The Farce That Is Darrell Issa

By Joan Walsh, Salon

04 June 13

He's a buffoon whom even some in his own party attack. But make no mistake: He is a symbol of today's GOP

he only thing that makes Rep. Darrell Issa remotely qualified to chair the House Oversight Committee is his personal familiarity with the investigative process - on the receiving end. The man Republican House Speaker John Boehner put in charge of investigating government wrongdoing was himself indicted for stealing a car, accused of stealing at least one other car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and twice suspected of insurance fraud - and once extensively investigated by authorities for arson, because his former business associates accused him, on the record, of burning down a building to collect the insurance payout.

Democrats love to hate the silly, camera-chasing Issa, who came to power in 2011 promising to put the White House under generalized investigation. But now even some Republicans are happy to criticize Issa too. It's easy for them to denounce his calling Jay Carney a "paid liar," as well as his evidence-free claim that the IRS mess was directed from Washington, D.C., while they continue to participate in smearing the White House with non-scandals themselves, nonetheless.

Issa's extremist idiocy lets "reasonable" Republicans denounce him and/or his rhetoric, while they continue their own ethically, intellectually and politically blinkered crusades against President Obama. Sure, Sen. John McCain says it was wrong to call Carney a "paid liar" - but also on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," he compared the IRS mess to Ronald Reagan's deadly Iran-Contra scandal. Um, no.

Scandal-drunk Sen. Lindsey Graham says Issa went too far when he said the IRS agents who keyword-targeted Tea Party groups "were directly being ordered from Washington." But he continued to hype the IRS story. "At the end of the day, the IRS scandal really is scary," he told Fox's Brian Kilmeade. "How would you like your own government to turn on you?" Is that really what happened, Lindsey Graham? And if so, it happened most brutally to a Democratic group, Emerge America, which had its tax-exempt status revoked.

Of course, McCain and Graham are also the guys who brought us the ultimate non-scandal: Benghazi. Issa's idiocy lets them retain their role as "statesmen," gets them invited back on the Sunday shows, and gives the media an excuse to consider them arbiters of what's politically acceptable - while they're themselves on the right fringe. Of course it's guys like Issa who constantly move that standard of what's politically acceptable to the right.

Honestly, when David Plouffe started raising Issa's past on ABC's "This Week," and then on Twitter, part of me winced. But that's because I didn't completely remember Ryan Lizza's amazing Issa profile in the New Yorker - which was respectful while also documenting Issa's troubling history with law enforcement - as well as my own life in California during the surreal 2003 recall of Gray Davis (another example of GOP nullification of election results, by any means necessary, usually big money).

Issa financed the recall, and hoped to run for governor himself, but then the Los Angeles Times and other California papers began reporting on his earlier legal troubles. There was particular attention to his indictment for grand theft when he reported his Mercedes stolen after his brother William sold it; William had earlier obtained the right to do so from his brother. The two men had different stories for a while, and authorities believed they'd conspired to sell the car, report a "theft" and collect insurance on it.

(I personally think the arson investigation was even more damning: An Issa colleague gave investigators vivid detail that indicated his car-alarm factory had been intentionally torched, after Issa increased his insurance from $100,000 to $462,000. "Quite frankly," Joey Adkins told authorities, "I feel the man set the fire." But the local fire marshal never determined the fire's cause.)

In the end, the scrutiny doomed Issa's chance to run for governor - but his wealth funded the successful recall of Davis. Sure, Issa could continue to hold his House seat in his conservative San Diego district, but a guy as ethically compromised (and as blinkered ideologically) as Issa could never win a statewide election in California - let alone a national one. So he tearfully stepped aside for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So that's the guy who's heading up the House GOP's investigation into alleged Obama White House "scandals."

Sen. Chuck Schumer got a lot of attention Monday for telling "Meet the Press's" David Gregory that Issa's overreach is setting up a GOP loss in 2014 - just like the impeachment witch hunt against President Clinton set up his party's historic gain of seats in the 1998 midterms. I hope Schumer's right. But I find myself taking little comfort even in that uncertain outcome.

Democrats, including myself, like to declare that impeachment didn't resonate with the American people, who gave Clinton ever-higher approval ratings as the witch hunt continued. And yes, Clinton's party won seats in the '98 midterm. But impeachment, and the myriad baseless investigations that preceded it, from Whitewater to Travelgate to alleged Chinese fundraising scandals, preoccupied both the White House and the media, to the detriment of Clinton's agenda, particularly in his second term. They certainly didn't help Vice President Al Gore in his campaign to win the presidency.

While I've always rejected the claims of some anti-Clinton centrist Democrats that Clinton's philandering cost Gore the election, there was at least some polling that suggested it hurt Gore with suburban women. Certainly the cloud of scandal - and the stalling of the Clinton-Gore agenda - couldn't have helped Gore, who won the popular vote and by reliable accounts the electoral vote in a race that shouldn't have even been as close as it was, given the strength of the economy and the deficits of George W. Bush. I would argue that Clinton's experience proves GOP scandal-mongering works - and once again, the media let the party get away with it.

I'm happy even some mainstream media pundits are warning that Issa's overreach could hurt the GOP in 2014. And yet that new rhetorical twist puts the focus on horse race politics, where all of journalism appears most comfortable today. Issa's extremism may or may not hurt his party at the polls. All I know is it should be hurting him, and the GOP, more with the American people, when they think about what they want in their leaders.

Bradley Manning Court-Martial, Day One: Attacks on the Media Are the Extension of the Battlefield

By Bill Simpich, Reader Supported News

04 June 13

t was quite a first day at the Bradley Manning court-martial. For one thing, his defense team ate the government prosecutors for lunch. That part was no contest. For example, the prosecution tried to coax Bradley's former roommate to run him down. Although the two were not friends, the roommate was not about to snitch on him. That went nowhere. But other things did.

During his opening statement, the prosecutor displayed on a video screen the chat logs of Bradley Manning with Julian Assange. You get the feeling that the government would still like to find a way to bring down the journalist Assange, not just Manning. All of a sudden, this government exhibit was remarkably blurry - much of it could not be read, for some strange reason. But a key sentence could be read. The prosecutor invited the judge to read what the chat log said, but refrained from reading it out loud.

Manning's lawyer David Coombs picked right up on it, and made that chat log item a key part of his argument. Manning was telling Assange that the government documents that he was releasing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would result in "removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st Century asymmetrical warfare." Manning's goal was to inspire the American people to act.

Is it any surprise that the judge and the Army press office managed to scare off 250 media organizations from covering the first day of trial? Only seventy media credentials were issued in a non-transparent process that demanded submitting previous articles for vetting by the Army media corps. Nonetheless, more than a hundred reporters managed to claw their way into the media center, perching on every spare patch of carpet and clutching their laptops. No cell phones allowed - that might aid the process of reporting. No access to copies of the video or audio feed in the hands of the government - that might enable fact-checking.

The rest of us had to lock our laptops with our cellphones and our food, stand in the pouring rain, submit to invasive searches, and lots more. The two hundred and fifty media people that were not issued credentials were told that they were welcome to stand in line and see if they could get a seat in the Army's handpicked courtroom, which holds approximately fifty spectators. Quite naturally, these organizations decided not to show up and stand in the rain all day. They were not told that an entire theater had been opened up for overflow spectators, after repeated complaints and lawsuits. The role of the military media corps, as they will tell you after a couple of drinks, is the extension of the battlefield by other means.

A seasoned court-watcher knows that the key dates to attend a trial are for the opening statements on day one, for the defendant's testimony on day whatever, and for closing arguments on the last day. Colonel Denise Lind, the veteran military judge presiding over the Manning court-martial, wrote the leading law review article on how to handle the media at a military trial thirteen years ago. She is the leading expert on how to feed and water them, how to give them everything that they don't need, and how to deny them everything of substance - transcripts, documents, and access. If, as she admits in her state-of-the-art analysis, the "right of access is the right to attend a proceeding and to hear, see, and communicate observations about it," how can you deny reporters and the public the right to their cellphones and their laptops in an overflow room where the courtroom is far, far away? Is it any wonder that she was chosen by the Army for this trial?

To beat back this kind of repression, we have to tell the story of Bradley Manning at every dinner table in this land. We have to demand that our news outlets run the Manning story every day. We are going to federal court to make sure that all three hundred and fifty news teams are able to see the key testimony and hear the closing arguments. We have about eight to twelve weeks before the judge hands down her verdict. There is no other way.