Benghazi, IRS and Wikipedia
David Ignatius suggests a penetrating analysis in the way he frames this story about the Benghazi conflict, but he only partially delivers.  Still worth a read because he does highlight an angle on the story that is likely both important and overlooked because overlooking it is important to elite leaders of both parties.

Ignatius starts with this…

“The 100 pages of Benghazi emails released last week tell us almost nothing about how four Americans came to die so tragically in that Libyan city. But they are a case study in why nothing works in Washington.

Rather than reading these messages for their substance on Benghazi (on which officials were still basically clueless three days after the attack), try perusing them as an illustration of how the bureaucracy responds to crisis — especially when officials know they will be under the media spotlight.”

Susan Rice, President Obama’s UN Ambassador whose appointment as Secretary of State was derailed by the political firestorm surrounding her comments, turns out to be just the presenting conflict, the pretext upon which the deeper conflicts about governance in the mass media era, where there are enormous pressures to govern to win elections rather than the reverse, and the skilled (if cowardly) efforts to distract us from these important questions by focusing public anger and attention on the presenting conflict—designed to be so convoluted and outrageous that we throw up our hands in frustration and walk away from the conversation because is it ‘just politics.’  Ignatius closes with…

“At the bottom of the stack of message traffickers is the office of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who is appointed to deliver the talking points on the Sunday talk shows. And then, as we know, the Benghazi imbroglio really begins."

Elites using conflicts to advance their positions on deeper, less visible, sometimes procedural or technocratic or symbolic conflicts is nothing new.  It frequently involves finding a news story and transforming it into a conflict that can be used, just as a skilled bullshitter works with the truth to communicate a misleading message designed to disguise the fact that the storyteller is a phony, misrepresenting his intentions.   

An AP story about the IRS is starting to get interesting today, just as angry interest amplified by the phony story appears to be receding.  Here is how AP starts it story…

“There’s an irony in the Internal Revenue Service’s crackdown on conservative groups.

The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and senior Treasury Department officials were notified in the midst of the 2012 presidential election season that an internal investigation was under way.

But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right that were most influential in the elections and are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to hide their donors.”

It is worth reading, but here is one stray fact that caught my eye today…

“Despite the bipartisan outcry over the IRS scandal, there’s little incentive for lawmakers on either side of the aisle to push for reforms because Republicans and Democrats alike benefit from these big outside groups.

In fact, just the opposite may be happening.

Some congressional Democrats, fearful of being tied to the scandal, are backing the push for more aggressive enforcement of these groups. And some conservative leaders and Republican donors are using the IRS scandal to help protect the status quo while preparing to pump hundreds of millions of dollars — raised anonymously in many cases with no contribution limits — into the next election cycle, just as they did last fall.

‘I would hope that this new information about the politicization of the IRS should put the brakes on any sort of disclosure of donors who wish to remain anonymous,’ said Charlie Spies, who helps raise money for several conservative organizations and previously led the super political action committee that raised more than $140 million to benefit Mitt Romney’s presidential bid. ‘We’re now seeing exactly what the risk is for donors to be disclosed.’”

Finally, here is an interesting read, but disturbing story, about how Wikipedia works (or does not always work so well) from Salon, digging beneath presenting conflicts to begin to show us what is going on behind the scenes, where the capillaries of power cast a wide net.