Tag Archives: scandal

“The Prince” Lives On

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally published in The Hill

It was in 1513 that Niccolò Machiavelli first wrote The Prince, although it didn’t hit the printing presses until 1532, five years after the most infamous of political philosophers had died.

That was by design, because the Catholic Church didn’t much care for the tone of Machiavelli’s most famous work and put it on its list of banned books.

Despite the early controversy, The Prince still lives in the heart of the modern politician. Here are some examples: Continue reading →

Kanye Counters Kardashian Slam, Really Good

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

It’s about time.

If someone disses your woman, you should diss ‘em back. It’s the law of the jungle.

I’ve been wondering how Kanye was going to respond to Ray J; how he was going to jab the knife into the rib cage, just far enough to inflict pain, but cause no damage.

When the time was right, Kanye made his music the sharp blade of his revenge. He stepped onto the stage of Jimmy Fallon’s late night show last week, in a leather skirt, no less, and sang his hit ‘Bound 2,’ with new lyrics that answered Ray J’s ‘Hit It First,’ about how he hooked up with Kim Kardashian before Kanye. It was bad, really bad. The woman just had a baby, for crying out loud. Continue reading →

August Is Here!

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

What issue will dominate August of 2013?

1. Will it be war?

In 1914, as Barbara Tuchman wrote in the Guns of August, war dominated the discussion, more specifically, the First World War. The Great War, as it was called until the Second World War, forever ushered in modernity, with all of its terrifying warts.

We were allies of the British in those wars, but in the War of 1812, they burned the Capitol building in August.

When I first started on Capitol Hill, war invaded August when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Viet Nam War officially started in August when the Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Continue reading →

Jedi Mind Trick Fail

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The Ranking Member of the House Government and Oversight Committee tried to channel his inner-Alec Guinness the other day, but he failed spectacularly.

Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat, tried to pull one over on the American people earlier this week. Here is how the Wall Street Journal’s John McKinnon put it:

“Earlier this week, the top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), said he’s ready to drop the matter, following an interview on Thursday of an employee in the Cincinnati office that oversees handling of tax-exempt applications. The employee, who was a manager at the time, said the scrutiny started in early 2010 with an agent who noticed a single tea-party application come in, and flagged it for closer review. The manager “agreed that the case should be forwarded up the chain to technical officials in… Continue reading →

Don’t Focus on Only Scandal

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Can they walk and chew gum at the same time?

That will be the question for congressional Republicans as they navigate the next year and a half before the 2014 elections.

The scandals that have dogged the Obama administration at the beginning of its second term have presented the House GOP with a seemingly golden opportunity. But all that glitters is not gold, and the temptation to put all of the political eggs in the scandal basket might be overwhelming but should be resisted.

The conservative advocacy group Heritage Action has sent a warning letter to congressional Republicans telling them to stop walking toward legislative accomplishments and focus only on chewing up the administration on the scandal front.

Continue reading →

Obama on the Ropes

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing like Grandma Moses painted: Sooooo very sweet.

Well, that’s over. So as Bette Davis (as Margo Channing) said in “All About Eve” in 1950: “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night”

The IRS is going to be the death of the Obama Administration. NOBODY LIKES THE IRS. I’m not saying all IRS employees are bad people, but neither are all meter maids bad people – we just don’t like to see them sniffing around our stuff.

Actually the IRS is not Obama’s biggest strategic problem.

James Rosen is. Continue reading →

It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Cover-Up

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The three scandals currently on the table are: Benghazi, the IRS targeting conservative taxpayers, and the Department of Justice looking at the phone records of Associated Press reporters.

There is an old saying in Washington: “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover up” that does the damage.

The Nixon Administration attempted to dismiss the June 17, 1972 break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex as “a third rate burglary” which it more-or-less was.

1972 was an election year and despite the wailing of Democrats about the seriousness of the campaign probably having ordered the break-in, Nixon beat Democratic Senator George McGovern 49 states to one that Fall. Continue reading →

The Whipping Boy

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

According to Wikipedia: “A whipping boy was a young boy who was assigned to a young prince and was punished when the prince misbehaved or fell behind in his schooling. Whipping boys were established in the English court during the monarchies of the 15th century and 16th centuries. They were created because of the idea of the divine right of kings, which stated that kings were appointed by God, and implied that no one but the king was worthy of punishing the king’s son. Since the king was rarely around to punish his son when necessary, tutors to the young prince found it extremely difficult to enforce rules or learning.” Continue reading →

Scandal is Big Government

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally published in The Hill

Twenty-nine years before the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., John Dean, then the White House counsel, sent a list of names to IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters. On the list were names of enemies of the Nixon campaign that were to be investigated and audited and generally harassed by the tax-collecting agency.

That was among the revelations that came from the Watergate investigation, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon.

Some 40 years later, the Internal Revenue Service is once again in the news for targeting political enemies of the president. I would bet my bottom dollar that there is no evidence that the current president is involved directly in this latest scandal. Continue reading →

Budget Issues Trump Other Scandals

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

Or should trump them, at least.

Despite all the consternation about the Obama Administration and Benghazi, the IRS harassment of Tea Party groups and the AP phone records being monitored, we still have a country to run.

Somebody better be paying attention to our spending and deficit/debt problems or else it really won’t matter if the Obama White House is lying about any of the above 3 scandals now a-brewing.

They are all important issues of governance or malfeasance, however you want to call it.

But none of them can do the damage to our future that out-of-control spending can cause because our debt gets too high and then, when interest rates return to ‘normal’? It either crowds out other essential functions of government or inflation rears its ugly, ugly head and everyone suffers. Especially the elderly, poor and infirm. Continue reading →

Obama, Benghazi, and Mark Sanford

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

There’s an axiom in Washington that goes like this: ‘The more words it takes to explain something, the more likely it is that you are lying’.

Think about it. It is always easier just to tell the truth and take your lumps and get over it somehow.

Lying takes a lot of work. Here’s some aphorisms about telling the truth versus lying that somehow seems to get forgotten by people when elected to higher public office:

‘It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place’. ~H. L.Mencken Continue reading →

Mark Sanford (R-Appalachian Trail)

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

I had lunch a recently with an experienced Republican operative who happens to be from the South Carolina congressional district where Mark Sanford, the governor who said he was hiking on the Appalachian Trail but really was in Argentina with his mistress, is running for redemption. I also had dinner recently with a Democratic fund-raiser.

The Democrat and our other dinner companions (all three are Democrats) were joking about Sanford’s travails and saying there is no way he can win the special election. The Republican at lunch said he would win easily (Note: he said this before Sanford was nailed for trespassing in his ex-wife’s house watching the Super Bowl with his young son and “trespassing,” meaning he violated his divorce agreement). When my Republican friend said the ex-governor would win, I questioned him, too, because my New England-based Continue reading →

Imperfect Men Give Us Imperfect Government

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

There is a reason that Kevin Yoder, the Kansas Republican, swam in the Sea of Galilee instead walking on top of it. It is the same reason that Todd Akin is now in extremely hot water. Neither is perfect, unlike the fella who walked on water a couple of thousand years ago.

Both Yoder and Akin were perfectly good members of Congress. Yoder, a freshman member of the Appropriations Committee, has been particularly impressive for his legislative judgment and his mature approach to his work in Congress.

Akin was impressive enough to win a tough, three way primary for the privilege to take on Claire McCaskill, a very vulnerable member of the Democratic majority who has made more than her fair share of ethical mistakes. Continue reading →

Danger of Closed Circles

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

The coverage of former FBI director Louis Freeh’s report on the 14-year cover-up of the child abuse scandal associated with Penn State’s football program gives us a peek into an issue I’ve thought about for a long time: Closed circles.

Closed circles are like black holes in physics: An actual, physical force. The gravity they generate is so great, not even light can escape; and anything that ventures near the event horizon will be sucked in and will (essentially) disappear.

It is clear from even the most cursory reading that paramount in the minds of Joe Paterno and the university leadership was protecting the football program. Penn State football was Joe Paterno. Paterno was PSU football. Period. Continue reading →

Lost Phone, Late Column, Political Update

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Yes, I think Herman Cain’s campaign is over but it doesn’t have nearly as much to do with this new charge of adultery as it does his continuing inability to demonstrate any knowledge about just about any issue that might turn out to be important to a high-level official such as President of the United States.

Yes, I think Rick Perry’s saying that (a) the voting age in New Hampshire is 21 (it is 18) ; and (b) Election day next year will be November 12 (it will be November 4) is a big deal. If he wasn’t sure about the voting age or election date, he should have talked around them: “For those of you who will be of voting age next November…” would have served him well.

It is another example of Perry’s absolute inability to think on his feet which might turn out to be an important skill for a high-level official such as President of the United States. Continue reading →