The Day the Obama Scandal Playbook Suddenly Stopped Working

Today on NRO

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Libraries, liberalism, and why there's nothing quite like National Review. NR Is Irreplaceable.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Should we really police all discourse for fear of the reaction of a microscopic minority? Don't Let Mass Killers Hold the Culture Hostage.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama's West Point speech and his policy of retreat are characterized by smallness. Obama's Ad Hoc Foreign Policy.

JOHN FUND: As businesses and residents vote with their feet, low-tax states like Texas are winning. The New War Between the States.

SLIDESHOW: Movie Preview: Maleficent.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

May 30, 2014

Today I'm off to Texas, for the Americans for Prosperity TXOnline conference. Not every blogger you know and love is gathering in one place to discuss how to what we do even better, but a large chunk of them will be forming a cabal.

The VA Disaster: The Day the Obama Scandal Playbook Suddenly Stopped Working

Thursday evening I joined some names you probably recognize — Buck Sexton, Will Cain, Charlie Cooke, Tara Setmayer — on Real News on Glenn Beck's The Blaze channel, discussing the administration's preference for investigating itself when its staffers are caught with their metaphorical pants down. You've seen them run those plays so often, you could do them yourself . . . in your sleep. The Department of Justice's investigation of its own "Fast and Furious" operation took 19 months.

The State Department announced the review of its actions in Benghazi in October, but waited until after the election to release its own internal review. The review panel never talked to Hillary Clinton, no one was under oath, no one transcribed the interviews, and the final report only blamed low-level employees, who were put on paid administrative leave and then reinstated about a year later.

The White House is now investigating its own leak of the station chief in Kabul; more specifically, how allegedly bright and well-informed staffers could see the title "STATION CHIEF" on a document listing people meeting the president in Afghanistan and not grasp what that meant.

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, among others, has identified the administration's predictable five-step response to a scandal:

Step One: Say "We had no idea."

Step Two: Express great outrage.

Step Three: Fire some low-level employee.

Step Four: Announce a review, a study, or an investigation; deny any further comment or action until the end of the investigation. This step can stretch on for weeks, months, or years, and let the outraged public forget about it.

Step Five: This is old news, the Republicans are playing politics with it, "Dude, this was like, two years ago."

For the VA scandal, the Obama administration's plan appeared to be to speed ahead to step four — you'll notice Obama initially emphasized that the allegations of inhumane delays of care were merely allegations, and that he couldn't reach any judgments until the full reviews were completed. The problem is that the VA Inspector General's report came out quickly, and with way too many smoking guns — 1700 vets denied care they needed.

The usual responses in step five don't fit. It's not old news yet. A few stray liberals are using the tired "Republicans are playing politics!" line, but it isn't working.

Shinseki may be gone by this afternoon. The question is: Did the playbook just fail in these unique circumstances? Or are these tactics finally worn out?

One final note — it wasn't that long ago that The Blaze zipped me up to New York on the Acela or flew me into Dallas for appearances, because they didn't have a D.C. presence; now they have a nice little studio on Capitol Hill just a few floors above Fox News' Washington office — a sign of how they're growing into a "real" news network.

Is America Depressed?

Okay, so America's seen some bad news lately. The economy stinks, and no one is confident. Mediocre economic numbers are greeted as a triumph. Obamacare's a mess. The federal government is one cluster-you-know-what of venality and incompetence after another. The Millennials seem spoiled, self-absorbed, and incapable of achieving in the modern workplace. Trouble is brewing from Ukraine to Syria to Iraq to Libya to the South China Sea to the Korean peninsula. Our allies are unnerved, our enemies acting bolder.

There's a particular gloom among a lot of conservatives lately, too: The country has more takers than makers. Everybody's addicted to "Uncle Sugar." Too many establishment Republicans just want to replace the Democrats' crony capitalism with their own crony capitalism. Our popular culture makes Sodom and Gamorrah look like Mayberry. Time to start putting our savings into gold and shopping for real estate in Belize.

We can't let our perspective of our fellow Americans get defined by every idiot on Twitter or the comments section. We've always had idiots. We've always had loud idiots. The good folks working hard, taking care of their families, and living the American dream don't spend a lot of time arguing on the Internet.

This is still a country packed to the gills with innovative, driven, hard-working, ingenious, generous, kind-hearted folk of every race, creed, and color.

Don't believe me? Here are some bits of good news you may have missed:

Faith in the future is returning; we're making more new Americans — a.k.a. "babies" — again:

The newest child birth rate numbers have just been released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the report indicates that there were 4,736 more births in 2013 than there were the year before, which shows an increase that America hasn't seen in five years.

We're doing this while reducing teen pregnancy, births, and abortions:

In examining birth and health certificates from 2010 (the most recent data available), Guttmacher Institute found that approximately 6 percent of teenagers (57.4 pregnancies per 1,000 teenage girls) became pregnant — the lowest rate in 30 years and down from its peak of 51 percent in 1991. Between 2008 and 2010 alone, there was a 15-percent drop.

At 34.4 births per 1,000 teenage women, the birthrate was down 44 percent from its peak rate of 61.8 in 1991. The abortion rate is down too: In 2010, there were 14.7 abortions per 1,000 teenagers, which is the lowest it's been since the procedure was legalized.

According to the CDC, the numbers are going in the right direction for life expectancy, heart disease, and cancer death rate:

Americans are living longer than ever. According to the report, in 2010, life expectancy at birth for the total population was 78.7 years — 76.2 years for men and 81.0 years for women. Between 2000 and 2010, life expectancy at birth increased 2.1 years for men and 1.7 years for women. The gap in life expectancy between men and women narrowed from 5.2 years in 2000 to 4.8 years in 2010.

The report also notes a 30% decline between 2000 and 2010 in the age-adjusted heart disease death rate, from 257.6 to 179.1 deaths per 100,000 population. But in 2010, heart disease was still the most lethal disease in the US, with 24% of all deaths, the report says.

The age-adjusted cancer death rate decreased 13% between 2000 and 2010, from 199.6 to 172.8 deaths per 100,000 population. Still, in 2010, 23% of all deaths in the US were from cancer, close behind heart disease. In 2012, 18.1% of adults aged 18 and over were current cigarette smokers, down from 23.2% in 2000.

The Mayo Clinic just scored "complete remission" of a form of previously-untreatable cancer using an engineered measles virus in a human being. Harvard's Stem Cell Institute recently announced that adult stem cells from bone marrow tissue can specifically target and kill brain tumors.
The hunt for a cure for AIDS continues, but treatments have effective and widespread in ways that were simply unimaginable a generation ago. It is a much less deadly disease: "The age-adjusted HIV death rate has dropped by 85% since its peak, including by 14% between 2009 and 2010." There are indications that some people can be "functionally cured" of HIV. There are other beautiful anecdotes: A Vancouver, Canada hospital repurposed its AIDS ward because the number of cases dwindled so rapidly.
The scale of the U.S. energy boom is jaw-dropping: "According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of new jobs in the oil-and-gas industry (technically a part of mining) increased by roughly 270,000 between 2003 and 2012. This is an increase of about 92% compared with a 3% increase in all jobs during the same period. The BLS reports that the U.S. average annual wage (which excludes employer-paid benefits) in the oil and gas industry was about $107,200 during 2012, the latest full year available. That's more than double the average of $49,300 for all workers."
We're at the dawn of the era of private spaceflight: "SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada are building new manned spacecraft with the goal of restoring U.S. human spaceflight capability by 2017."
Yes, it's a dangerous world. But our men and women in uniform, the companies that supply them, and the researchers that equip them regularly produce breakthroughs that sound like science fiction. The Pentagon is developing a hypersonic missile that can hit anywhere in the world in 30 minutes. They're developing brain chips to treat PTSD. There's some mysterious plane -- allegedly a stealth transport -- flying over Texas. University researchers may be on the verge of developing functional invisibility. And, as Kevin Williamson notes, brainwave-driven exoskeletons may help the paralyzed rise and walk.
As David Plotz lays out, there has never been more news published than there is today; web sites of media organizations from the New York Times to Fox News publish literally hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new items a day. Sure, you can say a lot of it's crap. A lot of anything is crap. But the barrier to entry in the news world is obliterated. We're no longer in an era where the number of pages and column-inches in the New York Times, and the time limits of the nightly news,set the limits for what the public sees and reads. Despite the commencement mobs and the political-correctness enforcers, this is a golden age for free speech.

In fact, things are going so well in the apolitical or non-political aspects of American life . . . all that talk about a second American Century may not just be happy talk or tired campaign rhetoric. We just have to get our government to work correctly — and in many circumstances, do less, and get out of the way! — and our best days may indeed be ahead of us.

So cheer up, conservatives!

So, My Life Will Be Chaotic in the Coming Weeks. How About You?

The good news is every time I ask you readers to buy the book, you guys generously respond. The bad news is that I'm sure this nagging must feel tiresome to some of you. So if you don't like it, you can skip ahead . . .

This coming Tuesday, June 3, is the publication day, and you can look forward to an excerpt of The Weed Agency on NRO.

June 6, I'll make my first appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. I know, I know, some of you aren't fans of him. But I can't go around telling other conservatives to break out beyond their comfort zones, and to do more than preach to the choir, and then chicken out and stay away because I'm afraid Bill Maher will make fun of me. Besides, I can't wait to talk to him about his spectacular performance in the late 1980s sci-fi/satirical television series Max Headroom. (Maher played a television executive who developed a broadcast narcotic.)

I have some book-related events coming up, some open to the public, some not.

I'm doing a blogger briefing at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. June 17.

I'll be doing a book event at Sun City Hilton Head, South Carolina June 23. (If you live within a fifty mile radius of that location, my dad has probably already twisted your arm into buying a copy of the book.)

I'll be discussing the book at the Union League Club in New York City July 18, but I don't think that one is open to the public.

And it looks like I'll be at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina July 28.

Oh, and in the middle of all this, I'm moving, because it's always good to go through all of life's most stressful changes simultaneously. We're relocating from pleasant, heavily-Democratic Yuppie Acres, Alexandria, Virginia to pleasant, slightly-less heavily-Democratic Authenticity Woods in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Yup, I'm moving outside the Beltway, so you'll notice my opinions will soon become much less "ruling class," much more ipso-facto "true conservative," just because of the location of my home.

ADDENDA: Phil Kerpen gets himself entangled as a key figure in the rough-and-tumble Cochran-vs.-McDaniel primary fight . . . by asking a single question in a single Tweet. Somehow the D.C. government treated the Tweet as a formal filed complaint.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

Why not forward this to a friend? Encourage them to sign up for NR's great free newsletters here.

Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital.

National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives.