't worry; he might prove them after 18 more interviews! Do you hear history's echo? Sen. Joe McCarthy paved his way to infamy with 205 names. " I have here in my hand a list of 205 -- a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party ...," McCarthy said in 1950. (There is some dispute over the actual number of names McCarthy cited.) Crowley pointed out the obvious -- that Issa had "no direct link" between the wrongdoing of IRS agents and political leaders in Washington. Issa replied, "The president's spokesman is saying whatever is convenient at the time and the story changes." That sentence is irony wrapped in raw partisanship and infused with hypocrisy. If Issa is going to call Carney a liar, he might want to step outside his glass house.So let me see if I have this straight: Issa doesn't have enough of a "smoking gun" to call Jay Carney a liar (which he clearly is, as we've demonstrated here), but Ron Fournier is on solid ground calling Issa a McCarthyite? But wait. It turns out Issa is not just Joseph McCarthy. He's Al Sharpton too! Francis Wilkinson explains via Bloomberg:
Issa's love of political theater and his penchant for wild accusations have rendered the House Oversight Committee he chairs completely ineffective. His investigations have been a joke. His hearings are models of partisan hackery. Yesterday he called White House press secretary Jay Carney a "paid liar" -- the kind of language that someone with Issa'srecordoffalsehoodsshould probably avoid. But in the annals of cheap demagogy, the California Republican is a footnote compared with the Reverend Sharpton. I've never gotten over MSNBC's appalling decision to hire Sharpton as a host. Apparently Stuart Stevens hasn't either. In his Daily Beast article, he dredges up the Tawana Brawley affair, a hoax so personally vicious and socially destructive that Sharpton's central role in it should have permanently disqualified him from any position of responsibility anywhere in American society.You see how this works? What's important is not whether the IRS abused its power to trample on the rights of Americans, nor whether administration officials lied about it. What matters is whether a Republican member of Congress investigating the matter can be discredited by the media, and if he can, they have an excuse to whitewash the whole thing. Does this sound familiar? It's akin to the media's attacks on Ken Starr for the manner in which he investigated Bill Clinton, which were allowed to become as important as the fact that the president of the United States lied under oath and obstructed justice. Yes, but Ken Starr's movie rentals were weird! So one cancelled out the other in their minds. This, of course, is also part and parcel to the emerging media theme of Republican overreach in the investigation. You can pretty much count on this going forward. If they must cover a Democratic scandal, they will at the very least treat Republican conduct during the investigation as an equally relevant story/scandal. And they think Darrell Issa makes for a good whipping boy because he is brash and doesn't back down from the fight. If the media are allowed to get away with it, this will be their method of saving Obama. Issa's horribleness will become the thing that discredits the entire story and compels them to let Obama off the hook. They're busily crafting the narrative as we speak. They're still mad at Obama, but it's as natural as breathing for them to attack a Republican, so they're going all in. Those who have the ability to hold them to account for this had better do it.
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