Obama Denies Role in Government

In other news, even liberals are starting to find President Obama's weak attempts at deflection laughable.  The following is from Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker in a post entitled "Obama Denies Role in Government":

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years. 

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.” 

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.” 

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.” 

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

More Lies

So you might have heard the latest spin by the Obama Administration and the media (but I repeat myself) that the IRS scandal is nothing more than machinations of a few rogue agents in the IRS office in Cincinnati.  What a surprise to find out that isn't true:

Officials in the Technical Unit of the IRS’s Rulings and Agreements office played an integral role in determining how the targeted applications were treated, provided general guidelines to Cincinnati case workers, briefed other agency employees on the status of the special cases, and reviewed all those intrusive requests demanding “more information” from tea-party groups. At times, the Technical Unit lawyers seemed to exercise tight control over these applications, creating both a backlog in application processing and frustration among Cincinnati agents waiting for direction. 

An IRS employee who asked not to be identified tells National Review Onlinethat all members of the agency’s Technical Unit are based in Washington, D.C. A current list of Technical Unit managers provided by another IRS employee shows that all such managers are based at the agency’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in the District of Columbia, and the IRS confirmed, in a testy exchange with National Review Online, that the Technical Unit is “based in Washington.”

Shocker.

The Real Scandal

Bill Kristol gets it right with his thoughts on seeing the Obama Adminsitration's scandals in their proper context and what Republicans should be doing in the mean time:

Obama’s scandals are damaging to the country. Congress should do its duty in getting to the bottom of them, and if the scandals weaken Obama’s ability to push through bad legislation, conservatives have no obligation to look that gift horse in the mouth. But Obama’s liberal policies are more dangerous than his managerial scandals. 

That’s why making the substantive case against the Obama administration’s policies remains job one for an opposition that hopes to persuade the American people that it deserves to govern. So the key task is to demonstrate how Obama’s policies are failing, to explain why they’re destructive to the country, and to elucidate why conservative policies have worked in the past and how they can be updated to shape a better future. 

This isn’t that hard. But it’s easy to be distracted by the scandal of the day. The real scandal, though, is the Obama administration, whose purposes and policies exemplify a liberalism that degrades popular self-government and embraces American decline.

I think it's lazy for Republicans to sit back and talk of impeachment (at least as the evidence stands currently) or see how many times they can link Obama to Richard Nixon in a press conference.  This opening should not be wasted.

Sports Writers and Politics: A Second Take

It seems that it should be a universal rule that sports writers and commentators should never breach into other topics, especially something as high as politics.  Jay Nordlinger wrote a wonderful column for National Review on the subject, which came out at during a time (2005 to be exact) when sports writers, in the middle of describing a walk-off win in extra innings or a late touchdown catch to secure a win, felt the need to interject some riff about Dick Cheney or link some boneheaded play to the supposed incompetence of the Bush Administration.  A sample:

Perusing [Sports Illustrated's] website, you might suspect that anti-Cheney remarks are required from all SI writers. These remarks amount to a big, collective tic. Have a passage on a San Antonio Spur: “[He] remains as unpopular among non-Spurs as Dick Cheney is among Democrats, Independents, Americans with no political affiliation, a growing number of Republicans, the great majority of the world population as well as that poor guy he filled with buckshot.”

But in the growing scandals of the Obama Administration--in trying to erase the fact that the State Department did not heed the repeated warnings on the lack of security by then-Ambassador Chris Stevens prior to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi and the ensuing attempt to try to fool the American people and blame it on a video instead of Muslim terrorists; the IRS singling out groups of a certain political bent and then covering up who knew what and when, which included then-acting IRS head Steven Miller lying to Congress in early 2012; and the Justice Department under Eric Holder doing things that were only dreamed of in the heads of leftist columnists during the Bush Administration--, (stay with me here) sports writers, in a sense, have actually proved themselves even more capable talking about politics than the political writers and commentators themselves.  I base this all on on observation made by James Taranto late last week in the WSJ:

One thing we have learned from the IRS scandal is that sports journalists are morally superior to political journalists. Whereas the former understand that cheating is an assault on the basic integrity of the sport, the latter all too often treat it as if it were just part of the game.

It is a sad state of affairs in the world when that observation is true.

The IRS Scandal and the Future of Campaign Finance Reform

With the IRS scandal now seemingly growing by the hour, Steven Hayward takes a moment to reflect on where this may all be heading:

I’ve always said that the way to get rid of corruption in high places is to get rid of high places, and surely that’s the right answer here: let’s get rid of the byzantine campaign finance rules that stifle political expression or limit it to the insiders like Rove and Axelrod. But the opposite is likely to happen. The so-called “reform community” (Fred Wertheimer, chief nanny), which is very well organized and has media sympathy, is going to argue that the IRS scandal shows that we need more regulation of political speech, or at the very least, disclosure of donors, so that more people can receive the Koch brothers treatment by the left. (Of course, the so-called “reformers” always want to change the subject when you bring up the exemption from campaign contribution disclosure that the Socialist Workers Party still enjoys; most reporters don’t even know it exists.)

And we need to be afraid of this development:

Want to hear some really bad news? John McCain is on the case. Which means we’re doomed: 

A Senate investigative panel led by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John McCain of Arizona has been reviewing the use of social welfare groups for political causes for the past year and now is examining the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt reviews.

Remember when McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" was passed back in 2002?  (And also remember when President thought it was unconstitutional but signed it into law anyway because for Bush, resolving issues of constitutionality is something only the courts can decide?)

Well, we may have not heard the last from McCain on that front.

And also, remember immigration reform?  I wonder what has been going on with that with all of the scandals taking the front pages (if you are the New York Times coverage begins on A16)...

The Bulworth Presidency

In an interesting piece for the New York Times (odd, I know), Peter Baker stumbles upon something important regarding how the president sees himself:

“Being in office for nearly four and a half years gives the president some perspective — it helps separate the signal from the noise,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a White House senior adviser. “When you have dealt with real life-and-death problems, the political ones seem much smaller and affect you less.” 

Yet Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. While Mr. Beatty’s character had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama’s desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him.' 

“Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod, another longtime adviser who has heard Mr. Obama’s movie-inspired aspiration. “It’s probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.”

But, like me, if you've never seen that forgotten Beatty masterpiece, here is a section of a review by John Podhoretz that is, shall I say, enlightening:

In Bulworth, which [Beatty] co-wrote and directed, Beatty plays a U.S. senator who suddenly becomes a Marxist while running for reelection -- and receives 71 percent of the vote before being assassinated by an insurance company. It would be tempting to describe Bulworth as the single most left-wing portrait of the United States ever attempted on film, but Bulworth is not actually set in the United States. It is set in Beattyworld, a fantasy land in which the suffering masses are just waiting for a politician who will wander around yelling "Socialism!" and "Ebonics? Great!"

Ha.

Courage, Obama Style

News broke yesterday that President Obama asked acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller to resign amid the scandal that, for once, is now causing the press to be somewhat interested in doing their jobs (I just heard this from Jonah Goldberg on Fox News).  But what's interesting in all of this is that Miller was scheduled to leave in June anyway.

Wow, the courage...

UPDATE:

If you have the time, please read this post on Ricochet, which gives an in depth account of the unlawful methods of the IRS.

Lastly, please read this take on the liberal argument that Tea Partiers, taking advantage of the evil ruling in Citizens United, more than doubled the creation of advocacy nonprofits soon after the ruling so that they would begin receiving tax exempt statues (I just heard this argument myself from Juan Williams):

Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010. 

In fact, applications were declining, data show. 

Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase” in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” and “9/12.” 

Both Steven Miller, the agency’s acting commissioner until he stepped down Wednesday, and Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s exempt-organization division, have said over the past week that IRS officials started the scrutiny after observing a surge in applications for status as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Both officials cited an increase from about 1,500 applications in 2010 and to nearly 3,500 in 2012. President Obama ask Mr. Miller to resign on Wednesday. 

The scrutiny began, however, in March 2010, before an uptick could have been observed, according to data contained in the audit released Tuesday from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.