Your friendly neighborhood IRS
In the past, I can’t say I’ve liked the IRS. Who does? My attitude has always been that they’re a nuisance, and a cause for mild anxiety. The tax laws are the tax laws, but the IRS was not responsible for them. They just administer them, and for the most part they seemed to do it competently as far as I was concerned, anyway.
Now I find that I regard them as not-so-secret agents of the Obama administration. This is not paranoia. As Ed Rogers wrote yesterday in the WaPo, it is fact:
Encouraged by the lack of a public backlash, an uninquisitive press, cover from the White House and an eager-to-please bureaucracy, the Democrats are boldly counting on the IRS to be their political and policy enforcer.This statement isn’t an overreach by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” or a phony crisis created by hecklers (like me) on the right ”” it goes back to the early stages of President Obama’s reelection campaign.
Rogers goes on to list some of the more egregious examples of what has occurred and how the administration has been emboldened by the fact that so far there have been no negative consequences to them for their actions. The hue and cry that was expected – and to a certain extent came at first, when some of the revelations about Tea Party harassment were revealed – has been muted and blunted. So now the excesses are being further and more openly institutionalized:
Last week, we learned President Obama unilaterally gave the IRS the mandate to monitor the thinking and attitude of any business that might be trying to circumvent the negative impacts of Obamacare, and punish them accordingly. And presumably the punishment isn’t limited to civil fines, but includes criminal perjury charges as well.
Anyway, the blatant use of the IRS as the Democrats’ cat’s paw has clearly taken root within individual Democratic campaigns. An article in The Hill quotes several vulnerable Senate Democrats ”” such as Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) ”” who are openly demanding the IRS increase their intimidation of organizations that may oppose them. Obviously, the Democrats expect more from their team members at the IRS in the months leading up to the 2014 elections.
In the comments section to Rogers’ post, I find a smattering of liberals arguing the old, disproven, “liberal groups were targeted too” approach to the subject. It demonstrates once again how the Big Lie works, and how in the case of the IRS scandal (no longer a scandal, apparently) it soothed the liberal troops, at least some of whom might have otherwise become alarmed by what had occurred.
I wonder, though, how much the IRS scandal has affected Obama’s and the Democrats’ ratings with the public. I can’t find any polls about the subject since last summer, but my guess is that it has had some part in the downturn. I certainly hope so; all Americans of any political stripe should be highly alarmed, although of course that isn’t happening. One of the most pernicious reasons is ignorance of history; some people say, “Oh, all administrations do this.”
No, they don’t; not like this in terms of extent and success. Nixon was excoriated for wanting to do it in the Nixon tapes, and the assumption has been that he did do it. But in fact for the most part he failed at it. Why? Because the heads of the IRS at the time would not cooperate (see this for a background discussion).
Here’s a very short history of the efforts of other presidents. You can see that, except for the Nixon example, it seems that most of the presidents who were involved with any small success in such undertakings were Democrats. That’s no accident because, as “Nixon henchman Jack Caulfield astutely complained,…the IRS was a ‘monstrous bureaucracy”¦dominated and controlled by Democrats.’”
So Nixon is convicted in the eyes of the public for what appears to have been largely thoughtcrime, whereas the Obama administration and its handmaidens such as Lois Lerner get off seemingly free (so far) for the actual crime. Obama’s much greater success compared to earlier efforts appears to be due to several factors: greater drive, boldness, and scope; public ignorance/apathy; the coverup attempts by much of the MSM; and the simpatico political persuasion of much of the IRS.
I am more concerned with the evidence of multiple unrelated agencies (IRS, EPA, OSHA, FBI, ATF etc) working together to harass citizens, the recent testimony of Catherine Engelbrecht should have raised the hair in the back of everyone’s neck but it didn’t, it wasn’t the first story of this kind. The entire federal govt has been weaponized. This cannot end well.
It just keeps getting worse and worse. I really would like some of the more ethical and courageous elected officials to do more. What the hell are they waiting for?
The Left’s cannonfodder are not expected to understand the high level strategic initiatives of WMDs or propaganda weapons. That is why they are the cannonfodder and not the Left’s ultimate strategic advisers or generals.
So of course they would think the IRS targeted everyone, impartially. It is the command they were given to believe, and they believe it about as readily as they believed that it was time to bring up Obamacare signups at Thanksgiving Day and Christmas. It was just the order being relayed from their Authority and God.
If a village in ancient Aztec Empire was commanded by their gods to sacrifice 300 humans to appease Divine Wrath, the village would do it, it doesn’t matter whether they want to do it or not. They will still obey.
What the hell are they waiting for?
They are waiting for the homosexual and heterosexual rape threats sent to them via blackmail, to go away or be appeased. They won’t sacrifice their families for the ethical protection of others.
Being ethical merely means a good person will not fall to corrupt via bribes. Blackmail still works as well as anything else.
I am more concerned with the evidence of multiple unrelated agencies (IRS, EPA, OSHA, FBI, ATF etc) working together to harass citizens
They aren’t technically coordinating. Most people will say there’s no proof for a “conspiracy” because the concept of a conspiracy comes mostly from imprison tax evading crooks like Al Capone that the feds found problematic in pinning down. It was a day before the internet.
In the modern communications era, things like JournoList and social get togethers are more than sufficient to coordinate “operations”. Since the individuals in the bureaucracies follow the same Divine Leader and have the same social circles and economic interests, it’s very easy for them to form “flash riot squads” for a specific purpose. They just need the name of the target and maybe why that target needs to be “eliminated”.
You got that right Neo. Outcry and then nothing. Why isn’t Lois Lerner being cited for contempt? Or forced to testify because she waived her constitutional rights? Great lawyers for the House! No Fred Thompson there.
And we need to go to a sales tax and abolish the income tax. Too much corruption, criminality and compliance costs.
Free us from the tyranny of the IRS.
Everyone outside of the hard left fears the power of the IRS over all the other alphabet soup agencies. If (big word) we can get a truly conservative congress working with a conservative executive the first order of business should be to abolish the IRS and install a flat tax.
From the linked Washington Post piece:
The lesson of the day: In politics, gall pays off.
And this from an article in The Hill that the Post piece links to is downright scary:
There are many things that can be done administratively by the IRS and other government agencies…
What we are seeing is Chicago politics writ large. The IRS, DOJ, and EPA can make your life unpleasant. The government has all your phone records, your financial records, and many of your health records. Ben Carson has called it a Gestapo society. Because of her East German experience, Angela Merkel reacted strongly to being wire tapped by the U.S. The MSM assume they are on the winning side and have nothing to fear as long as they support Obama.
New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago, all can be effectively considered Fallujah: occupied by an enemy such as the Islamic Jihad.
The rest of the cities will fall in due time, if they have not already. With that, the strategic map of the war will change dramatically. Louisiana is a conservative state, but New Orleans is like the portal of invasion. It’s the entry point of conquest.
Neo: “The hue and cry that was expected”
Expected from whom, exactly?
Politically effective ‘hues and cries’ don’t just happen spontaneously.
They’re the manufactured product of organized effort – then raised, sustained, and expanded strategically – by a proper Marxist-method activist movement.
If there’s no sufficient Marxist-method activist popular-political movement to do it, then it won’t be done.
Will: “What the hell are they waiting for?”
A proper Marxist-method activist movement to back them.
You want them to fight for you? Then make an army of The People to fight for them.
An army needs money. Which the IRS won’t allow them to have. Problem number 1.
Oh look, the leader of the New Tea Party is here. Your idea was already tried. It was called Occupy Wall Street. IT FAILED. Too many Marxists, I guess.
And speaking of Marxists (or should it be Maoists?), why are you so opposed to the wonderful future President Barack “There are some who refer to him as Commie Rat Bastard” Obama, has planned for you?
To your article I add:
This is what you get from refusing to punch back. The “encouragement” the IRS may be getting is as much a function of REPUBLICAN fecklessness as anything else.
When this scandal became obvious, Republican leadership should’ve cut the IRS’s budget at the next opportunity. Then, they should’ve gone on all the talk shows and explained that this was explicit retaliation for the politicization of the department. (though, maybe they could phrase it a bit nicer)
Instead, what did we get? Boehner and McConnell passed a budget extension for a whole year with no demands attached.
That move gave the IRS carte blanche for the next year to target conservatives.
…and that may have been Boehner and McConnell’s intent!
WE MUST BE RID OF THESE QUISLINGS!!!!
It’s impossible to defund the federal government. They can literally print as much money as they want to pay for their bills, so even if you refuse to pay taxes, you are paying for it via currency devaluation. Printing money is another form of wealth redistribution, but this one feels painless and is called “inflation”.
The New Deal was the first mass wide field test.
The fed government can reroute funding from the military to pay for the IRS, no problem. It’s just normal money laundering. If that doesn’t work or becomes unnecessary, they’ll just print an extra 15 trillion dollars a year and call it their “surplus”.
Eric’s trying to learn from the enemy he fought, so adopts Marxist literacy and wording. But that’s eventually counter productive if your ultimate enemy is Marxism or allied forces. As the greater the hate in the US towards enemies of the State, the more necessary it is to change the PR. The Marxists realized this and rebranded themselves as Progressives or Liberals.
The problem is whether a person becomes too little like his enemy to defeat them or too much like the enemy to be indistinguishable.
Marxist-method activist movement is indistinguishable from the Tea Party if the focus is on method and activism. But when the focus is on using the Tea Party to soak up fire from the enemy, then the focus becomes more of a Marxist thing. That changes the meaning of the movement from one that fights Marxism to one that is Marxism.
A Marxist method activist movement that is seen as being a Marxist method acting org will not receive enough recruits to be able to fight Marxism. There’s a branding issue as well as a methodology conflict.
And as I’ve told him myself, conservatives are not temperamentally inclined to Marxist organization.
How many spittle-flecked Tea Partiers have you seen (let alone “occupying” anything or defecating on police cars)?
Leftists are like herding cattle. Conservatives are like herding cats.
…I mean, I would like to say that I’m “occupying” neo-neocon (the site). Take THAT, 1%ers!
But really, I just visit.
It would help if there were more cookies.
I’m gonna say that to the next leftist troll I encounter:
“Occupy your mom.”
The other side is that the more the Dimwits act like the STASI, the more the ordinary Man in the Streets will detest them. It won’t escape the notice of the casual observer that the IRS is somehow always going after one side. The leftwing nutjobs will applaud that, but the liberal birdbrains might feel a bit queasy.
Now is the time for us to throw the “Speaking Truth to Power!” slogan back in their faces.
Remember this??? This is what we’re up against: this is where it leads.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExOYvW5vCj4
Beverly…
There is no wall for US to jump.
There is no there, there … no other place to go.
%%%
We have one end game: POTUS runs his ops on our dime.
Everyone should study up on Argentina. It’s what’s next.
My old client went from college age salary man to billionaire by noting that Argentina was out ahead — in the debauch — and that by seeing what had transpired there he had a generational leap on America’s economic trends.
In sum: Argentina’s citizens decided to vote themselves wealth — not earn it.
Sound familiar?
Everything else flowed after that.
I wonder what would happen if the concept of Civil Disobedience came to to Washington and it’s Imperial Offices and Departments in the Colonies (otherwise known as States and Localities)?
What if anyone who worked for the Empire became, at the least, a social pariah unable to participate in the normal functions of normal life?
Why should they? They run for the Empire. They get paid to shakedown their neighbors, and their pay is money earned by their neighbor’s hard work. They do no work but shakedown work.
While Japan is facing similar economic problems, mostly because they think copying a foreign nation like America is a good idea (status), Japan has not had their patriotism, nationalism, and culture destroyed by the Left.
America has. Major difference.
@Mike
Shunning the D.C. crowd would have no effect. They are already effectively cut off from the rest of the country…they wouldn’t even notice they’re being shunned. And if they did, they wouldn’t mind.
When the Tea Party took up the vanguard against the Left and Obama sometime after the 2008 elections, I thought it was a sign of change even if only a minor but. The primary problem I saw with that movement was logistics, not strategy or tactics. Other people argued about what the TP should focus on, ideologically vis a vis Republican policies.
What I focused on was logistics. The Left has permanent agent provocateurs and paid protestors. Nobody is paying the members of the Tea Party to protest, they have to stop going to their jobs and take a pay reduction to protest. Without a line of logistics and support (money), the Tea Party would not be able to stand toe to toe with unions or other forces.
The Leftist alliance realized this, which is why they called artillery suppression on the movement when we weren’t paying attention. Many of us in the background and shadows thought the Tea Party sluiced down due to running out of money, no matter how good the grassroots individual movement leaders were. In reality, there were major funding for the Tea Party but it required 501s to be initialized and that is why they went silent. Because they were busy doing the 501 process and they were being muzzled by the law, silently disappeared.
Whether people believe me or not is irrelevant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1U3kQ9FYhQ
The Left will convince them, one way or another.
Amateurs argue tactics, because it is easy. Compared to even strategy, logistics is something most people pay little to no attention to in war.
Matt – There are IRS agents and employees everywhere. In your town and mine.
Maybe the civil disobedience should be local.
Pontius Pilate was in Jerusalem, not Rome.
Conservatives and individual liberty fighters are big on personal responsibility. SO why do they attempt to hold the Generals and Politicians responsible via 5th hand leverage, when they can have first hand leverage on the people who Obey the trigger orders?
The people who obey the orders are your family, your relatives, your friends, and others who work for the Left and obey the Left.
If you want someone to hold responsible, you don’t need to quit your job and work as a bum on the streets of DC protesting Obama. Think global, act local.
Also, the friendly neighborhood Park Rangers will also be taking care of you, similar to how the IRS takes care of you.
Necromancers, after all, take great care in their puppets and zombies.
Obama administration and its handmaidens such as Lois Lerner get off seemingly free (so far) for the actual crime. Obama’s much greater success compared to earlier efforts appears to be due to several factors: greater drive, boldness, and scope; public ignorance/apathy; the coverup attempts by much of the MSM; and the simpatico political persuasion of much of the IRS.
I think it’s similar to the Woody Allen progression. They target a vulnerable person, pre condition them to be sexed up, and it works well after that. They’ll hide it in the first few stages, then when the target is brainwashed, they’ll get out in the open and “marriage” it up.
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I see the frogwater temperature got turned up one degree.
Don’t let your hearts be disheartened.
There is a natural limit to the amount which a people will allow stealing.
The more government, the more stealing.
WE LOVE TO STOP STEALING.
TEA PARTY
Democracy is only for virtuous societies, not those concerned with the sexiness of the candidates. Can anyone give me a single indication that most Americans are even aware let alone concerned with the erosion of the constitution as opposed to love of Dear Leader. The people are stupid and they vote. My hope is that Obama voters truly suffer for what they have done.