GOP Chair Tries to Cow TV Networks

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Reince Priebus throws an ill-considered fit, Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post, and Obama yucks it up with Jay Leno.  (I'm only including the question about the Republican National Committee Chairman.  To see the other questions and answers click on the link to the magazine in line one of this paragraph.) 

First, Benson's question:
 
NC chairman Reince Priebus delivered an ultimatum to CNN and NBC earlier this week: Pull the plug on your planned Hillary Clinton film projects, or we won't allow you to air the 2016 GOP primaries.  Do you think the RNC chair has a point? And, tactically, is this a smart fight for him to pick? 

(Actually, he threatened to freeze the two networks out of any Republican primary debates.)

And here's Rich's answer: 

It seems that almost no one debating this has seen the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job directed by Charles Ferguson, who CNN has hired to do its Hillary documentary. It is a scathing (and superb) takedown of the Wall Street financial establishment that looted the country during the bubble and precipitated the crash. My guess is that David Brock has seen Inside Job, and that might explain in part why Media Matters is against Ferguson taking on the assignment for CNN: It's impossible to imagine that Ferguson would do a hagiography of Hillary, whose husband's administration empowered many of the villains in Inside Job. (And it tells you what kind of idiot Priebus is that he is looking a gift horse from CNN in the mouth.) As for the NBC miniseries starring Diane Lane, does anyone really believe that such a project long before the election, broadcast on a network often seen by fewer viewers than Univision, is going to seriously alter public perception of someone as well known at this point as Hillary Clinton? Perhaps most idiotic of all is Priebus's threat to bar GOP presidential primary debates from airing on CNN and NBC in retaliation for those networks' "in-kind donations" to Hillary. Does he really want to go there? Fox News, after all, is a 365-days-a-year in-kind donation by Rupert Murdoch to his political party. But let's say for the sake of argument that Priebus pulls off his boycott and even achieves what is surely his dream scenario - that all Republican debates be held under the auspices of Roger Ailes at Fox. What the GOP will end up with is a presidential field that panders entirely to the party's base - the perfect way to facilitate, say, a Paul-Cruz ticket, provided that Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann doesn't make a comeback. Good luck with that in November 2016.

Rich gives a great answer.  Just as the most interesting question about the Democratic nomination contest for 2016 is "Will Hillary run?" the most interesting question on the Republican side is "Will they finally pull out all the stops and nominate a full-blown extremist?"  As they come more and more under the spell of the Tea Party monster they've created, the answer has a stronger and stronger chance of being  "yes."  If so the likely result will be a defeat on the scale of the Goldwater debacle in 1964.  Party Chairman Priebus's threat keeps that scenario open for the reasons Rich cites.  This could all be a lot of fun.  Things are, as Alice exclaimed in Wonderland, getting "Curiouser and curiouser!"       

The Bigger Picture

Reader Tom sent me an article by Frank Rich today. The New York Times op-ed luminary published a piece called "Two Cheers for Rod Blagojevich" in the December 13 edition of the paper of record. You can go to it here.

As the Times intro to the piece says, as bad as the corrupt Illinois pol is, he is but "a timely national whipping boy for an era of corruption and profound lack of accountability." Yes, the guy is a scum, if not literally crazy. They should impeach the rat and then throw the criminal book at him. But it's rather like Michael Vick or Scott Peterson. Kill some dogs or your pregnant wife or rob a liquor store and people are incensed. Kill thousands and squander billions and it somehow provokes less of a reaction. As Stalin once said, "Kill one person and it is murder. Kill a million and it is a statistic."

Blagojevich is a figure we can get at, unlike the seemingly invulnerable authors of the disasters that now place the national weal in peril. Where is our sense of proportion? As Rich points out, "Blagojevich's alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald."

George W. Bush neglected his duty to get the enemy who attacked us and used fear of it as a pretext to start an unrelated war against a different power. He justified it with a web of intentional deceit. He still even this week blames "the intelligence," ignoring the accounts of former administration insiders that attacking Iraq was on the agenda in the first month of the Bush presidency. As a result, thousand of Americans are dead, tens of thousands are maimed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead and at least $600 billion of our money is gone. These have all become statistics. And the original enemy still plots, schemes and kills. Yet the votes are not there for impeachment. It would be inconvenient.

Stealing elections, abridging the Constitution, torturing prisoners, abrogating treaties, spying on citizens without cause, politicizing the Justice Department, falsifying scientific research, selectively revealing classified information and identities for political gain while keeping the basic workings of government secret - these are the kinds of practices for which tin-pot dictators from third world countries eventually wind up getting hauled in front of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. For the "greatest democracy on earth" they are business as usual if the offenders work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The financial malefactors will likely suffer no real consequences either. One would think the reputations of people like Phil Gramm, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan would be ruined. Instead, the damage they caused was so severe it became imperative for the people at large to come to the rescue of the institutions they destroyed in order to prevent the total crashing of the entire economy. Instead of being held to account they are, in effect, being rewarded. Make sure to see Rich's article for a fuller list of the miscreants. The bottom line is that this has got to stop. Some people need to go to jail.

We cannot afford this kind of dishonesty and self-delusion any longer, either morally or financially. In 1945 the United States stood like a colossus over a ruined world. It accounted for 50% of the world economy and alone possessed the ultimate military weapon. Those days are long gone. Institutions with the power to misdirect our entire political system or the wealth to short-circuit our entire financial edifice have to be watched like a hawk and held to account. Gov. Blagojevich is a useful example, and the example should not stop with him.