May 14, 2013

AP Scandal: When did you stop beating your wife?

Not a day passes after the "Impeachment" word is thrown around like it's 1995... and now this.

What's "this" you ask?

First, there's the Benghazi fire re-kindle. Second is the IRS targeting the TEA Party People - and now, the and now the revelation that earlier this year the Justice Department secretly seized two months of phone records involving editors and reporters at the Associated Press.

The Associated Press? 

Let me tell you, dear reader - this is big. Big Brother big. Well, at least, that's the spectre that's going to be screamed about for the next two or three months while the press feels like it just got raped by the ghost of Richard Nixon. 

Date Raped. 

I mean, the press was going out with the Obama Administration. It gladly repeated everything that it agreed with, and politely ignored those things that the neighbors and the GOP brought to her attention. Like, that gun running scandal, and the fact that maybe she didn't "fall down the stairs" and she "should get some help" or a "restraining order." But love is a mysterious thing that makes you overlook obvious things, and shun the people who are really trying to help you.

And now, maybe, this will be the straw that - at the very least - makes the AP and the media think twice about blindly loving that abusive boyfriend from Chicago? Maybe. Probably unlikely. "He still loves me." 

Maybe. But just to be on the safe side - the White House already prepping Eric Holder to be placed under the ceremonial bus. It's already gassed up and ready to go. Jay Carney, the (current, as I write this) White House spokesman, who is already under fire for his statements about Benghazi, insisted that his boss had nothing to do with the decisions to seek a subpoena and not to inform the A.P. until now. “Other than press reports, we have no knowledge of any attempt by the Justice Department to seek phone records of the A.P.,” Carney said, “We are not involved in decisions made in connection with criminal investigations.”

"It wasn't us - it was..." that's right, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, who last June assigned Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the D.A. for the district of Columbia, to investigate the leaking of the fact that, a month earlier, the C.I.A. had foiled a Yemen-based plot to bomb an American airliner. The A.P. broke that story, and Machen’s tactics appear to have been aimed at discovering the identity of the wire agency’s sources. At one point, the F.B.I. appears to have suspected somebody in the White House, possibly C.I.A. director John Brennan, who was then President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism. During Brennan’s confirmation hearings earlier this year, he said that F.B.I. agents had questioned him about whether he was the source, which he denied.

But why were 20 AP employee's phone's tapped? They're going after the leakers? Or the whistleblowers? Or both? And remember how pissed they were when Rupert Murdock tapped all those phones? This is way, way, way worse.

Either way, pissing off your battered girlfriend (the Press) and then denying it, is only going to make those folks who just watched House of Cards on Netflix froth at the mouth for a scandal.

And the GOP is playing Game of Thrones.

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