GOP hopes renewed probes into Benghazi, IRS will fire up conservatives and not annoy centrists
House Republicans are gambling that ramping up new inquiries into old controversies involving the Internal Revenue Service and Libya will energize conservative voters without turning off moderates.
Over Democrats' heated objections, House Republicans voted this month to hold an IRS official in contempt for refusing to testify. They also launched a new investigation into the September 2012 terrorist attack on a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
Democrats say the moves reek of political opportunism and desperation.
Criticizing the president's health care law "has run its course," said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, and Republicans "have to find something else to talk about." She called the new Benghazi inquiry a "political stunt."
Republicans say their actions are serious and justified, even if they also might be good politics.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the select committee on Benghazi will not be partisan or involve political "sideshows." But he declined to tell Republicans to stop using the Benghazi tragedy to raise campaign money.
So what? We are all still suffering, yet early into things Wall Street got serviced. Fair and square, and too big to fail? Isn't the truth they proved themselves too failed to be big?
Geithner: Here, here, a self-serving account, here and here. Also, the thing did go splat under the Republicans, in the latter lame-duck Bush II months in office; handing a big puddle of muck to his successor; and through it all Goldman, Sachs prospered; Wall Street prospered; and politicians of both parties in our beloved two-party system kept criticism under check.
Whatever Barney Frank is doing these days, the other Dodd-Frank legislative leader, in the Senate, is now raking in MPAA lobbying millions each year, as Mr. SOPA. Here and here.
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Back once more to Elizabeth Warren, on how the Republicans insist on ignoring real issues - the economy, need for a minimum wage increase and tax inequalities being examples - over lesser far narrower considerations of no general concern or impact on many in the nation but which they hope to polarize and emotionally inflate, in hopes of reaping political benefit by distraction of the public's attention from the pattern of their constant and contrary aims to stifle fairness for the least wealthy while favoring plutocrat enrichment across the board; Warren re Benghazi, here. (Taking time, that last sentence might have been written more tightly, but I was searching for words to express the frustration felt over this Benghazi stuff being taken at all seriously by the press, who should know better.)