House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa, AKA "Mr. Grand Theft Auto"
Darrell Issa's efforts to tie the Obama administration directly to the Cincinnati IRS office are not going so well, and it seems to be wearing on him. Sunday in the midst of a flailing interview with CNN's Candy Crowley,
Issa got personal, calling White House spokesman Jay Carney the administration's "paid liar." To which David Plouffe apparently went, "well, if he wants to go there ..."
Steve Benen reminds us of Issa's record. It's
not just that Issa "had, among other things, been indicted for stealing a car, arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, and accused by former associates of burning down a building."
On top of that,
The congressman, for example, claimed to receive the "highest possible" ratings during his Army career, despite the fact that at one point he "received unsatisfactory conduct and efficiency ratings and was transferred to a supply depot." Issa also claimed to have provided security for President Nixon in 1971, which wasn't true, and said he won a national Entrepreneur of the Year award, but didn't.
Issa's insisting that that's all old news, and that he wasn't convicted of any crimes, and Carney is a
liar. But no less a purveyor of the Beltway media worldview than Ron Fournier both castigates Issa for the "paid liar" comment and, looking at the IRS allegations Issa made in the same interview,
writes:
See what he's doing? "We understand" and "in all likelihood" are weasel phrases couching accusations and assumptions that Issa can't support. But don't worry; he might prove them after 18 more interviews!
Do you hear history's echo? Sen. Joe McCarthy paved his way to infamy with 205 names. " I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party …," McCarthy said in 1950. (There is some dispute over the actual number of names McCarthy cited.)
Ron Fournier wrote that. But then, as former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs observed of Issa's "paid liar" comments,
"It’s why five people in this town take Darrell Issa seriously and it’s the surest bet the Republicans are very much on the verge of overplaying their hand publicly and the American people will lose interest in their side of this. They want to see the IRS cleaned up, but they will understand quickly that Darrell Issa is doing nothing more than politicizing this event."
Yeah, when the exact type of reporter that Republicans go to all the trouble of creating such "scandals" to excite is seeing through your wild claims, you've overplayed your hand. We'd already seen that in
polls and
the media, yet Issa can't stop overplaying. That's desperation for you.