Welcome to your back to work Tuesday open thread. I hope you all had a good Memorial Day weekend and are ready to work again! I know I’m not and I didn’t even go anywhere. Let’s get this thread rolling.
Digby describes how the GOP is going back to Clinton rules in “Smell Test.”
Here’s the best example I’ve seen of how the noise machine is framing this Sestak non-scandal:
This morning on Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney offered her thoughts on why the White House tapped former president Bill Clinton to try and persuade Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) to drop out of the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary. After saying Clinton doesn’t have “an impeccable record of integrity,” Cheney argued: “You know, there’s a lot here that just smells funny. If the White House in fact thought that what they were doing was above board, why did they go to Bill Clinton? Why did they need a cut out for whatever they were doing?”
It’s all there, even down to the “it just smells funny” routine. Earlier this week on the Mclaughlin Report, the increasingly agitated Monica Crowley accused the administration of a cover-up and they were all shrieking for an “independent counsel.” (That’s right, they’re talking about bringing it back. I take that as a strong indication that they know they can’t win the presidency in 2012, so they simply hope to wreak destruction upon this one.)
Media Matters has the full explanation of the non-scandal here, if you haven’t ben following it. But none of that really matters. This has taken on a life of its own. Whether they can make anything of this specific charge is unknown. But what it signals is a return to the Clinton Rules and the scandal politics of the past. Regardless of whether or not any particular scandal takes hold, the way this works is by the cut of a thousand deaths.
*sigh* Admit it – how many of you blamed Clinton (at least partially) for the atmosphere of politics in the 1990s? Can we at least admit now that this is how the Republican party operates – at full out attack mode. They have an even bigger noise machine now and the rest of the media hasn’t lost its appetite for stories hand-fed to them from the Republican noise machine.
BP CEO Tony Hayward has a sad:
On Sunday, immediately after apologizing, Hayward then complained about the effect of the Deepwater Horizon disaster on his personal life, saying “I would like my life back“:
We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.
We’d like to have the Gulf back. I guess we don’t always get what we want.