Anatomy of scandals

There is a pattern. [Link]

First, a scandal has to erupt. Often, it arises when the narrative pushed by the president and administration officials reaches the point where it's impossible to reconcile with known truths. For example, the Obama administration considered the Affordable Care Act, passed through Congress divisively in 2010—and which cost Democrats control of the lower chamber in elections later that year—a landmark piece of legislation, a "big fucking deal" in the words of Vice President Joe Biden. It took a lot of promises to get Obamacare passed, promises to legislators and to the public. The president's most famous promise, that if you liked your insurance plan you could keep it, ended up a lie.It could be no other way. The structure of Obamacare relied on restricting the kind of insurance plans individuals could purchase for themselves; the Obamacare website, moreover, may have been destined for failure from the beginning, possessed as administration officials were with the idea that it would succeed through will alone.

Similarly, the fact that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was targeting Tea Party-like 501(c)4 groups for extra scrutiny shouldn't have come as a surprise. The Obama campaign spent the run-up to the 2012 election demonizing the Tea Party as well as demonizing both 501(c)4s specifically and campaign spending in general despite, of course, making use of both. Democrats pushed for extra scrutiny for Tea Party groups, so why should it be a surprise when that scrutiny happened?

In Benghazi, meanwhile, the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission, which came less than two months before the election, flew in the face of President Obama's campaign trail assertions that Al Qaeda was on the run. So the president and his underlings instead blamed the terrorist act on a movie clip found on YouTube. The administration's efforts to twist the truth to fit a preferred political agenda is also sometimes abetted by the media. During one of the 2012 presidential debates, for example, CNN's Candice Crowley helped President Obama get away with spinning the specifics of the Benghazi reaction by backing him in a "fact check" while later admitting that debate opponent Mitt Romney was indeed "right in the main."