American Democracy: 1776-2012
By Mitch Berg
The IRS scandal has been going on for a solid year now. And while people who care about such things – “such things” as honest, transparent, non-banana-republic government – are up in arms, the media has successfully gundecked the issue.
Let’s run it down:
- Before the 2012 elections, senior IRS poobahs – Lois Lerner being the one everyone knows today – singled out conservative organizations for attention and harassment.
- The investigations had nothing to do with violations of the rules; they, all and sundry, were about nothing but the groups’ political identity. “Tea Party” , “Patriot”, “Liberty” or “9/12”, “Taxes”, “Debt”, “Spending ” in the title was all it took to warrant the kind of harassment (“what do you pray about?”) that the American media would not tolerate if directed at a college Satanist alliance.
- When an IRS internal review threatened to highlight the fact that the IRS was acting in a corrupt manner, Lerner picked some scapegoats in Cincinnati (although the direction did in fact come from the IRS’ “director of rulings and settlements”, Rob Choi).
- At this very time, IRS staff were actively campaigning for Barack Obama – on IRS time, using IRS resources. Nobody knows how much of this activity went on, but any is too much.
There is only one word for this – corruption. The kind of thing that would make a Boliviancommandantegag up his skull with embarassment.
The IRS is not just a revenue agency — it is a law-enforcement agency, a police agency with far greater powers of investigation and coercion that any normal police force. Its actions in this matter are not only inappropriate — they are illegal. Using government resources for political ends is a serious crime, as is conspiring to mislead investigators about those crimes. But so far, other than holding Lois Lerner in contempt for refusing to comply with the demands of congressional investigators, almost nothing has happened. The characteristic feature of a police state is that those who are entrusted with the power to enforce the law are not themselves bound by it.
Read the whole thing.
And confront what it really means. Conservatives have been warning for decades that goverment is becoming too big, too powerful, too much an end unto itself, with the whole goal of perpetuating itself.
It’s anti-American, and it needs to be treated as such.
May 20th, 2014 at 9:11 am
Remember…..a gov’t that has as many laws and regulations that ours has, can then pick and chose which ones to enforce against which groups of people. Ask any one running a business and they will tell you that its impossible to comply with all the regulations, rules that often contradict other laws, so you are at the mercy of the regulators.
May 20th, 2014 at 9:52 am
A couple of weeks back, I read that Carl Levin, left wing nut job from Michigan, was holding one of the smoking guns for directing the IRS to target or give extra attention to conservative groups. Yet another Jewish member of congress that seems to be forgetting the past, so they are steering the Democrap party towards national socialism. There has been an excellent documentary series running on the old Military Channel, now called American Heroes Channel, about how Hitler and his Nazi party coerced a whole nation down the destructive path through WWII. The similarities to what the Dems have been doing since Herr Obama got into office, are down right chilling.
May 20th, 2014 at 11:39 am
I am ashamed and affronted by these freaks. Unfortunately, history has a tendency to repeat itself.
Entire IRS scandal is a criminal issue, but as long the goobernment refuses to enforce laws, which is in itself a criminal act, what can one do? Are we not a Nation of Laws? Did not every goobernment official take an oath to uphold and execute laws? What happens when someone breaks an oath? What are the consequences?
Banana republic indeed!
May 20th, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Conservatives look at at public policy and see what they can do within given limitations. If you control the presidency, for example, you still can’t go to war. You need congress. Ditto changes in tax policy.
Liberals see no limitations. If the SC affirms the right to bear arms on an individual basis, they’ll use the EPA to shut down the manufacturers of guns and ammo. If you use your first amendment rights to express opinions they disagree with, they’ll get you fired from your job.
It’s a terrific example of the nietzschean will to power, and we all know that it ends in misery for everyone. Liberals know it as well, I suppose, but they can’t help themselves.
May 20th, 2014 at 1:23 pm
Liberals know it as well, I suppose, but they can’t help themselves.
They see themselves as the exceptions.
May 20th, 2014 at 1:48 pm
“They see themselves as the exceptions.”
Some do, some don’t. Orwell nailed it in Nineteen eighty-Four. With no ends justified by metaphysics, there is only the will to power, the ends are arbitrary. See any SITD comments by RickDFL for examples.
May 20th, 2014 at 3:07 pm
Because if Orwell stood for anything, it was a good show trial.
“Napoleon decreed that there should be a full investigation into Snowball’s activities. With his dogs in attendance he set out and made a careful tour of inspection of the farm buildings, the other animals following at a respectful distance. At every few steps Napoleon stopped and snuffed the ground for traces of Snowball’s footsteps, which, he said, he could detect by the smell. He snuffed in every corner, in the barn, in the cow-shed, in the henhouses, in the vegetable garden, and found traces of Snowball almost everywhere. He would put his snout to the ground, give several deep sniffs, ad exclaim in a terrible voice, “Snowball! He has been here! I can smell him distinctly!” and at the word “Snowball” all the dogs let out blood-curdling growls and showed their side teeth.”
Sounds just like Fox News coverage of the IRS or #Benghazi
May 21st, 2014 at 9:52 am
… aaaaaaaaand he shows up to make your point for you.
May 21st, 2014 at 11:34 am
Rick DFL just phoning it in because Dog Gone hasn’t been around lately …….
May 21st, 2014 at 1:30 pm
I am not sure why RickDFL quotes from Animal Farm.
Napolean is usually considered to be a stand in for Stalin, and Snowball for Trotsky. The dogs are the NKVD. I don’t believe it’s as simple as that. Snowball is more likely to represent Bukharin. Bukharin believed the workers could judge the state. Of course Stalin had Bukharin killed after a show trial.
The really interesting thing about Orwell isn’t that he was an anti-totalitarian, but that he saw that totalitarianism was the inevitable outcome of socialist revolution. If he had lived longer, Orwell would have become religious, I think, because he loved justice more than power.
My credentials as a worker are impeccable. God only knows what kind of bourgeois den RickDFL crawled out of. School teachers and other public employees back there, I suspect. He doesn’t want to implement the will of the workers, he wants to implement his will and claim that it was for the good of the workers.
May 21st, 2014 at 3:03 pm
PM:
“I am not sure why RickDFL quotes from Animal Farm”
To spell out: Napoleon = Mitch, you, and the SITD crowd Snowball = IRS Scandal, #Behngazi, and Obama ‘corruption’.
“he saw that totalitarianism was the inevitable outcome of socialist revolution”
That is a pretty silly reading of 1984 and Animal Farm. A socialist for most of his adult life, Orwell wanted to bring socialism to Great Britain and Europe.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/European_Unity/english/e_teu
It also seems clear that Orwell did not believe in any sort of historical inevitability.
“Orwell would have become religious” Who says he wasn’t?
May 21st, 2014 at 3:31 pm
To spell out: Napoleon = Mitch
It’s impossible to respond to that with out some sort of ad-hominem.
So I’ll just let that statement sit and fester in its magnificent, dissociative glory.
May 21st, 2014 at 4:30 pm
Mitch:
“It’s impossible to respond to that with out some sort of ad-hominem.”
Isn’t that your stock and trade?
But to be clear, I don’t think you are a genocidal tyrant, allegorical or otherwise. The analogy is confined to the lesser flaws of witch-hunting and the over-dramatic ‘discovery’ of evidence imperceptible to the audience.
May 21st, 2014 at 6:05 pm
“Orwell would have become religious” Who says he wasn’t?
Orwell did. You clearly a very ignorant person, Rick DFL.
May 22nd, 2014 at 11:10 am
Actually if you bothered to look something up, you would find that there is some doubt about the limits of Orwell’s lack of faith.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/7009903/orwell-vs-god/
Just trying to say, your hypothesis is not so far fetched
May 22nd, 2014 at 12:45 pm
The analogy is confined to the lesser flaws of witch-hunting and the over-dramatic ‘discovery’ of evidence imperceptible to the audience.
That’s because nowadays, the “audience” is so stupified by the constant barrage of American Idol and Real Housewives shiny objects thanks to the progressive media, and the decades of indoctrination and gradual decay of “education” from the government school monopoly, any evidence that matters is not just impercepetible to them, it’s non-existent. We are living in a country of 200 million adult useful idiots.
Mike Judge was ahead of the curve. Everyone thought Idiocracy was just a comedy. It isn’t. It’s a documentary.
May 22nd, 2014 at 5:17 pm
That’s a bowl full of thin gruel ya got there, RickDFL.
I conjecture that Orwell may well have become religious, if he had lived longer, not on text, but on sub-text. He was capable of change; his pre POUM writing is pro-revolutionary, anti-capitalist, and anti-class system. After POUM, Orwell wrote about totalitarianism.
Neither Animal Farm nor Nineteen Eighty-Four end well. They are bleak novels. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, Orwell sets up a revealing tension between Smith and O’Brien. O’Brien argues that Smith cannot rationally suppose his own memories are a repository of truth. Smith had no grounds to believe that the truth was other than what Big Brother told him was the truth. Smith cannot refute O’Brien’s argument, but he still believes that the truth is other than what Big Brother says it is. Orwell never resolves this conflict, yet Orwell must have been aware of what was implied by the idea of a truth outside and above the reckoning of any man or men.
May 27th, 2014 at 12:49 pm
Regarding Rick’s comment, if Eric Holder had started a real trial of those implicated in the IRS scandal–say Lerner, Choi, or any of the other operatives who had participated in this–then the discussion on Fox would be quite different now, wouldn’t it?