Clearly Obama is a horrible boss, and the White House is a toxic work environment, probably, where people are afraid to report bad news to their superiors. Just like Nixon, times ten thousand.

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Let's recap the scandals, in case you have been too busy having message board debates about Star Trek or deciphering new Kanye lyrics to pay attention:

1. Benghazi. Republicans insist the White House did something evil and incomprehensible involving talking points following the September 11, 2012 attack on the American consulate in the Lybian city. Recently, the White House released an email chain showing the process of drafting and revising the talking points.
2. The IRS. The IRS reportedly targeted conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny of their tax-exempt status.
3. The Associated Press. The Justice Department sought access to, and received, a massive trove of phone data of AP journalists, as part of its investigation into a leak.

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Kinsey's column sort of cheerfully mocks, in the Kinsleyan fashion, the dark warnings of "anti-austerians" like Krugman. He cheerfully quotes a series of statistics showing how miserable the recent economic crisis has been for Americans, and people around the world, and says, yes, recessions lead to death and austerity worsens recessions but it's worth it because "Austerians believe, sincerely, that their path is the quicker one to prosperity in the longer run." And Kinsley seems to accept that belief as true.

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Like all talking points, these talking points were dumb and full of weird weaselly language and made worse by the fact that each claim was designed to be repeated by people on TV who presumably don't believe what they say or at least don't really care that much. "For those interested in pushing back against partisan attacks while the rest of us grapple with the larger questions, here is language to guide you," the memo said. The rest of us will be back here, grappling, while you engage in your semi-scripted verbal combat, with some guy who has different talking points.

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21. The time he hung out with Elvis in the Oval Office

"Hey Elvis they should call them tranquLOLizers right?"

20. The time Richard Nixon was the original The Dude.

19. More like SWAG IT TO ME

18. The time he told off his dog's haters

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We are in second-term scandal mode. A combination of genuine abuses of power and overblown pseudo-scandals will engulf the administration over the next four years. But which currently raging controversy is most likely to lead to the premature end of the administration?

Benghazi

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When she's not interviewing famous people, Walters is partying and vacationing with and occasionally dating them. Former relationships (dutifully recounted in her boldfaced-name-heavy memoir) include Sen. Edward Brooke, former Bear Stearns head Alan Greenberg, and Alan Greenspan, who I guess has a type. She's buddies with war criminal and society fixture Henry Kissinger. She's old friends with make-believe TV tycoon Donald Trump. She testified at the Brooke Astor trial, because Astor was, of course, a close friend.

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The issue is that Republicans won't sign on to McCarthy -- or any EPA administrator -- until she agrees to force the EPA to submit everything they do to a very "business-friendly" (time- and money-intensive) analysis. Here's how Politico explains it:

Republican leaders were unmoved, though, saying the Obama administration deserves blame for the impasse by refusing to fully answer questions that GOP nominees have posed about McCarthy and EPA. They include questions about the “underlying data used to justify EPA’s job-killing regulations,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a statement to POLITICO.

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Those are the accusations the #BENGHAZI coalition has been making since shortly after the attack: that the Obama administration intentionally allowed the attack on the U.S. consulate to happen, or did not do as much as it could have to stop the attack once it started, because it did not want to admit that it did not successfully destroy terrorism itself in its first term; and that after the attack, the administration intentionally and repeatedly lied about the attackers and their motivation (the "they didn't say 'terrorism'" argument), and then engaged in a Watergate-style cover-up of the fact that the attack had been terrorism.

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The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has it figured out:

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Yes, underperforming for a Republican in a heavily Republican district, in a special election, is definitely proof that Sanford was a superior candidate, and not merely that he had an R by his name. If anything, Sanford's victory proves that candidates matter only in terms of ideology, not biography. In a very conservative district, the Republican candidate will win, even if he's a weird creep with a humiliating past.

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Kurtz just got the ax from the Daily Beast, following a column in which he attacked Jason Collins, an NBA  player who recently came out as gay, for not disclosing that he'd once been engaged to a woman. Collins had in fact disclosed that. But the Beast also seemed to want an excuse to rid itself of Kurtz, its "Washington Bureau Chief," who had recently (for like the last year or so) seemed hugely distracted by other ventures that he also seemed more interested in promoting.

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McAuliffe is a longtime professional fundraiser for the Democratic Party. The dehumanizing stuff was uncovered by (or provided to) BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski who simply posted some clips from the audiotapes of McAuliffe's autobiography. In these clips McAuliffe abandons his wife as she is giving birth to their daughter to go to a party for former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, and then he forces his wife and his literally newborn son to sit in a car, on the way home from the hospital, while he attends a fundraiser. In the second story it is noted that his wife is crying, but the important detail is that he raises a million dollars for the party.

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Original post: 
Howard Kurtz had a bad day yesterday. He wrote this whole column calling out Jason Collins, the NBA player who this week came out as gay, breaking a major American sports barrier and quickly becoming a widely celebrated and admired figure, for not telling readers of his Sports Illustrated piece that he once had a (female) fiancée. Except, one little problem with the entire concept of the piece: Collins explicitly wrote that he'd once been engaged in his Sports Illustrated piece. It took a few minutes for the Internet to point out this titanic error. Then, the the column was altered, without a correction, to say that Collins "downplayed one detail" instead of "left one little part out." Finally, a proper correction was appended.

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Like Politico's Glenn Thrush, who was mad that the press conference was announced only 90 minutes before it happened. Thrush said the whole game is rigged.

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Then he got in a funny argument with Dan Pfeiffer.

So the president, in his first term, did fewer press conferences than Bush did in his first term, and Bush was famous for not doing press conferences so that he didn't have to explain or defend himself. Obama, though, is capable of defending himself without a script, even if he frequently falls back on increasingly grating clichés. He simply skips them because they really are a waste of everyone's time.

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The New York Times charitably says that "Friday’s speech was not the first time Mr. Cruz may have acted counter to some of the Senate’s norms," before bringing up Cruz's decidedly McCarthyite take on Chuck Hagel.

Cruz is at the FreedomWorks Texas Summit, and the news here is that he calls most of his colleagues "squishes" and gives a (quite self-aggrandizing) account of off-the-record Senate Republican caucus luncheons, which apparently involved a lot of people yelling at Cruz and Rand Paul and the other guy who also promised to filibuster the entire gun deal from start to finish. In this version of events, the three filibustering amigos were responsible for the failure of the entire proposal. As Dave Weigel points out, that's not really how it happened. The bill failed -- and was probably doomed to begin with -- because a lot more than three senators opposed it, and the Cruz/Paul filibuster threat was worse politics for the party than allowing debate to proceed and then watching red-state Democrats cave. Which is what actually happened.

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Simpson and Bowles have been speaking to the people, and the people agree with them!

No matter our audience, those we spoke with shared two things: a thirst for the truth about what it will take to right our fiscal ship and a willingness to be part of the solution so long as everyone is in it together.

Basically these two are nostalgic for December when it seemed like a "grand bargain" might actually happen:

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After presidents are done being presidents, they get to build big museums about themselves, because a tradition that originally involved simply making the documents and papers and records of a president available to researchers and the public obviously became this giant, expensive, pseudo-regal tribute thing, because this is America and we're really weird about presidents.

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This is at this point pretty thin. "Talks" doesn't mean much. Gingrich and Cutter might be part of a whole bench of hosts. But it does suggest that CNN is going about a "Crossfire" launch in just about the worst way possible. Those hoping for a smarter version of the old show will definitely be disappointed.

Stephanie Cutter has spent her entire career as a campaign flack. Her job has been, for years, to spin reporters. (This job leads to becoming a political news media professional strangely often.) Regardless of her intelligence and her ability to speak extemporaneously on camera, she has never demonstrated an ability to be an interesting, independent thinker, and it is fair to predict that as a TV pundit she'd be representing "The Democratic Party" and not "liberalism."

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