gracchusdixit

The ultimate rallying cry of the right wing nuts who now run the Republican Party is “liberty”.  They used that rallying cry to shut down the government and very nearly drive the nation over a fiscal cliff.  They are still using it to justify their senseless actions to the voters and to themselves.

Personal liberty is among the most cherished of American ideals.  But it is not the only one—a fact that tea party Republicans refuse to accept or acknowledge.

The greatest of the other American ideals is equality—not the elusive and deceptive concept, “equality of opportunity,” but real, honest to goodness equality:  personal, social, racial and, yes, economic.

People like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Paul Ryan perpetually pit these American ideals against one another.   They tell us that we cannot have both and must resist the one to preserve the other.  Indeed, they go further.  They claim that any attempt by government to regulate the so-called free market or level the playing field between rich and poor is positively un-American—a kind of “class warfare” and a violation of personal liberty leading straight to the bottomless hell of “socialism”.  Decades ago, demagogues like Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan used to threaten us with the even more horrific specter of “communism,”  knowing full well that communism never had the slightest chance of gaining any traction in the United States.  Their successors today would do the same if they thought could get away with it.  But even the most idiotic among them realize the bogeyman of communism disappeared so long ago that such a threat would now be laughable.

The claim that liberty and equality are opposing values is, and always has been, an outright falsehood, designed to mask the true agenda of those who insist on the contradiction.  The opposite is true.  The truth is that real liberty is impossible without equality, particularly economic equality.  Wealth is power, and power is an instrument of force.  When wealth is apportioned in grotesquely unequal ways, real liberty cannot exist.

Examples of this simple truth are all around us.

Consider the disastrous decision of the Supreme Court several years ago to treat corporations as “persons,” giving them a Constitutional right to use their riches to influence elections and, for all practical purposes, to buy political candidates.  In upholding “freedom of speech” for wealthy corporations, the Court completely ignored the obvious reality that speech cannot be “free” when it goes on the auction block.  The Supreme Court will soon hear an even more egregious case, in which one conservative billionaire wants all limits on political contributions lifted on the grounds that he should be “free to spend my money any way I want”.  If the Court gives in again to this specious logic, only the highest bidders in the auction will be “free”.  The rest of us will be silenced.

Or consider our fundamentally unequal system of medical care, in which those with money are “free” to buy whatever care they choose but those with no money are “free” to sicken or go bankrupt or die.  In the run-up to the American Revolution, Patrick Henry famously said:  “Give me liberty or give me death.”  Little did he foresee that millions of Americans would, two centuries later, have no other choice.

We’ve heard a lot about the “one percent,” who now own more than thirty percent of the country’s wealth.  It’s even worse than that.

Every year, Forbes magazine publishes a list of the 400 richest Americans.  That’s not “one percent.”  That’s one in a million.  The average wealth of the one in a million on the latest Forbes list is five billion dollars, and their combined wealth is two trillion.  Thus, one millionth of the population has enough money to cover the annual costs of both Social Security and Medicare for three years, enough money to pay off the entire federal deficit for five years.  It scarcely needs saying that they will never be asked to pay for either.

The ultimate reality is that in a profoundly and increasingly unequal society, personal liberty ceases to be a right and becomes, instead, a commodity, which can be bought and sold like any other, purchased by the few, denied to the rest.  Liberty and equality are not enemies.  The true enemy of liberty is inequality.  Until we realize that, we will continue to live in a society that is neither equal nor free.

Dick Cheney notoriously once said:  “Deficits don’t matter.”  He was pilloried at the time, not because he was wrong but because he was right.  And what he said about the deficit could just as easily be said about the national debt.   The current manufactured crisis over raising the “ceiling” on our national debt is a thus charade, and both sides of the argument know it.

The truth of the matter is that raising the debt ceiling is largely a psychological gesture, which says to the world:  for the time being, we’ll continue to send you interest payments, and you can continue to pretend you’ll get your money back some day.  Such symbolism is not unimportant, but it shouldn’t be confused with reality.  Debt is, and always has been, a game of musical chairs in which someone is eventually left without a place to sit or a penny to spend.  The only thing that matters, to debtor and creditor alike, is to keep the music going as long as possible.

Republicans constantly prattle on that the country should be run like a sensible household or, better yet, an “efficient” corporation, with a tidy “balance sheet”.  These homely metaphors would be merely silly if they weren’t being used to advance the loony idea that the financial catastrophe of trying to “balance the books” might somehow be good for us.  A nation isn’t a household, and it certainly isn’t a corporation.  This is particularly true of the United States of America.

We have the largest economy in the world, and our public debt is the de facto currency on which the rest of the global economy runs.   We are constantly being threatened with the possibility that our Asian creditors may someday pull the plug and demand their money back.   That’s ridiculous.  Where else are the thrifty Chinese or Japanese going to park their savings?  They need American debt just as much as we do—perhaps more so—and if they pulled the plug, they know full well that they’d be left sitting on a mountain of suddenly worthless paper higher than the Himalayas.  A nation’s debt has value only as long as nobody asks for the money back.

More crudely, we also have the largest military establishment in the world.  No one on the planet is capable of forcing us to pay off our debts until we actually choose to do so.   There will undoubtedly come a day when this is no longer the case.  Military muscle doesn’t last forever, either for us or for the innumerable “empires” that came before us.  But for the time being, our creditors have no interest in turning us over to some global collection agency, because they know that no such agency exists.  You might even say that our debt isn’t debt at all but, rather, a form of implicit taxation:  buy our bonds or we blow you to smithereens; buy our bonds or we’ll let someone else blow you to smithereens.

Finally, unlike households or corporations, governments are perfectly capable of printing all the money they want to pay their bills, and our money just happens to be the world’s principal medium of exchange.  Don’t get me wrong.  Printing money has undesirable consequences, inflation being the main one.  A surge of inflation would be painful for everyone, most especially for ordinary working Americans, but it would, within nanoseconds, turn our national debt into chicken feed.

History, not the debt ceiling, is the only reality that counts.  As long as we remain the foremost economic and military power in the world, the game of musical chairs we’ve bee playing for 75 years will continue.  When our turn at the piano finally ends, somebody else will be playing the tune, and the rest of the world will once again be singing merrily along.

Americans are thoroughly disgusted by what they believe to be the dysfunctional polarization of our political process.  Where, they ask, is the spirit of compromise?  Why, they wonder, can’t our elected officials put aside their differences and get down to the people’s business?  This disgust is entirely understandable—but it assigns blame inaccurately.

The reality is that our current fix hasn’t been caused by the idiocy of tea party politicians, although they are idiotic enough and have much to answer for:  their refusal to act in behalf of the nation as a whole; their intransigent and at times blatantly racist contempt for Barack Obama; their irrational hatred of government, combined with a refusal to acknowledge how much their own constituents owe to government.  To hear tea party politicians talk, you would never know that the constituents in many of their districts are among the most “entitled” people in the nation: dependent on lavish military spending, agricultural subsidies, government-provided water, transportation, and energy.

Despite their undeniable idiocy, the zealots of the tea party are not primarily to blame for their own folly.  The blame lies with our Constitution, the purportedly wise men who wrote it, and our own passive reverence for the political mess they bequeathed to us.

We have been told so often about “the wisdom of the Founders,” we are so puffed up with pride in the supposed superiority of our Constitutional arrangements, that we rarely stop to examine, or question, what a governmental disaster the Founders really left behind.

It was the Founders who distrusted government.  It was they who feared democratic majorities.  It was they who gave us a “federal republic” of semi-autonomous states, in which the property and privileges of their own class could be protected.  Their most famous accomplishment, the so-called system of “checks and balances,” is nothing but a series of roadblocks that prevent us from solving truly national problems.  That system perpetuated slavery for nearly a century and allowed the de facto slavery of Jim Crow to continue for another.  It wasn’t our Constitution that put an end to all that.  It was civil war, riots, and bloodshed.  Even now, we again have a Supreme Court that is using the Constitution to turn back the clock and reinstate the old evils.

Our system has survived as long as it has, not because it was wisely conceived but, rather, because we have been lucky enough to live on a vast continent, rich in natural resources, remote from much of the outside world, and protected by two oceans from the travails of that world.  It wasn’t our political system that created our good fortune.  On the contrary, it is our material good fortune that has enabled our rickety system to carry on, despite all the chaos, waste, and downright evil it sometimes produces.

Unfortunately, our luck is running out.  Our economy, though still the world’s largest, faces serious rivals for the first time in 75 years.  Our military might, though still greater by far than that of any other nation, has been exposed by two fruitless and costly wars to be largely ineffectual.  And our political system is proving itself, once again, to be utterly incapable of dealing with the critical issues that confront a modern, industrial nation.

This is not an “aberration” that we can blame on the tea party.  It is the result of what many of the Founding Fathers intended.

We need to wake up and recognize that are other models of government exist, which work as well or better than ours—parliamentary democracies in which the executive and the legislature are elected simultaneously, in which governments “fall” when they lose the confidence of the people, in which coalitions and compromise are required, not merely desired.  Can we honestly say that the peoples of Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom are any less free?  Can we honestly say that the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia have done less to provide their citizens with the opportunity to lead a decent life?

It is time for the American people to direct their anger where it belongs:  at a political system that doesn’t work and never has.  It may even be time to abandon our illusions about that system and start from scratch.

In just a few days, Republicans in Congress, spurred on by a small minority of the electorate, may force the government of the United States to shut down, and if that doesn’t accomplish their purpose, may even wreck the financial reputation of the nation.  All this, to stop the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. “Obamacare,” from taking effect.

It does not seem to matter to Republicans that the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land.  It does not matter that the Act has been deemed constitutional by a Supreme Court that is at least as conservative as they are.  It does not matter that in the last election their presidential candidate was resoundingly rejected and more Americans by far voted for Democratic Senatorial and Congressional candidates.

Lacking a mandate from the voters, Republicans nonetheless claim to be “listening to the people”.   Instead of listening, they are merely pandering to a fearful and suspicious electorate which has little real knowledge of what the Act is intended to accomplish or how it will work—if it does.

Republicans have accused the Affordable Care Act of being everything from a “job killer” to “socialism,” none of which is even remotely the case.  Indeed, they have yet to articulate any truthful, logical, or substantial objections to the Act.  Rather than presenting arguments or facts, all they have given us is cliches.

The question therefore arises:  what are they so afraid of?

In a moment of unexpected—and for a supposedly smart man, remarkably dim-witted—candor, Ted Cruz of Texas told us.  He, and the tea party he hopes to lead, are afraid that benefits, once given, will be difficult to take back.  To his discredit, he swaddled this uncontroversial objection with insinuations designed to fuel the racism and class animus of his constituents:  the Act will be another undeserved “entitlement;” it will be a government give-away to those who haven’t earned it; it will penalize the hard-working middle class, by which he really means the old, white bigots who form the core of the tea party.

Some speculate that Republicans are afraid the Affordable Care Act, rather than producing the “train wreck” they predict, may actually work, in which case it will be, not difficult, but impossible to repeal.  That may well be the case.  But the truth runs deeper.  What Cruz and his co-conspirators truly fear is that successful implementation of the Act could become merely the first step toward the eventual replacement of our shamefully inadequate system of market-driven medical care.

Far from having the “best medical care in the world,” we are burdened with a system that is a sham and a scam.  We pay substantially more for medical care than any other advanced country; yet our basic health statistics lag woefully behind.  The only metric by our health care system indisputably leads the world is profit:  profit for insurance companies, profit for drug companies, profit for hospitals and the conglomerates that own them.  It’s a wonderful system for the wealthy and the healthy; for everyone else, it’s a disaster.

The rest of the world knows this.  That is why the government of every other advanced country either provides health care to its citizens directly or heavily regulates those who do.  That is why so many of those countries pay significantly less and get significantly better care in return.

That is the reality they Republicans are so afraid of.

They demonize the Affordable Care Act as government interference in the private market, which they would like us to believe can solve all our problems.  What they realize, for all their rhetoric, is that the market has proved itself utterly incapable of providing decent, cost-effective medical care to the American people.  It isn’t government interference that scares them so much.  It is government success.  They are determined to prevent it, even if they have to destroy government itself.

After years of bitter partisan division, the elites who run our country—the politicians, the bureaucrats, the pundits in the media—have finally come together, with almost one voice, to vilify Edward Snowden, the young man who recently revealed the secret and pervasive surveillance of our private telephone and internet records by the National Security Agency.  The drumbeat condemning him from both right and left has been almost deafening.  It has also been remarkably vicious and dismissive.  Here are just a few examples:

Jeffrey Toobin of CNN called Snowden “a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison”.   Toobin is a Harvard-trained lawyer who has written a couple of best-selling books on the Supreme Court.   He is not, however, a psychologist, and “narcissism” is not something he is competent to judge—unless, of course, he is speaking of himself.

John Bolton labeled Snowden a “deceitful and dishonest man.” Among the many “deceitful and dishonest” men in the Bush administration, Bolton stands at the head of the queue.  He lied more brazenly than anyone about the reasons for the invasion of Iraq and has continued to do so ever since.

Jed Babbin, another former member of the Bush administration dubbed Snowden a “punk and a weasel.”  Babbin’s most recent claim to fame is part-time work on right-wing talk radio, which is populated by nothing but “punks and weasels”.

Tom Brokaw, of all people, characterized Snowden as a “high school dropout and a military washout”.   This, from a man who once dropped out of the University of Iowa, having majored in—his own words, not mine—”beer and coeds”.

Perhaps I’ve missed something, but do any of these pontificating members of the establishment actually know Edward Snowden?  Have they met or spoken with him?  Do they have any insight into his motives other than what we have heard from the young man himself?

The answer, of course, is no.  All we have to go on in judging Snowden’s motives is what he has said.  And what he has said has been straightforward, self-effacing, and, as far as one can tell, unselfish.  He knew what he was doing, he knew why, and he knew precisely what the consequences would be.  You can call Edward Snowden many things, but you can’t call him “narcissistic” or “deceitful” or “naive”.

Far worse are those who talk about “treason”.   To hear such talk from John Boehner or Eric Cantor isn’t surprising.  But to hear it from Diane Feinstein, whose liberal credentials are otherwise unimpeachable, is both disappointing and despicable.  Edward Snowden broke the law, and he will probably go to prison for it.   But he did not commit “treason”.   He did not (to quote the Constitution) “levy war on the United States” or “adhere to their enemies”.   He talked to journalists about the blatantly unconstitutional activities of the NSA, and they decided to publish what he told them.

All this shrill viciousness reveals, with jarring clarity, the arrogance and hypocrisy of the elites who run our country.   They believe that only they are qualified to judge what is best for the nation.  They believe that the rest of us are too dumb to make mature decisions about our freedoms and our security.  They believe that anyone who dares to question their actions and their authority deserves to be branded a “traitor”.

Those who talk of “treason” say that Snowden violated an oath not to reveal classified information.  Since he worked for a private contractor, rather than the government, I have no idea what oath he actually took or whether he violated it.

I do, however, know that both the President and members of Congress have sworn to “defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States”.  In choosing to authorize and defend the unconstitutional actions of the NSA, they are the ones who have violated their oaths.  If it’s “treason” they’re looking for, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

From the first moment the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act became law, the Wall Street banks have been trying to delay, weaken, or gut it altogether.  They have yet to acknowledge (or be punished for) the reckless and criminal behavior that led to the financial collapse of 2007-2008.  On the contrary, they have exerted themselves in every possible way to ensure that the very same behavior continues unchecked.  Unfortunately, their efforts have been successful to a scandalous degree.

The latest episode in this scandal occurred last week, when it was revealed that H. R. 992, a new bill designed to amend and water down Dodd-Frank, was largely written by Citigroup.  Even more scandalous than the bill itself is the fact that it was passed without a quibble by an overwhelming majority of the House Finance Committee, many of whom accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the very banks they are supposed to be regulating.  Once upon a time, this would have been a blatant example of corruption.  It’s still corruption, but thanks to Congress, it’s now legal.

In the justifiable furor surrounding this episode, most of the attention has been focused on Citigroup and the shameless conflicts of interest that motivated its paid representatives in Congress.  Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to what the bill itself actually does.

Unless you are a lawyer or a lobbyist, this is not easiest thing in the world to figure out, since Congressional legislation is written in a language that doesn’t even remotely resemble plain English.  H. R. 992 is more opaque than most, because it deals with arcane financial activities that few people—even people on Wall Street—truly understand.

Fortunately, H. R. 992 is short—a mere five pages—and it deals with just one of the hundreds of sections in the original Dodd-Frank bill.  That section, however, is absolutely vital.  The Section is 716, and its title is: “Prohibition against Federal Government bailouts of swaps entities.”

A “swap” is one of several forms of “derivative”—a financial instrument that has no value by itself.  Think of swaps and other derivatives as chips on the baize cloth of a roulette table.  The chips mean nothing until it’s time to collect or pay up.  Until that moment arrives, the gamblers get to keep playing.

Derivatives are used by Wall Street to repackage questionable assets, hedge investments and make speculative bets on a host of things: movements in currency prices, interest rates, and so on.  Because they are traded over-the-counter and for the most part privately, derivatives are difficult to value and almost impossible to regulate.  This makes them risky but also very profitable for the banks that engage in them—as long as somebody else assumes the risk.

That is what happened in 2007-2008, when “swaps” played a primary role in the financial collapse.  In essence, the major Wall Street banks made a series of very big, very bad bets.  When they lost those bets, trillions of dollars went up in smoke.  The Federal Government was forced to step in not only to save the banks themselves from going up in smoke but to preserve the savings of millions of investors who had no idea what the banks had been doing with their money in the first place.

Section 716 of Dodd-Frank was designed to prevent such a bailout from ever happening again.  It states unequivocally: “No Federal assistance may be provided to any swaps entity with respect to any swap, security-based swap, or other activity of the swaps entity.”  Section 716 exempts only “insured depository institutions” from this prohibition, because such institutions have to meet tough standards and are strictly regulated.

H. R. 992 changes all that.  It replaces the phrase “insured depository institution” with much looser language.  It allows uninsured bank branches and even foreign banks to receive Federal assistance.   It so broadens the definition of allowable “swap” activities that just about any bad bet can now expect to be indemnified by the government.

Nearly a century after the speculative crash that plunged us into the Great Depression, merely five years after the collapse of the speculative bubble that almost caused a second Great Depression, we seem to have learned nothing.  Nobody knows when the next bust will come.  But we do know this: thanks to Citigroup and its friends in Congress, the next bust will be followed by another bailout.  The traders and executives on Wall Street will get to keep their millions.  You and I will be stuck with the bill.

An article recently appeared in the New York Times with the title: “Why Can’t America Be Sweden?”  It discusses the work of three economists, two American and one French, who argue that any attempt to adopt the more equalitarian income distribution that exists in most of northern Europe would undermine America’s technological leadership and, ultimately, the entire global economy, which depends upon our leadership.

Their argument is grounded in three assumptions: (1) the United States is, in fact, the world’s innovation leader; (2) our leadership depends upon individual entrepreneurial success; and (3) the successful entrepreneurial spirit requires what these economists call “differential rewards,” i.e., the ability of entrepreneurs to make a lot more money than anyone else.  To quote one of these economists directly:

“…a greater gap in income between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs increases entrepreneurial effort and thus a country’s contribution to the world technology frontier.”

There may be many reasons why America can’t be like Sweden, but this isn’t one of them.  Like so much of the babble in our public life, the assumptions made by these economists are little more than myths.  Such myths may be satisfying to our national ego, they may help to advance a political agenda, but they do not pass for truth.

The truth is that no economic evidence exists to establish a correlation (let alone a causative correlation) between income inequality and innovation.  On the contrary, the reverse is the case.  Most of the evidence indicates that a flatter, more equalitarian income distribution, embodied in a large middle class, does more than anything else to stimulate both growth and innovation.

If you stop and think about it, this is nothing more than simple common sense.  When opportunity—and that’s all income really is—is distributed widely, more people have a chance to contribute their brains and talents to the greater economy.  The contributions of a few brilliant and lavishly compensated individuals cannot possibly make up the difference.

Furthermore, the assumption that innovation is the product of individual entrepreneurial effort, spurred by “differential rewards,” is simply untrue.  Maverick and “differentially rewarded” entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs are immensely popular icons, but they do not represent the major source of technological innovation.  Last year, more than a quarter of a million patents were awarded in the United States.  Ninety-five percent of these went to corporations, universities, and government agencies or departments; merely five percent went to individuals.  And by the way, most of the universities on the list were public institutions, not the richly endowed private universities of the Ivy League.

An even bigger myth is the assumption that the United States is, in reality, the world’s innovation leader.    INSEAD, one of the world’s largest graduate schools of business, publishes an annual Global Innovation Index.  Last year, the United States ranked 10th, not first, and a majority of the patents mentioned a moment ago were issued, not to Americans, but to foreigners, particularly the Japanese.  Indeed, seven of the top ten patent-winning entities were non-American.

The final and most damning myth is the claim that the social mores of more equalitarian countries like Sweden stifle innovation.  This is patently false.  Sweden ranks 2nd on the Global Innovation Index, Finland ranks 4th, and Denmark (with the least “differential” income distribution in the world) ranks 6th—all well ahead of the United States.

When it comes to innovation, the “socialists” seem to be doing fairly well.  Instead of drugging ourselves with self-satisfying myths about our “entrepreneurial spirit,” perhaps we should wake up and learn from their example.

In the wake of the dreadful tornado that devastated the town of Moore, Okllahoma just days ago, the Associated Press, perhaps the most respected journalistic organization in the country, published a story with the following headline: “More Tornadoes from Global Warming?  Nobody Knows.”

This headline exemplifies a strange and dispiriting lunacy that seems unique to our country among the world’s supposedly advanced societies: a persistent unwillingness, or refusal, to acknowledge the reality of climate change.  While the Associated Press article dealt narrowly with the effect of global warming on tornadoes, it implied, far more broadly, that the reality of climate change and its consequences are somehow in doubt.  If the AP had said, “Nobody knows for sure,” that would be one thing.  Nothing in science (or life, for that matter) is ever “sure.”  But to say, “Nobody knows,” is to deny that we do, in fact, know a great deal.

Scientists have been studying climate change for more than a hundred years, and for the last quarter century the scientific community has been measuring it with unprecedented thoroughness and rigor.  The IPCC—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes more than a 1,000 scientists from dozens of countries and is backed by every major national academy of science, including our own—has issued four “assessments” since 1990 with a fifth to be issued next year.  One can reasonably quibble with some specific findings or question particular studies, but the overall results cannot be disputed by any responsible observer.  Global temperatures are rising—fast—and human activity is a principal cause.  One of the main consequences of rising temperatures, progressively more violent weather, was predicted long ago for reasons that anyone who has had a high school physics course would readily understand.  And yet, supposedly respectable journalists continue to say, “Nobody knows.”

There are at least three reasons for this tragic denial of reality.

One is the corrupting effect of lobbying by the immensely rich oil industry.  Throw enough money at them, and some of our political leaders are prepared to affirm, or deny, anything, no matter how ridiculous.

Another is the bitter polarization of our two major political parties, particularly the Republican Party, which reflexively opposes anything proposed by a Democratic President, no matter how damaging their opposition may be to the country as a whole.

A third, often overlooked, reason is the culture of journalism itself.

The mantra of the profession is “objectivity,” which is a noble idea in theory but in practice too often masks laziness, ignorance or timidity.  Journalists are taught to “report the facts,” but they are seldom taught, let alone encouraged by their bosses, to think for themselves, to evaluate evidence and sources, and to draw logical conclusions about what is, and isn’t, factual.  As long as some loud voice out there has enough money or muscle to peddle “another point of view,” journalists feel obligated to give that voice a hearing.

For most journalists, there is no such thing as “is.”  There is only “according to,” a noisy arena of conflicting opinions in which every opinion must be treated “objectively,” in which facts do not exist in any meaningful sense.

The problem, of course, is that facts do exist, and one of those facts is climate change.  Until journalists realize that “objectivity” and “reality” often conflict, we will never hear the facts, and we will never act.  If they don’t come to that realization very soon, it will be too late.

A trifecta of so-called “scandals” has given the dysfunctional Republican Party a new chance to distract public attention from its own lunacy and incompetence.  After losing a Presidential election they should by all odds have won, after months of trying to rationalize their defeat and deny their own mistakes, after the tragic embarrassment of refusing to pass even the most innocuous measures for gun control, Republicans finally got lucky.  The IRS, America’s least-loved department of government, did something stupid.

It has been said before, and it should be said again: if the IRS scrutinized conservative 501(c)(4) organizations for explicitly political purposes, either on its own account or because it was instructed to do so by the White Office, that would be a genuine “scandal.”  There is, thus far, not even a shred of evidence suggesting that either was the case.

The greater problem is that the IRS’ mistakes have enabled Republicans to gin up interest in two other “scandals,” one old, the other new.  If it hadn’t been for the missteps of the IRS, the old “scandal” of Benghazi would have been forgotten long ago, while the new one concerning the Associated Press would have caused most Americans to shrug, for, next to the IRS, there is probably no public institution less loved than the press.

All of this is undoubtedly embarrassing for the White House and unquestionably lucky for the Republicans, but none of its amounts to anything even remotely resembling “scandal.”

The White House just released 100 pages of emails regarding the “talking points” that were prepared in wake of the attack on our embassy in Libya, emails that were discussed in closed-door Congressional hearings months ago.  Several days before they were released to the public, ABC News made the claim, based on hearsay, that these emails documented an attempt by the State Department to “scrub” the record for political purposes.  That claim has since been debunked, but ABC News, to its shame, has issued only the most tepid of apologies and continues to “stand by” its original story.

If you care to read these emails for yourself, you can easily download them from any number of sources on the web.  Be forewarned: they are, with few exceptions, boringly procedural and innocuous.  What you will find is plenty of bureaucratic muddle and hairsplitting, but you will also find a surprising amount of bureaucratic integrity.  Most of what Republicans want to interpret as a “cover up” was clearly the opposite: an effort to get the facts precisely right before drawing conclusions or pointing fingers.

If there’s a true “scandal” here, it’s that Republicans in Congress refused to authorize sufficient funding for the protection of our embassies and consulates around the world, where attacks occur routinely and thousands of diplomatic personnel go about our country’s business in danger every day.  The refusal to protect these public servants wasn’t done to save money.  It was done to spite the State Department and its then Secretary, Hillary Clinton.

The Justice Department’s decision to subpoena the telephone records of the Associated Press, while lamentable, doesn’t qualify as a “scandal” by any standard.  In a free society, we may abhor this decision (I certainly do), but it wasn’t illegal, and its only political purpose was to placate the very people who are now hollering in protest: the Republicans in Congress.

If there’s a “scandal” here, it’s the shameful contradiction between the Republican Party’s blind defense of the right to own guns and its reluctance to defend—indeed its unseemly eagerness to violate—the right to free speech.  It was Republicans who vociferously demanded an investigation of these particular “leaks” to the press.  It was Republicans who loudly proclaimed that any failure to conduct such an investigation would be put the country in danger.  Now, when it suits their political convenience, it is Republicans who are singing a different tune.

Let’s be clear about what’s actually going on here.  When Republicans lost a second Presidential election to Bill Clinton in 1996, they did everything in their power to bring him down.  Having lost a second Presidential election to Barack Obama, they are trying to do the same thing again.  This time, they are desperate, because they see the specter of Hillary Clinton on the horizon.  As dumb and vicious as they are, they are smart enough to realize that Hillary Clinton could do more than defeat them; she might destroy them as a viable political party.