How Washington deals with crises

As you may know, we have three crises developing in Washington. The first is who knew what related to the attack on our Benghazi mission in Libya last September 11. Second, who really ordered the IRS targeting of Tea Party and similar organizations and finally, the Associated Press’s phone records being examined by the FBI to discover a leak.

I could rehash the details, but broadly speaking the Republicans have created an attack vector to discredit the president and Hillary Clinton. Why? To head off Hillary’s probable run for presidential office in three years by discrediting her, and to weaken President Obama in the meantime. What actually happened in Benghazi takes second place to the political manoeuvrings.

In addition, the IRS has been forced to admit that it focused on harassing Tea Party and similar groups trying to get tax exempt status, the political enemy of the Democrats. For “some reason,” the IRS chose to target them while President Obama is in office. As he is a Democrat, the Republicans want to find if the White House had influence over the IRS. It brings to mind the era of President Nixon, and his dirty tricks. I remember it well.

The Associated Press (AP) is loudly complaining that the FBI should not have seized their phone logs, as protected under the Constitution. The AP reported on a foiled plot to blow up a Yemini airplane. Various governments around the world are upset that details of this plot have been revealed, and that inferred operating techniques of how our CIA and other spy agencies did business. You may note that the AP doesn’t loudly complain when other people’s phone records are subpoenaed, just its own.

The purpose is to express how Washington deals with crises. Broadly speaking almost all crises are used to attack the governing party and discredit anyone with power, currently the Democrats. It really doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, just that the perception should be that the governing party got caught with its hand in the cookie jar.

The executive branch of government, at this time run by Democrat President Obama, is using several tactics to parry the attack. The first is to delay. Delays work as we have such a series of ongoing crises that, with enough time, the public will yawn and lose interest in the crises of yesterday and start complaining about the crises of today.

The second is to state that the evildoers wrongdoers will be held “accountable!” It’s a good pitch, except that it’s usually meaningless unless the president is scared. It rarely mean firing the heads of the agencies in which the screw-ups occurred. It doesn’t usually mean being demoted or being suspended without pay. If anything happens, it will mean that the some of the low level employees will be severely punished, perhaps denied access to the building gym for a few days and that will be that.

I suggest that if the White House is not actually culpable, the likelihood of punitive punishment is greater. In other words, if the White House is innocent of any chicanery then they can punish without blow-back. The fired person, person who resigns will then write a quick tell-all book, appear on the 60 Minutes TV show as a book promotion and laugh all the way to the bank as the political operatives will all buy the book looking for more dirt to use against the opposition. 60 Minutes is known for its book promotions disguised as news stories, and is the “elephant’s graveyard” of broadcasters.

Again, that process will take a long time, what with the investigations and committee meetings, followed by more back and forth debate and vitriolic public grandstanding comments. But the end result is the same… the public will yawn, lose interest and we’ll move on to our next crisis.

The problem with these three, occurring at the same time is that the president may get nervous and facilitate a crisis to move the public’s focus to the new one. What that will be I don’t know, but if it happens it will have to be a really good distraction.

There is an old saying – Time creates objectivity. With the passage of time, the emotional energy on any topic diminishes.

We’ll see what happens.