Politics

For a New York minute it seemed like a return of yesteryear, with old times there not forgotten. Bubba was back, and Hillary had him. Then, pffftt! The minute was gone, and so were Bubba on the stump and the missus dreamy-eyed at his side.

Anthony Weiner, the Gotham flasher who quit Congress when his night job, starring in his own show on his own private porn channel (“the stars come out at night in the Twitterhood”), closed out of town. Now he’s running for mayor of New York City to test F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that there are no second acts in American lives. Fitzgerald thought you get an opening and a closing, with nothing between. The flasher had his opening and closing, and his second act is lost in the clutter of memories and might-have-beens.

Bubba and the missus got their second acts, each one verging on a boffo performance. They could teach Mr. Weiner a thing or two when he needs help most. Who better than Bubba to tell him how to profit from disgrace. Who better than Hillary to tutor Huma Abedin, the Weiner missus, on how to wring out of the shadow of disgrace the last ounce of sympathy, pity and compassion that is the wronged wife’s due. If Bubba could do it, why not the weenie?

The Weiners and the Clintons have more in common than marital malarkey. Like Anthony Weiner, the Clintons were once left for dead on the side of the road in New Hampshire, and with sheer determination and a sufficiency of gall Bubba recast himself as “the comeback kid.”

Mr. Weiner starts with advantages Bubba didn’t have; the Clintons borrowed a million dollars from a Republican friend in Little Rock to keep the campaign afloat in the storm. Mr. Weiner has nearly $5 million already banked and perhaps another million is available in public matching money, together with the IOUs collected over 14 years in Congress. He’s the big mule in a crowded feed lot, dominated by the speaker of the City Council (aldermen with a speaker?), but it's a field consisting mostly of “others.” A new poll, taken by Quinnipiac University, puts the speaker, Christine Quinn, at 25 percent and Mr. Weiner at 15 percent, a gap not as large as it seems. If somebody doesn’t get 40 percent there will be a second round. A run-off is a new election.

Mr. Weiner understands, as Bubba did in his day, that “this is going to be a difficult slog, and I’m going to have to have a lot of difficult conversations with people along the way.”

He’ll have to endure a lot of cheap jokes, too, just like Bubba. Double-entendres will lie in wait every time he speaks. “I hope at least some of my ideas penetrate,” he told commuters at a subway stop Thursday, “and it changes some of the conversations.” He, like the Clintons, must expect the unexpected. Big-haired women seemed to pop out from the potted plants with an entertaining tale to tell everywhere Bubba went, and Mr. Weiner conceded (wisely, no doubt) Thursday that more lewd photographs may lurk in the Twitterhood. “It is what it is,” he said, leaving “it” as vague as Bubba left “is.”

“People may decide they want to come forward and say, ‘here’s another email that I got,’ or another photo. I’m certainly not going to do that. So people may hear things that are true, they may hear things that are not true, but I’m going to keep being focused on issues that are important to New York City.” And so forth and so on. This was right out of Bubba’s playbook.

Mr. Weiner is not getting much help from any of the usual liberal suspects, who mostly want to lie low and keep quiet. Gov. Andrew Cuomo calls the prospect of Mr. Weiner winning a “shame on us.” The crowded field includes a prominent black, and the speaker of the City Council is, she wants everybody to know, a lesbian. These are constituencies a New York pol dare not let anyone else bow deeper to. But the boy needs help, and Bubba, who performed the marriage rites when a suitable rabbi, priest or imam couldn’t be found, always thinks only of others. He’s famous for that. But not this time.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Republicans tempted to reach too far too soon should remember that when impeachable presidents, like persimmons, are picked green, they’re inedible. Once ripened, they’re delicious.

Like guilty presidents finally run to ground, ripe persimmons can be eaten fresh, dried, raw, or cooked. Properly ripened persimmons have the texture of pudding, with no risk of becoming “a pudding without a theme,” as Winston Churchill once complained of a dessert unfit for a prime minister. The flesh of a mature persimmon, like a mature presidential scandal, is very sweet on the tongues of a president’s enemies.

Green persimmons, bitter and acidic, only inflict the pain of an unexpected pucker. It’s important to pick neither persimmon nor scandal before its time.

Republicans, on the run only a month ago with no sure strategy for stopping President Obama’s runaway second term, with Atty. Gen. Eric Holder holding his horse, now have a surfeit of scandals, particularly satisfying since it’s served up by a reluctant mainstream media. If you’re weary of Benghazi, there’s the tasty pursuit of uppity journalists. You can sample a little of the latest Benghazi salad or sauteed journalist while anticipating the main course, deep-fried tax collector. Or you can shake up all three scandals and change the order on the menu for tomorrow. There’s a new delight coming out of the kitchen almost on the hour.

The mainstream media, so called, thought it had the Benghazi scandal safely bottled up until the other two broke. Benghazi seems to be misfeasance of office, lawful but awful, probably legal but something that earlier generations of Americans would have regarded as unforgivable – a commander in chief abandoning Americans in distress to the mercies of a brutal enemy. Abusing journalists and using the Internal Revenue Service to punish political enemies is more like malfeasance, unlawful and dreadful. If these are not high crimes they’re at least misdemeanors, and either is constitutional grounds for impeachment.

The White House is furiously peddling the excuses that Benghazi isn’t a scandal because it happened a long time ago, abusing journalists is outrageous, terrible, contemptible, abominable (pick your own approved adjective) and maybe the IRS was naughty but nobody in the Obama administration can be held responsible because the evil-doers were only rogues. Besides, it happened in Cincinnati, and two lowly IRS grunions have been sacked.

Thin gruel, indeed, and less persuasive with every news cycle. An official of the IRS in the Cincinnati office told The Washington Post over the weekend that the Cincinnati office is blameless because it was only doing what Washington headquarters asked for. “We’re not political,” the IRS official told The Post. “We people on the local level are doing what we are supposed to do. That’s why there are so many people here who are flustered. Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

The Justice Department has been after reporters for a long time, through Republican as well as Democratic administrations. John Solomon, former deputy Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press and later executive editor of The Washington Times, tells in The Times’ Tuesday editions how his phone calls and email exchanges from both home and office were monitored for years by the Justice Department. And not just his telephone records. Once, when a source in the Philippines sent a package of material by FedEx, it was lost. Suspecting that it was not lost but “lost,” he tracked it to a FedEx clerk who told him, with a raised eyebrow in his voice, that “it fell off a horse cart in Manila and must have gotten lost.”

Like so much that the Obama administration has borrowed from its predecessors, the illegal pursuit of journalists continues. James Rosen, a correspondent for Fox News, is the latest example. The Justice Department tracked his telephone records, emails and even his movements to meet sources face to face. The government says it was pursuing “national security leaks,” but the more we learn, the greater the suspicion that the government is monitoring hostile politics.

This story is just beginning, and before we learn how far and wide the corruption goes, the president will be buying aspirin by the pound. Mr. Obama, like presidents before him, just thinks he has preserved credible deniability. Patience, as his critics will learn if they keep their voices down until it’s time to shout, can be its own reward.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

It’s too early to conclude, as some Republicans have, that the dam has broken, that the sleeping mainstream media has begun to come out of its sleeping-sickness stupor, and that even Democrats are about to leap out of the way. Not yet. But the dam has clearly sprung a leak.

Benghazi is no longer “the b-word,” to be relegated to furtive whispers behind the potted plant, spoken like the f-bomb and the n-word, the ugly burps in the language of the uncivilized and the indecent. “For a long time,” concedes Alex Koppelman in the New Yorker, “it seemed like the idea of a cover-up was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.”

And it’s not just Benghazi. The scandal at the Internal Revenue System frightens everyone, given that an IRS audit and a heart attack are the twin terrors of the wee hours of the night. “Previous presidents,” writes Joe Klein in Time magazine, “including great ones like Roosevelt, have used the IRS against their enemies. But I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.”

Maureen Dowd, the dowager queen of spleen at The New York Times (where Mo’s toxic rants are applied to Republicans and other conservatives in the absence of waterboards), says the nation’s capital is “in the throes of déjà vu and preview as it plunges back into Clinton Rules, defined . . . as damage control that goes like this: ‘It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.’ The conservatives appearing on Benghazi-obsessed Fox News are a damage patrol with an approach that goes like this: ‘Lies, paranoia, subpoena, impeach, Watergate, Iran-contra.’ . . . [But] now that the IRS has confessed to targeting Tea Party groups, maybe some of the paranoia is justified.”

This late evidence that the rhinestone glitteries of the media do, after all, inhabit the same planet as the rest of us is reassuring, even if the glitteries are nevertheless still anxious to protect President Obama from his emerging legacy. “It’s terrible,” Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward broke the Watergate scandal a generation ago, says of the IRS targeting conservatives for audits: “Outrageous. Heads ought to roll. Simple as that. From what we know so far, some high-up heads.”

But just not too high-up. “We know a lot about President Obama, and I think the idea that he would want the IRS used for retribution – we have no evidence of any such thing.”

Well, not yet. And maybe not ever. But Carl’s Watergate scoop from that earlier century was dismissed for weeks as “a third-rate burglary,” so if we know anything about Washington cover-ups we know that it takes time to unravel them. A new poll, by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, finds that Republicans are angrier about Benghazi than about the discovery that the IRS has been keeping a little list of Mr. Obama’s enemies. This is welcome news at the White House, which is expected to play the scandals against each other. In fact, there’s fanciful speculation that the White House leaked the IRS disclosure specifically to distract attention from Benghazi. The IRS scandal might be successfully laid to benign incompetence. The indifference to saving American lives at Benghazi was criminal.

Benghazi is still regarded as a Washington scandal in flyover country, not yet news for the front page. For most Americans “Benghazi” is just another word from the weird world of the Middle East and North Africa, just easier than most to pronounce. It’s a story with violent death but no sex. On the other hand, everybody’s familiar with the IRS. Barack Obama has joked about using IRS audits to silence enemies, as in the commencement speech at Arizona State in 2009. The reference seemed innocent enough at the time, but he probably would find a better joke now.

Once the leak in a dam becomes a torrent, and then the dam breaks, there’s nothing even a president can do. He becomes an unwilling participant. Every time he is forced to comment, as he was yesterday in a “press availability” with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he can only insist that “there’s no there.” But now everybody knows there is. He can run, but he can’t hide. It’s his legacy, and he’s stuck with it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Deep in the bowels of the Senate and House Office Buildings, secreted away where there will be no distractions, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, have put aside partisan differences to work for the common weal. This particular weal has never had it so good.

The issue at hand transcends taxes, immigration reform, the war on terrorism, even war and peace (if any). The hush-hush conversations, involving House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are about how to exempt Congress and all the little grunions who attend every need of the congresspersons from . . . Obamacare, the health care monstrosity that we were told would be so good for us.

Discussions started months ago, when it suddenly dawned on these worthies that the Affordable Health Care Act would not be affordable for these highly paid daytime residents of Capitol Hill, and they must be exempt from the requirements that will bankrupt everybody else. Democrats and Republicans alike are aware of the “acute sensitivity” of embracing public hypocrisy with such enthusiasm, and the sticking point is whether Democrats can persuade Speaker Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, to commit hari-kari with them. A source close to the talks tells Politico, the Capitol Hill political daily, “everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

The alternative is to reach deep into savings or borrow the cash to pay for Obamacare in the insurance exchanges, just like everyone else, as mandated by the president’s health-care scheme, and joined with such glee by congressional Democrats, and sanctified by Chief Justice John Roberts. If Congress and its go-fers, the aides who pamper, coddle and on occasion even go to the bathroom for the members, are to be treated like the rest of us, a lot of them will have to retire to K Street’s lobbying shops or go home to find honest work as florists, dog walkers, bicycle mechanics - or rest on the kindness of indulgent kin. “This could lead to a real brain drain,” says one congressional aide, “with the nation losing the counsel and wisdom of many of the best and brightest.” (Brains on the Hill. Who knew?)

These worthies are shameless, as we all know, and they’re all hiding in fear in broom closets, little-used toilets or whatever they can find in the shadows under the elms. Harry Reid’s office won’t talk about it. Steny Hoyer, the House minority whip, sent out an aide to say that he was looking for a way to implement Obamacare in a way that’s workable for everyone, “including members and staff.” John Boehner’s mouthpiece said his boss wants to spare everyone pain. “If the speaker has the opportunity to save anyone from Obamacare, he will.” First the speaker and his aides, of course.

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who led the Republican opposition to Obamacare in the Senate, thinks exempting anyone, even a member of Congress, is a bad idea. “I think if this is going to be a disaster, which I think it’s going to be, we ought to enjoy it together with our constituents.” Perhaps Congress could hire out-of-work musicians to play “Nearer My God to Thee” on election eve next November, like the violinists who bucked up the spirits of the doomed on the deck of the unsinkable Titanic as the great ship sank.

Obamacare could be the gift to the Republicans that keeps on giving, as President Obama himself knew it would be when he arranged to have it become effective only after he was safely re-elected to a second term. Democrats are terrified that the full reality of the disaster will become apparent to all just in time for the 2014 congressional elections. They’re being particularly nice to their Republican colleagues, because they must have bipartisan cover.

Republicans, being Republicans, are likely to give it to them. The health-care “reform” is tailor-made as a Republican talking point – no need to shout – and nobody knows this better than a Democratic congressman. The prospect of hanging, as Dr. Johnson famously said, “focuses the mind wonderfully.” So, too, the delicious prospect of a congressman having to endure the punishment he devised for someone else.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

This has put Thatcher critics in a froth of toxic bile, as the accolades continue to pour in from all over the world. Civility is always scarce in politics – it is, after all, a contact sport – but some of the rage in Old Blimey moves close to the edge of the charts.

A cartoon in the Guardian, a leading newspaper of the left, depicted the Iron Lady descending into hell, the front page of the Socialist Worker headlined her death with the single word "Rejoice," and a movie marquee in the tough neighborhood of Brixton paid its respects with the message "Margaret Thatchers Dead LOL," for "laugh out loud." The BBC called the song, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead" tasteless and offensive, but played it to mark her death, anyway.

Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons, announced that she would not accompany her husband to the funeral Wednesday at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It wasn't clear whether she was making a feminist point or she's just eager to throw a brickbat at a womanly better. Or maybe she was just throwing a fit of wifely pique.

"As Commons speaker, John will be attending the funeral," she said, "and rightly so. But I'm not obliged to participate in my husband's public life – last time I looked this was the 21st century. John holds public office and an important position, not me."

Colleagues in the Commons rallied around her husband, as everyone usually will when a spouse makes a public spectacle. Said one fellow member: "John Bercow handled it brilliantly. He got just the right tone. As for Sally, as the old saying goes, 'she wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral'."

Some of the "protests" of the honors for Mrs. Thatcher are reminiscent of the tasteless stunts of the Westboro Baptist Church, so called, at soldiers' funerals in America. There's a tradition in Britain, where good manners are otherwise prized, of mixing Bronx cheers (as they're called here) with accolades for prime minsters. They wouldn't do that for the queen or senior royals, says Robert Worcester, an American who founded Mori, one the Britain’s leading polling firms. Rude posters and placards are expected outside St. Paul's during the funeral. "Good riddance" will be among the kindest sentiments.

There's considerable affection for Mrs. Thatcher throughout England, but memories are short and the misery she inherited and largely put right are mostly forgotten, particularly among trade unionists. Mr. Worcester of Mori observes that it isn't likely, for example, that a Navy ship would be named for Mrs. Thatcher, more out of fear than custom. "Shipbuilders would put down their tools rather than honor a woman many trade unionists blame for taking their unions out of politics."

Robert McGeehan of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, a London think tank, observes that there was no public celebration of the death of Richard Nixon, though he was equally reviled on the stinky left. “This really shows the dissimilarity between the two countries,” he told The Associated Press. He couldn’t recall "anything remotely resembling the really crude approach we’ve seen here. There is a class ingredient here we simply don't have in America. They like to perpetuate this. The bitterness goes from father to son."

But not only in England. There’s no scarcity of pique and envy in America, too. Some critics on the left are trying to turn the Iron Lady into something made of lesser mettle. She wasn't really all that tough, and there was a liberal hiding among her convictions, gasping for air, writes Matt Latimer, briefly a speechwriter for George W. Bush, in the Washington Post. There's "something troubling in the Republican celebration of her political intransigence, and it is not just the fact that it's largely a myth."

There’s something frightening about a tough woman with courage and conviction, when all about her the Nancy men are trembling in their Gucci loafers. That "intransigence" might be expected of the men, too.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

They’re very, very upset that Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky who is the leader of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate, is openly practicing politics, like an actress coming out of the closet as a thespian, or a shopkeeper shamelessly committing nepotism with his daughter.

This is so far mostly of interest to a small but noisy conventicle of magpies, perched on telephone wires in Washington and Manhattan, chattering to each other about the day the senator sat down with his aides to talk about a prospective challenge from Ashley Judd, the movie starlet.

They were discussing Miss Judd’s strengths, such as there may be, and her weaknesses, and how a McConnell campaign could exploit the weaknesses if in fact she ran against him in November. You might think this is just what all successful politicians do, but somebody made a tape recording of the conversation and leaked it to David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, and overnight the incident became Son of Watergate (though the cliché-mongers of the media are trying to christen it “McConnellgate”). A McConnell campaign aide, equally bereft of imagination, likened the leak to something the Gestapo of Nazi Germany might have done, and the FBI was called in to see whether partisan evil-doers had planted a bug in the wall.

Soon everybody was trying to get an oar in while the water was lukewarm. The National Jewish Democratic Council demanded an apology, or something, for the reference to the Gestapo – the brutal Nazi secret police – “just days after Holocaust Remembrance Day.” The hapless McConnell aide probably should have cited the KGB, though reference rights to the Holocaust do not necessarily include rights to the Gestapo, an equal opportunity terrorizer. World War II belongs to everybody, though comparisons to Hitler by anyone who gets a parking ticket are getting tedious and going out of style in the better capital salons.

What was actually said at the meeting of Mr. McConnell and his good ol’ boys was more like a coffee-shop conversation than a conclave of the illuminati. “I assume most of you have played the game Whac-a-Mole,” the senator is heard saying. “This is the Whac-a-Mole period of the campaign . . . when anybody sticks their head up, do them out.”

One aide describes Miss Judd’s life as “a haystack of needles,” a wealth of exploitable material, much of it lifted from her 2011 memoir, “All That is Bitter & Sweet.” In it, Miss Judd discusses her emotional troubles, suicidal tendencies and how she was once hospitalized for treatment. The conversation goes on about some of the things Miss Judd herself said in her book and in interviews promoting her book – churlish criticism of Christianity, patriarchy, men, and her beliefs that “breeding” is bad and having children is selfish, that weddings and the ancient custom of fathers giving their daughters in marriage is rooted in male domination of a woman’s reproductive gifts. These are silly but perfectly legal things to say at a dinner party of Hollywood airheads in Malibu and will win applause on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But they’re not very smart things to say or write down if you intend to return to Kentucky to run for office.

Politicians and even pundits once understood these as the facts of life – and survival. Politics was a game as well as a calling, and a senator or a governor would occasionally acknowledge an opponent’s well-placed shot. But not now. “Opposition research,” or learning as much as you can about an opponent and his background, is OK if it’s about your opponent, but not OK if the opponent does it about you. Barack Obama used to great advantage the contents of an earlier tape leaked to David Corn and Mother Jones, of Mitt Romney declaring to a group of contributors that “47 percent” of Americans were drawing government checks. The FBI was not called in, nor should it have been, and Mr. Romney learned that he sometimes appeared to need a brain transplant.

Ashley Judd was the opponent Mitch McConnell should have been praying for, and perhaps he was. The conversation on the tape sounds celebratory, not mean. The only media folk who imagined Miss Judd a credible candidate were the authors of breathless portraits in the New Republic, The New York Times and Salon. Who needs Gallup or Rasmussen when everybody the authors know thought she was a winner? This “scandal” is hardly Son of Watergate. It’s not even a nephew.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The Democrats have used this formula to great advantage over the years, squabbling like cats and moving on to win elections so they can put far-reaching legislative programs in place. Most of all, Democrats love to fight. “I’m not a member of an organized political party,” the comedian and philosopher Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.”

The Republicans don’t quite get how the game works; they blew a reasonably promising opportunity to take back the U.S. Senate last year when Republican nominees in Missouri and Indiana decided they wanted to be gynecologists, not senators, and lectured voters on how babies are made. The party still might have made it to a Senate majority if other Republicans – the elites, as they imagine themselves – had not saved the Democrats the trouble of organizing a lynch mob. The Democrats politely stepped aside and let the Republican elites lead in destroying their nominees.

Democrats would never have played the game quite that way. They’re not much concerned with good manners or the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury, or the rules of a marquis of anywhere else. They have their own housebreaking rituals, but want first of all to win elections. They generally take the advice that Ronald Reagan once gave to his party, “speak no ill of another Republican.” The Gipper knew the opposition would do that, so why help them?

This week, conservatives from everywhere, Republicans all, converged on Washington – actually a suburb of Washington – for the annual winter meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, an occasion to size up ambitious governors, senators and others who would be president, and to indulge talk and speculation about 2016. This year they’re “a contentious generation of conservatives,” as The Washington Times called them, learning to squabble successfully like cats and Democrats.

In the wake of losing a national election, there’s always lots to view with alarm, and not much to point with pride about, as the cliché goes, and some of the contentious conservatives are still taking their cues from the Democrats and media liberals, as if by long habit, pounding on Barack Obama’s talking points, continuing to blame George W. Bush for drones, global warming, sinkholes, immigration woes, the economy, the heartbreak of psoriasis and whatever else the White House can find in the morning papers to drool over.

Angelo Codevilla, a professor at Boston University and a CPAC panelist on “the costs of war,” is among those unable to climb out of the rut of 2008. He’s terrified of the buzz that Jeb Bush may be the man for 2016. He thinks Jeb should be “smart enough to know that the name ‘Bush’ is poison in American politics today. The left hates [George W.] and nobody on the right really likes him. If somehow the Republican Party were to nominate Jeb Bush you would have the final defeat of the Republican Party. The Republican Party would cease to exist.”

Or not. There’s always an appetite for doom and gloom, but others at CPAC don’t share the vision of doom and gloom so deep that nothing short of an asteroid, preferably a big one like the one that killed the dinosaurs, could challenge the resurgence of the Bush family. Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, thinks the record of the two Bush presidencies is “mixed” and the positives might outweigh the negatives of the younger brother and former governor of Florida. No one else starts with the strengths of a Bush, he says, “and no family has [such an] attractive Rolodex as the Bush family does, with thousands of loyal followers.”

The great mass of Americans can’t understand why anyone would be talking about an election four years away; most Americans are enjoying the luxury of not thinking about politics at all. But politics and the future is what CPAC is all about; if you don’t obsess about the next election 24/7, CPAC is not the place for you.

Choosing a frontrunner for ’16 is an exercise only for silly people. Of 18 straw polls taken at CPAC to predict Republican nominees, only 3 accurately predicted actual nominees. Straw polls are nevertheless harmless unless taken seriously. But passionate preference can be fun. You could ask the cat.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The White House reacted with considerable heat Monday to editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post scolding the president for putting “major campaign donors” on an “advisory board” and giving them frequent “access” to the president. This little perk was said to be going for a half-million dollars.

“Any notion that there is a set price for a meeting with the president of the United States is just wrong,” Jay Carney, the president’s mouthpiece, told reporters at the White House.

The wording of Mr. Carney’s remarks, which are usually carefully measured to make sure the spokesman’s brain is engaged before his mouth moves, raises speculation that the price of the access is set on a sliding scale. This could pose problems for the president and his men. If the CEO of Ajax Widgets LLC pays $500,000 for a cup of coffee and a breakfast bagel with the president, he won’t be pleased to learn that the CEO of Acme Anvils, Inc., got the president’s ear for $475,000, and maybe got two bagels and a strawberry shmear on the side.

The Washington Post, in its editorial, decried the sale of access as “behavior that has become all too common in this town and carries more than a whiff of influence-peddling.” The New York Times detected more than a whiff, of something like genuine stink. An advisory board, the newspaper said, “is nothing more than a fancy way of setting a price for access to Mr. Obama.”

This contretemps, so far the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, is nevertheless enough to shake the president’s supreme self-confidence, rattle the White House dishes and make the floor tremble beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. This scolding comes not from right-wing websites, but from two of the most prominent pillars of the cult. Prominent pillars are not supposed to behave like that. On what other meat might an awakening media feed?

This followed Bob Woodward’s falling out of love with Mr. Obama, partly over the president playing games with the sequestration but mostly over the president’s failure to deploy the carrier USS Harry S. Truman. Mortuary Bob, who burnished his considerable reputation with his famous interviews with the dead and the comatose, tried to make it up to the president at the end of the week with an invitation to the Obamas to dine at the Woodward manse.

Taken all in all, these are not particularly happy days for His Grandiosity. After weeks of crying wolf, the White House retreated Sunday from the president’s fervent predictions that the world as we know it would end at midnight March 1, when the sequestration cuts would take effect. The sky remained resolutely overhead, though in some places there were deep gray clouds and in some places rain, but not the sky, fell.

The track record of the doom-criers, even the president, is not good. Geezers remember when were told that airplanes would fall from the sky, everybody’s bank account would be erased, and restaurants would decline to honor dinner reservations after the beginning of the new millennium because all the computers were programmed to die at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999. Even the ancient Mayans got into the act when someone thought they remembered that their calendar predicted death, destruction and other inconvenience for the modern age. Only yesterday, everyone was about to fall off the fiscal cliff. The sequestration rescued us.

“We lost the bet on just how intransigent the Republican majority can be,” a Virginia Democrat told Politico. “We made a mistake betting on reasonable compromise ultimately prevailing. We bet on that and lost.” The president bet he could come up with the idea of sequestration and when it actually happened nobody would remember that he was the elusive daddy.

The president and his partisans in Congress were high on a champagne buzz a month ago when they thought the Republicans, dazed by the election results, had been permanently scared into raising taxes whenever the president felt a whim coming on. Mr. Obama imagined that he could cry wolf twice a day and get a new tax increase each time. The “shock” of sequestration has given the Republicans a booster shot of testosterone. And just in time, too.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

President Obama and his liege man have been crying from the rooftops for weeks that if he doesn’t get to further plunder taxpayer pockets, airplanes will fall from the sky, classrooms will empty, fire and brimstone will ruin every hearth because there won’t be anybody at the firehouse to answer the telephone, crooks and criminals will roam the land doing all manner of evil because the cops will be on furlough, babies will cry in vain for milk, men will join breadlines like we haven’t seen since the '30s, and women will weep tears of bitter reproach, tsunamis will rise from the river, bayou and creek, locusts will devour failing crops, and we’ll all be dead by the Fourth of July (if not Memorial Day). Woe is definitely us.

With Judgment Day at hand, the only thing left for the White House to do is to kill, or at least grievously wound, as many bearers of bad news as the president’s men can find. Blaming the press is always popular, because the press deserves whatever abuse it gets. When the president read in the Washington Post, of all places, that he was being called out by the most famous reporter in the land for his fibs and stretchers (a president would never actually tell a lie) about who should be blamed for sequestration hysteria, he could hardly believe it. There, before his very own eyes and in black and white, Bob Woodward was citing chapter and verse with the proof that the sequester originated under Barack Obama’s roof. Truth will out, but it’s not supposed to will out in the president’s own house.

This destroyed Mr. Obama’s No. 1 talking point, that the sequester is a Republican ploy. This could not stand. Soon Bob Woodward got a blistering telephone call from an enraged Obama aide, followed by an e-mail from “a very senior person,” telling him that he would “regret doing this.” He didn’t say who the “very senior person” was, being polite and eager to protect an undeserving source, but the aide was later identified as Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council.

Reporters, even famous reporters, get into tiffs with official sources all the time; it comes with the territory. But threats like this come from unusual territory. A president would never dispatch someone to Cleveland to hire a hit man, nor even call in a drone, but he can make good on such threats in harsh and anonymous ways. If he could do it to the most famous reporter and editor at one of the most famous newspapers, he could do it at will to anyone else.

Richard Nixon kept an “enemies list,” and it was taken as the threat the White House meant it to be. Everyone immediately thinks of an IRS audit. John F. Kennedy once canceled a subscription to the late New York Herald-Tribune, which was a nominally Republican newspaper, because he didn’t like something he read there. For several days there was quite a row in all the newspapers.

The Obama White House gets particularly exercised by grunions of the cult who dare question or criticize the messiah from Chicago. When Lanny Davis, a senior aide to President Clinton and a loyal Democrat, summoned the courage to needle the Obama administration early on in a column in The Washington Times, the newspaper got a call suggesting that it should print no more op-ed contributions from Mr. Davis if it knew what was good for him, and it. The Times told the White House, as any serious newspaper would, that the newspaper and not the White House, any White House, decides when and what to print.

Most presidents come with thin skins, and Mr. Obama’s skin is only thinner than most. He seems to take his authority as messiah as seriously as the members of the cult do. The reporters and correspondents who trail obediently in his wake are mostly too young to remember JFK, but they yearn for the restoration of Camelot, even a cheap cut-rate copy of the original.

Unless he can make the earth move, the Mississippi run backwards and call down thunderbolts from a darkling sky, the president will be exposed over the next few days, weeks and maybe months as the president who cried “wolf” -- and the wolf stayed home. It should be a good show. The rest of us are entitled to enjoy it. We’re paying for it.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

The veep never fails to entertain, even when he’s trying not to, and this time his boss is probably not amused. Joe famously pushed President Obama to endorse same-sex marriage by sniffing the orange blossoms first, but if his advice for Americans to buy a shotgun to protect the homeplace was an attempt to convert the president to a Second Amendment aficionado, he’ll no doubt fail.

Joe’s endorsement of domestic mayhem in the cause of survival predictably infuriated those who are so terrified of guns that on certain playgrounds even little boys who make an imaginary gun with tiny thumb and forefinger risk having their hands seized, or at least a sentence to a trip to the principal’s office, followed by suspension.

Firing from the hip is always dangerous. When someone named “Kate” asked the veep, on a Facebook forum sponsored by Parents magazine, whether the president’s attempt to disarm America would make “law-abiding citizens become more of a target to criminals,” good old Joe’s working-class instincts from his origins overcame diplomacy, tact and discretion.

“Is this Parents magazine?” he asked in disbelief. “I have Parents magazine in my home, I’ve never heard anybody in Parents magazine ask these kinds of questions, but I’m delighted to answer them. Kate, if you want to protect yourself, get a double-barreled shotgun.

“I promise you: Whoever’s coming in is not going to [make it]. You don’t need an AR-15 [assault rifle], it’s harder to aim, it’s harder to use, and in fact you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun. Buy a shotgun.”

Unlike some politicians faking an appreciation of guns and the Second Amendment, good old Joe makes a persuasive case that in his heart he’s a good ol’ boy. He owns two shotguns and a handgun, a Beretta.

The advice he gave to “Kate” and to his wife, Jill, about when and how to use a shotgun, was actually not so good. If Mrs. Biden hears a bad guy in the woods outside their home, he told her, “fire two blasts outside the house.” Firing inside the house is not a good idea unless you mean really serious business.

The veep and his missus aren’t likely to hear anything suspicious in the back yard, either at the official residence on Massachusetts Avenue or at their own house in Delaware. The Secret Service patrols around the properties are ample and adequate. The peril in firing a Beretta off the porch in Washington is that she might hit a passing car, bicyclist or even the pope’s ambassador at the Vatican embassy across the street.

However, the veep’s instructions about how to use a shotgun, to “fire two blasts outside the house,” go athwart common gun sense. Shotguns are not ideal for firing warning shots because once both barrels are fired there’s nothing left for a second round short of fumbling for two more shells. A shotgun is meant to kill, and one advantage of the weapon is that it isn’t necessary to take careful aim.

If the veep really wants his wife to use a shotgun to protect herself he should give her a sawed-off shotgun. They’re illegal in the District of Columbia, and indeed in most jurisdictions, just because they’re so lethal. (If a television host waving an illegal ammunition clip on camera can get a pass from the District cops, surely a vice president can, too.) The shortened barrel reduces the gun’s range, but scatters the shot in a wide arc. The blasts from a sawed-off model can usually dispense with an entire roomful of bad guys.

Though forbidden to civilians, sawed-off shotguns are often used by the mob (particularly movie mobsters), police swat teams and the military. Sawed-off shotguns were a weapon of choice for Confederate cavalrymen in the Civil War, prized supplements to saber and carbine in close combat. Sicilian farmers used them for varmint hunting in the Nineteenth Century, and when their progeny came to America, they brought sawed-off shotguns with them. Hell’s Kitchen and the streets of Chicago soon echoed with deadly noise.

Bonnie and Clyde loved their shotguns. Clyde shortened the barrel of his Browning A-5 by 6 inches to make it easy to conceal and get to – he called the gun his “Whippit” because he could easily “whip it out” – and the sight of Clyde whipping it out terrified hundreds of bank customers in the ‘30’s.

Clyde and his shotgun wouldn’t have frightened good ol’ Joe. The veep would have cracked a gaffe and Clyde would have fallen down laughing until the sheriff arrived.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.