Seven Days in May * — It just depends on who is counting the days ?

Seven days ago, three “State Department” whistleblowers were testifying about Benghazi in front of the Congressional Oversight Committee chaired by Republican Darrell Issa  —  for the Obama White House it seems like the world has turned around many more than seven times since then —  and Congressman Issa and his committee, and a few other Committee Chairmen are now getting ready to look into two or three more White House scandals.

Oddly, most of the main stream media think that Obama & Co. is only six days into their current  travails. That’s because they don’t look upon the Issa Committee’s whistleblower hearing of last week as having uncovered or accomplished anything new (of course the MSM is wrong about that, but no matter, right now). The MSM sees the Obama Administration’s recent problems as having begun when certain members of the MSM started to turn on the administration.  That moment is measured from last Friday when ABC News broke the Jonathan Karl report about the leak about the twelve times revised/edited talking points for UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s Sunday talk-show dissembling about Benghazi ( See for example “The Strange Creation of the Obama Scandals” by Jonathan Chait, 5/14/13, New York Magazine/ Daily Intelligencer [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/strange-creation-of-the-obama-scandals.html]).

According to Jonathan Chait’s take on it, “The sudden barometric change in Washington has arrived so rapidly that it is hard to comprehend. ‘The town is turning on President Obama’ ... The black clouds may dissipate within a few days or weeks, or they may hover over the White House for the rest of Obama’s term... [W]e ought to step back and ask, what the hell just happened here? ***  Scandal is a powerful, yet weirdly amorphous term of art in politics. Conceptually, the division between a scandal and a mere controversy or flub or policy dispute is hard to define. It required a peculiar sequencing of events to transform what would on their own have been normal political controversies into the nebulous, all-encompassing Obama Scandals. ***  The episode began at dawn last Friday, when ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl broke explosive news about Benghazi.... ***   The Benghazi report was still fresh when a second bombshell exploded Friday, in the form of the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service had undertaken a one-sided, partisan campaign to scrutinize the tax- exempt status of right-wing activist groups, without applying any similar scrutiny to organizations on the left.... ***  The combination of the Benghazi and IRS stories formed the predicate for the revelation Monday that the Justice Department had conducted a massive sweep of phone records used by the Associated Press.... ” And Chait concludes that “[t]he head-spinning sequence of events from Friday to Monday suddenly elevated the phone records story from a one-day story that would produce denunciations in liberal blogs and taunting from the libertarian right into something categorically different. It was the capstone of the Obama Scandals.”

One can’t help but think that a liberal member of the MSM, like Jonathan Chait, believes that these conflated scandals have only produced a startling blip on the screens of otherwise fawning Obama-watchers. And that after sufficient explanation and analysis, it will all go away or be put into a manageable perspective. That view may be more pervasive in the MSM than other more ominous and negative ones.

However, there are some other views and outlooks out there among those in the MSM. It is only now, and as a result of the eruption of the current scandals, that some in the MSM have actually expressed any foreboding about Obama, his administration, his agenda and his legacy.

A very worthwhile read in the realm of the main stream media for any conservative-minded observers that are looking for some straws in the wind indicating a cyclonic storm that might sweep away this Obama aberration  is a lengthy item in Politico ( See “Obama's dangerous new narrative” by Alexander Burns & John F. Harris, 5/15/13, Politico [http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/obamas-dangerous-new-narrative-91390.html]). Although the portend is not of any kind of overthrow in the nature of a “Seven Days in May” scenario, or even an ushering away of a fallen POTUS aboard a helicopter, ala Richard M. Nixon; the authors do suggest the possibility of an Obama presidency that is completely up-ended and critically judged by the American people with an MSM not nearly as protective as it had been until the events of six or seven days ago.
______________________

*  “Seven Days in May” is a 1962 suspense novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II about an attempt to overthrow the POTUS.  It was the book that I was in the middle of when JFK was shot by ....   I’ve read SDIM again at least two times since 1963.

The book was made into a movie of the same title in 1964 with Frederic March playing the beleaguered president, also starring Kirk, Burt and Ava with a great supporting cast directed by John Frankenheimer; it should have been better than it turned out.