CSotD: Joe Heller, John Ciardi and me
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"Noone is trying to kill you," Clevinger said.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're
trying to kill everyone."
"And what difference does that make?"
It's good to have both sides upset over revelations of selective IRS scrutiny and of the collection of telephone data from the phones of Associated Press reporters, even though it's a bit disconcerting to have conservative Dana Summers and liberal Tom Toles coming up with the same gag.
Technically, they're both off-target in that the Justice Department (reportedly) was only pulling records of who called whom and how long they talked, which I guess is not an actual wiretap but what, on Law & Order, they refer to as "pulling LUDs" and which, according to this source, requires a court order but which I'll bet is less hard to explain to a judge than a request for a wiretap.
Though it's not clear that the Justice Department would have a lot of trouble getting either. I suspect the issue is that they don't want to tie up a lot of time listening to actual conversations. They just want to know who's talking to the press and vice-versa.
Oh. Well, that's diffo!
There's something almost comforting about the apparently indiscriminate nature of the monitoring of reporter conversations: You don't have to worry about whether they're listening to you. They're listening to everyone.
And that's why reporters need to be outfitted with pre-paid disposable phones. So they can do their jobs.
It's predictable, perhaps, that an attack on the press would provoke this kind of unanimity. Response to the IRS scrutiny of Tea Party non-profit applications, by contrast, has been all over the place, from outraged fury to somewhat outraged bemusement.
Until more details emerge, I'm willing to chalk this one up as poor judgment by underlings. There was, in the period leading up to the election, a large increase in groups filing for 501c-4 status, and it seems logical to take a closer look at an application from a potentially political group than one from a homeowners' association or a small country airport, not for partisan reasons but because they are more apt to be noncompliant, given the fine distinctions between "working for social welfare" and actual, partisan campaigning.
And some applications may have been prepared by attorneys while others were being cobbled together by Joe the Plumber, such that, if you saw that a lot of those potentially partisan, frequently garage-built applications contained the words "Tea Party" and "patriot," it would be tempting to filter them out for a look-see.
It's just kind of ironic to try to locate knuckleheads with bad ideas without running your own bad idea up the chain of command, knucklehead.
It seems to come under the same category as assuming that, even though you're probably over the legal limit, since you don't feel drunk and you don't really live very far away, it's okay to drive yourself home.
You'll probably get away with it, so what the hell.
Once you've hit the pedestrian, well, we're gonna set aside all that reasonable, understandable logic and take a blood sample.
And, to extend the metaphor, we'll have some questions for the bartender, the political issue being whether we simply call him as a witness or seek to indict him for having not either cut you off earlier or taken your keys.
And so Pat Oliphant asks: "What did the bartender know, and when did he know it?"
Now, it is a sincere tribute to the deep, abiding respect conservatives clearly have for Obama's intellect and organizational capacity that they believe he is masterminding policy at the level where all this occurred.
It's as if they want to indict the owner of the holding company who appointed the CEO of the division that controls a chain of taverns, one of which employed the bartender who served the driver who drove the car that killed the pedestrian that lived in the house that Jack built.
That is not Watergate.
What got people poking around in Watergate was that one of the burglars was directly linked to a mid-level White House employee, and it very quickly developed that things were going on at a level at which — in the days before Cheney transformed the office of vice-president — it was nearly impossible to believe the president did not know about them.
What does work in Oliphant's cartoon is the shopping list: Benghazi is nothing and the IRS thing is overblown, but the AP matter starts to get closer to home and "Justice," though pretty vague, sums up a general disregard for privacy rights that bothers people on both sides of the aisle.
This list brings us into that "preponderance of evidence" zone, at which point it stops really mattering if the president was aware of this particular matter or that one. There is obviously a pattern of abusive behaviors, petty and major, that the person at the top of the chain has to accept as a reflection of his own poor leadership.
I got my first traffic ticket for running a red light. It was a place where there were really two intersections less than half a block apart, the result of a Colorado University exit not quite across from a local road entrance, so that I went through the first, green, light without noticing that the second light was not coordinated with it and was, in fact, red.
I told the judge this, hoping it would mitigate the fine, but instead, he told me he would have rather I said that I saw the red light and didn't care and went through it on purpose, than have me admit that I hadn't even noticed it.
Nixon was a crook and a liar and a bigot and a fascist, but at least the things he did, he by-god did on purpose.
And, besides that, he was pretty unlikeable.
I like Obama. He's a nice guy, he's articulate, he's smart, he's funny, he's got a great wife and apparently nice kids. And I think he wants to do the right things.
But the best you can say about him at this point is that he hasn't done anything remotely close to justifying impeachment and that, anyway, probably whoever was president would be screwing it up.
And the problem with saying that is that it wasn't that Nixon was worse — he was.
The problem is that it didn't hurt to kick Nixon around.
On Flunking a Nice Boy Out of School
I wish I could teach you how ugly
decency and humility can be when they are not
the election of a contained mind but only
the defenses of an incompetent. Were you taught
meekness as a weapon? Or did you discover,
by chance maybe, that it worked on mother
and was generally a good thing —
at least when all else failed — to get you over
the worst of what was coming. Is that why you bring
these sheepfaces to Tuesday?
They won't do.
It's three months work I want, and I'd sooner have it from the
brassiest lumpkin in pimpledom, but have it,
than all these martyred repentances from you.
— John Ciardi
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