Lost amidst the White House he-said-she-said of finger pointing, scandal, incompetence, venality, hubris, vanity, error, greed, gluttony, embarrassment, cover up, stupidity, amateur bungling, brownnosing, grandstanding, photo-opting and hearings as the result of a few minor mistakes made by the Obama administration- an administration which rode roughshod over a several outdated laws, certain small parts of the Bill of Rights written by irrelevant white dudes; an administration that got people killed, violated civil rights, harassed government employees, ignored it’s basic responsibilities and common sense- are these small, little, niggling details: The folks in charge are freaking hypocrites; and because the are hypocrites they have nothing to offer the American people.
Nothing as in Zero (0).
Their ideas don’t work, and all they stand for is some vague notion of fairness and equity, with themselves as judge over what’s fair and what’s not. Even in that they fail.
As demonstrated recently, their notions of fairness and equity are worrisome. They want to win politically, by fair means or foul. That’s their only idea of fairness. ◼ John Ransom - Townhall
◼ This Is No Ordinary Scandal - Peggy Noonan/Wall St. Journal
We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.
Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.
As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not....
It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.
The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so high-handed, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know?
