Scandals Real and Fabricated

Right-wing political groups asked for additional information before IRS recognition of them as tax-exempt- SCANDAL!

Associated Press phone records secretly seized by the Department of “Justice:” NOT a scandal. (Yet.)

IRS “targeted” Tea Party groups requesting tax-exempt status. Actually the IRS subjected them to more careful vetting than usual, asking for more information, which delayed the granting of the status. But they're free to operate as tax-exempt while waiting. [1]

All the establishment media keeps calling it “targeting.” Yet it turns out that liberal groups were also subject to delays and lengthy questionnaires. One of them shut down as a result. I only heard or read one report about that. If you missed it, you're still being misled to believe that the right-wing was “targeted.” [2]

Not sure how one person at a desk sending out questionnaires constitutes “targeting” anyway. [See “Confusion and Staff Troubles Rife at I.R.S. Office in Ohio,” New York Times, May 18, 2013, paragraph 3.]

Meanwhile the secret rifling through the phone records of Associated Press employees last year by Eric Holder's minions at the Department of “Justice” isn't deemed scandalous. Guess because the Republicans hate the media too. Instead they're rehashing the Benghazi, Libya, attack last year by Islamists that killed the U.S. ambassador and some guards. Okay, Obama put out lies because he was afraid a “terrorist” attack would hurt his reelection prospects. Too bad the Democrats are incapable of just saying that. Instead they sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who's close to Obama, to FIVE- count 'em, FIVE- Sunday morning TV political palaver programs in one day to put out the agreed upon line that a mob was spontaneously inflamed by a dopey anti-Prophet Muhammed video, grabbed their AK-47s and RPGs and mortars out of their larders and expertly assaulted the guarded and fortified U.S. compound. (It only sounds ridiculous when you include details like that. So leave out the details! Brilliant plan, Barack!)

Hey, it worked. He got reelected, didn't he?

So why don't the Democrats just drop the bullshit and say Obama didn't want to jeopardize his reelection? I mean, as the inimitable Hillary Clinton says, What difference does it make?

That is to say, dead is dead.

Oh, that would be “cynical” of them, I suppose, to just come clean. That is, politicians are expected to maintain a facade of false at all times, lest their subjects- excuse me, “We The People,” lose trust in government. Wouldn't want that to happen, now would we! (Someone must be a bit out of touch if that's their concern. That horse left the barn a few years ago.)

One thing is a little sad. The ambassador who got killed, Christopher Stevens, if we are to believe the U.S. media accounts, actually was a decent guy. If the U.S. ever adopted a pro-human foreign policy, people like him would be important assets. Ironic that the sons of bitches, the John Negropontes of the world, never get what's coming to them. Instead it's the good guys who catch the karmic retribution. (That's not an endorsement of the Islamofascists who in this view are agents of that karma. I don't actually believe in karma. How about we just call it “blowback” and leave it at that.)

1] The issue is the particular tax status being sought by these Tea Party types. A political organization can have tax-exempt status, but it has to reveal its donors. These reactionaries seek to hide their donors' identities. (They should start something called the Bashful Billionaires Club.) In order to do that, they have to pretend they're “social welfare” organizations. This is what the mendacious Karl Rove does with Crossroads America, for example. The real problem with what the IRS did is that it just went after the small fry, apparently too politically weak to enforce tax law against blatant violators like GOP poohbah Rove. After all, Republicans control the House of Representatives, semi-control the Senate, the corporate media is mostly pro-GOP, and for that matter the men with the guns, the military and secret police and regular police, are overwhelmingly reactionaries and thus Republican- and that's no small thing. Oh, and most of the large corporate upper hierarchy is Republican.

There's a totally specious argument that reactionaries have trotted out at times to justify the need to hide their moneybag donors' identities. They point out that people who gave to the NAACP back in the 1950s and '60s were risking their lives. Good argument. Wouldn't want the KKK to kill the Koch brothers! (Uh, when exactly was the last time that a racist or fascist killed a rich reactionary? Oh, right, it was never.)

2] Brian Nailer, NPR Weekend Edition Sunday morning, when no one is listening, 5/19/13. A news co-op providing stories for the New York Times went out of business because of dilatory IRS tactics. Without IRS recognition of their tax-exempt status, they couldn't get necessary foundation funding to continue. So the only known actual IRS victim in the story gets ignored because it doesn't fit the “IRS targeted conservatives” script.

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