Showing posts with label scandal fatigue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scandal fatigue. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

The charmed political life of the "Teflon man", and a wingnut says goodbye.

It is nice to be home. Time to get back to the grind and daily routine of life here in America.

I see that not much has changed since I have been away. The Fox News folks and their trolls who hang around web sites are still looking for a scandal that they hope will bring the beige one down.

So far, though, it doesn't seem to be working. The president's approval rating is actually going up, and the economy chugs along while he cuddles a charmed republican governor for all the world to see.

That cry you hear is from republicans who are trying to take back the White House in 2016, and who want to close the popularity gap with those evil dumbocrats.

So what do you do if you try to push a scandal and the public doesn't cooperate"? Well, if you are Fox News, you keep on pushing and hope and pray that there is a smoking gun somewhere to link the Teflon man to some of these stories.

Meanwhile, they are wondering how Americans can already have scandal fatigue when they were never engaged in the first place.

What they need is a scandal with something salacious in it. (Think Bill and Monica.) I bet they thought they had one Tuesday when they saw that lipstick all over Obama's collar. Sadly for them, though, O had an answer for that as well

The irony of all of this is that a looming scandal actually brought down a popular Tea Party politician.

"Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican whose status as a leading voice of the Tea Party movement in Congress has faded in the wake of a failed presidential bid and a widening investigation into her campaign spending, said Wednesday that she would not seek re-election.

Mrs. Bachmann, defiant as ever as she insisted that she would have won re-election had she tried, also said the legal inquiries had nothing to do with her decision. She vowed to continue to fight for the principles she said she holds dear: religious liberty, traditional marriage, family values and opposition to abortion.

“I fully anticipate the mainstream liberal media to put a detrimental spin on my decision not to seek a fifth term,” she said in a gauzy network-television-quality video posted on her campaign Web site. “They always seemed to attempt to find a dishonest way to disparage me. But I take being the focus of their attention and disparagement as a true compliment of my public service effectiveness.”
      
Mrs. Bachmann spent heavily in her last Congressional campaign and eked out a victory by less than two percentage points. She would have been one of the Democrats’ top targets in the 2014 elections, but her decision not to run by no means guarantees them a victory in the conservative-leaning district.
      
In addition to a tough fight for re-election, Mrs. Bachmann also faces growing legal troubles. The Office of Congressional Ethics, a quasi-independent House agency that acts like a grand jury to examine allegations of ethics violations, has been conducting its own review of Mrs. Bachmann and her staff since early this year." [Source]

In her farewell video Michele actually said that she is not leaving because of the looming investigations or the fact that she is down in the polls to her potential opponent.

"The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported this month that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was also conducting an inquiry, joining the Federal Election Commission and the Iowa Senate Ethics Committee on the growing list of investigative bodies examining her campaign activity.
      
Among the allegations Mrs. Bachmann is facing is that her campaign improperly used money from an affiliated political action committee, MichelePAC, to pay a fund-raising consultant who worked for her during the 2012 Iowa caucuses. Her campaign has also been accused of making secret and improper payments to Kent Sorenson, an Iowa state senator and popular Republican conservative leader in the state, in advance of the caucuses. And she has been accused of improperly using her presidential campaign staff to help promote her book, “Core of Conviction.”  [Source]
 
Oh ohh. It looks like we might have a real scandal on our hands. I wonder if FOX News will cover this one.