Scandal-mania: some thoughts

Bad News – Eels

Okay, so the threshold for what makes a scandal really seems to be falling. Only one of these things strikes me as a legitimate ‘scandal,’ and even there it’s a pretty minor variant. It’s particularly telling to me that a number of folks have started referring to the whole collection of things as ‘Obamagate.’ What this suggests to me is that the true scandal for them is the simple fact of Obama’s presidency. He himself is the scandal, and they’re just happy to find any specific content to layer on top of that which can compel a larger story.

– The most extreme non-scandal of the bunch: Benghazi. There has never been any here here, and the newest ‘revelations’ don’t change that. It is a tragedy, and there is even something useful about poking into the post-attack fights about precisely how to understand what happened. But that’s just standard national security evaluation. If this is a scandal, then every presidential administration in history has faced literally hundreds of scandals.

– The press stuff. I have to admit that I find journalists to be, as a class, pretty obnoxious. This is never more true than when they go nuts about something that wouldn’t trouble them in the slightest if it were happening to someone else. I understand that everyone sees things differently when they impose personal (rather than social) costs. So it’s understandable, but it doesn’t make it any less contemptible.

In this case, the entire argument for additional protection to journalists in leak stories is that the Fourth Estate provides a great deal of social good. We don’t think they deserve special First Amendment protections just because they’re swell people; it’s because their contributions to society are particularly important. Which means that it is perfectly legitimate to balance other competing social values against such freedoms. All of which is to say: I grow incredibly frustrated by journalist attitudes which treat their freedoms as moral absolutes while regarding similar freedoms for other groups as merely instrumental.

In these particular cases, it is particularly important to remember that (as far as I have seen) no laws were broken, or even really bent. You may well DISAGREE with the existing state of the law, and that is totally fine. But let’s be clear about what this is. There isn’t really a ‘scandal’ here; there is a debate about what the law ought to be and a debate about whether the executive ought to exercise more discretion than they are legally obliged to do.

My basic position: I’m in favor of some executive flexibility to make judgments on this sort of stuff. While it does seem like in these cases they may have been overly enthusiastic about prosecuting the case—and ought to suffer some blowback on these issues—I’m not convinced anything seriously terrible happened here. If this sort of thing becomes far more standard, and we can begin to see real evidence of a ‘chilling effect’ on journalistic pursuit of significant stories, I think the political pushback would grow significantly. And I would absolutely join the chorus.

But we are not there right now, and honestly I don’t think we’re all that close either.

– The IRS. Okay, this is a real scandal although it’s one where the optics strike me as far more important than the actual content. The harm in question wasn’t really all that big, and it does seem to have been shut down before it could really go much of anywhere. That said, the governmental bureaucracy in general and the IRS in particular need to operate as fairly and independently as possible so when they fail to do so, it really does matter.

I’ll be pretty shocked if this ends up mattering in any kind of serious policy way for the long term. But there’s no denying it will be pretty good fodder for the anti-tax folks for many a year.

– Sexual assault in the military. And here we have a genuine scandal with absolutely horrifying consequences for those affected. 26,000 sexual assaults per year, with not nearly enough done to police them. And now several officers tasked with combating these attacks have themselves been arrested for sexual assault. That’s a problem for some pretty obvious reasons. Except: it doesn’t seem to be included on any of the lists recounting the series of scandals. I wonder why that is.