Remember the Obama Scandals? That Used to Be a Thing
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/obama-scandals-used-to-be-a-thing.html
(Emphases mine)
What about the rest of the scandals? Well, there arent any, and there never were. Benghazi is a case of a bunch of confused agencies caught up in a fast-moving story trying to coordinate talking points. The ever-shifting third leg of the Obama scandal trifecta Obamas prosecution of leaks, or use of the National Security Agency is not a scandal at all. Its a policy controversy. One can argue that Obamas policy stance is wrong, or dangerous, or a threat to democracy. But when the president is carrying out duly passed laws and acting at every stage with judicial approval, then the issue is the laws themselves, not misconduct.
The whole Obama scandal episode is a classic creation of a narrative the stitching together of unrelated data points into a story. What actually happened is this: House Republicans passed a twisted account of a hearing to ABCs Jonathan Karl, who misleadingly claimed to have seen it, creating the impression that the administration was caught in a major lie. Then the IRS story broke, which we now see was Republicans demanding a one-sided audit and thus producing the impression of one-sided treatment. In that context, legitimate controversies over Obamas civil-rights policies became the three Obama scandals, exposing a government panopticon, if not a Nixonian administration bent on revenge.
The collapse of the Benghazi story happened very quickly, when Jake Tappers reporting found that Karl had peddled a bogus story. (Its notable that the only misconduct in both the Benghazi and the IRS stories was committed by House Republicans.) But the scandal cloud lingered through the still-extant IRS scandal, which in turn lent the scandal odor to the civil-liberties dispute. Now that the IRS scandal has turned into a Darrell Issa scandal, were left with
an important dispute over domestic surveillance, which has nothing to do with scandal at all. The entire scandal narrative was an illusion.
We have laws on the books right now that pretty much all of us disagree with. Can we start from there as this being the problem with surveillance?