----- Attention Obonzo: You're Fucked! Politico: DC Turns On Obonzo (snicker)

[Bret Cahill's Sore Rectum]

It's Bedtime For Obonzo!
Politico: DC Turns On Obonzo
The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for
this White House.

Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to
Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the
case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to
begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over
themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama
administration.

Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a
good old-fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and
public scolding to pile up.

Vernon Jordan, a close adviser to President Bill Clinton through his
darkest days, told us: “It’s never all right if you’re the president.
There is no smooth sailing. So now he has the turbulence, and this is
the ultimate test of his leadership.” Jordan says Obama needs to do
something dramatic on the IRS, and quick: “He needs to fire somebody. He
needs action, not conversation.”

Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with
little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press,
after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated
by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to
be as ruthless as can be.

This White House’s instinctive petulance, arrogance and defensiveness
have all worked to isolate Obama at a time when he most needs a support
system. “It feel like they don’t know what they’re here to do,” a former
senior Obama administration official said. “When there’s no narrative,
stuff like this consumes you.”

Republican outrage is predictable, maybe even manageable. Democratic
outrage is not.

The dam of solid Democratic solidarity has collapsed, starting with New
York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s weekend scolding of the White House
over Benghazi, then gushing with the news the Justice Department had
sucked up an absurdly broad swath of Associated Press phone records.

Democrats are privately befuddled by the White House’s flat-footed
handling of this P.R. and legal mess, blaming a combination of bad
timing, hubris and communications ineptitude. The most charitable
defense offered up on background is that Obama staffers are scandal
virgins, unaccustomed to dealing with a rabid press.

Chris Lehane, who spent so much time managing scandals in the 1990s that
it inspired him to write a textbook on the subject, is among the
contingent of Clinton-era scandal hands that thinks the Obama team has
botched its second-term image. “One cannot get caught up with chasing
news cycles in a crisis, as that is a prescription for putting out
inaccurate information that does not withstand scrutiny or the test of
time,” said Lehane, whose book is titled “Masters of Disaster.”

One Democrat who likes Obama and has been around town for many years
said elected officials in his own party are no different than
Republicans: They think the president is distant and unapproachable.

“He has never taken the Democratic chairs up to Camp David to have a
drink or to have a discussion,” the longtime Washingtonian said. “You
gotta stroke people and talk to them. It’s like courting: You have to
send flowers and candy and have surprises. It’s a constant process. Now
they’re saying, ‘He never talked to me in the good times.’”

This makes it easier for Democrats like House Oversight and Government
Reform Committee member Elijah Cummings to pop off, as he did on CNN on
Tuesday, calling the IRS scandal “one of the most alarming things” he’s
ever seen. Ouch.

None of this is going away. Top Republicans tell us the Benghazi
investigations will last at least months, and probably until the
midterms of 2014 and beyond. Same for the IRS scandal — and new scrutiny
of how the Obama White House clamps down on its critics. Republicans are
also working up plans to use the backdrop of government incompetence and
over-reach to try to further undermine implementation of the new health
care law.

This is a dangerous — albeit familiar — place for a second-term
president. Once the dogs are released, they bark, they bite and it takes
a very long time to calm them down. Bill Clinton got hit early and
often, and George W. Bush never really recovered from it.

No doubt, the hysteria cools. But, once you hit this point, it takes
time, often lots of it.

The long-term danger is that the political system and the public start
to view the president, his motives and ideas through a more skeptical
lens. The short-term danger is the press races for new details, new
scandals, new expressions of indignity with each passing day. Read
Tuesday morning editorial pages of every paper for a taste of things to
come. Or watch a rerun of Tuesday’s “Morning Joe,” in which reporters
made it sound like Obama is a latter-day Richard Nixon.

““And it goes beyond even the story,” National Journal’s Ron Fournier,
who covered the Clinton and Bush scandals and was once the AP Washington
bureau chief, said on the show. “One common thing with Benghazi and the
IRS scandal, is we’re being misled every day. We were lied to on
Benghazi, on the talking points behind Benghazi, for months. We were
lied to by the IRS for months and now they’re sending a clear message to
our sources:

‘Don’t embarrass the administration or we’re coming after you.’”
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/dc-turns-on-obama-91386.html?hp=t1_3

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(snicker)