{"id":43950,"date":"2014-05-20T08:00:21","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T13:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=43950"},"modified":"2019-10-30T07:05:20","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T12:05:20","slug":"american-democracy-1776-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=43950","title":{"rendered":"American Democracy: 1776-2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

The IRS scandal has been going on for a solid year now.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Let’s run it down:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Before the 2012 elections, senior IRS poobahs – Lois Lerner being the one everyone knows today – singled out conservative organizations for attention and harassment.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  2. The investigations had nothing to do with violations of the rules; they, all and sundry, were about nothing but the groups’ political identity.\u00a0 “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.\u00a0<\/li>\n
  3. 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).\u00a0<\/li>\n
  4. At this very time, IRS staff were actively campaigning for Barack Obama – on IRS time, using IRS resources.\u00a0 Nobody knows how much of this activity went on, but any is too much.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There is only one word for this – corruption. The kind of thing that would make a Boliviancommandantegag up his skull with embarassment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    h Kevin Williamson at NRO on not only the scandal, but what it says about the future of American democracy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

    The IRS is not just a revenue agency \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

    And confront what it really means.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    It’s anti-American, and it needs to be treated as such.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The IRS scandal has been going on for a solid year now.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Let’s run it down: Before the 2012 elections, senior IRS poobahs – Lois Lerner being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[289],"class_list":["post-43950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-tyranny","tag-kevin-williamson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43950"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44023,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43950\/revisions\/44023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}