The Real Danger

With the news on the scandal at the IRS growing by the day (it turns out that the higher ups knew way back in 2011), Ken Masugi sees the real danger to which this episode points:  the adminsitrative state.

Staying on the superficial level of comparing Obama with Nixon ignores the fundamental problem coming into sight here: the administrative state. In Woodrow Wilson’s conception, this scientific, a-political unity would inflict the will of an elite class on an electorate. In its modest way the IRS in this current scandal is playing out the logic of the great Progressive theorists of the administrative state—as well as its practitioners (see Woodrow Wilson, especially his classic essay on public administration). I have made this argument in some posts for this site, e.g., this one on Cass Sunstein and FDR, and several others, including John Marini and Joseph Postell, have made similar arguments.

This is about as clear a description of the battle lines as I have seen:

The assault on bureaucracy today pits the rights of the people against the wisdom of the ruling elite. Try reforming the CIA, the civil rights division of the Justice Department, or the IRS through political appointees, who reflect the results of elections. Those agencies have long been captured, not through some iron triangle of interests, but through the acceptance of their employees of a conception of justice that is at war with constitutional government. That is what the IRS scandal is bringing to light.

Is the administrative state--partially caused by the legislature freely ceding away their power to virtually unaccountable bureaucracies that have quasi-legislative, executive, and judicial powers--at all compatible in a regime built on the the laws of nature and of nature's God?  Is it compatible with the principle of government being built upon the (enlightened) consent of the governed?  I think not.

Justice Served?

Today "Dr." Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of three counts of murder.  He undoutedly could have been found guilty of many more, as Ramesh Ponnuru notes:

Kermit Gosnell is a serial killer. He was found guilty today of the first-degree murder of three infants and the third-degree murder of a patient at his abortion clinic. The grand jury believes that hundreds of infants met the same end as the ones whose murders were proved in court. Let no one call this justice. 

And, on Planned Parenthood's almost unspeakable attempt at blaming the pro-life side for the actions of Gosnell:

Among supporters of late-term abortion -- a small but vocal contingent -- a common reaction to the trial has been to say that restrictions on the practice drove women to Gosnell. The grand jury reached a different conclusion: There weren’t any restrictions, thanks to Pennsylvania state governments of both parties that supported legal abortion. Clinics stopped being monitored under the administration of Republican Governor Tom Ridge, who got himself a nice reputation as a moderate because of his stance on abortion.

Also not to be missed, Hadley Arkes, one of the foremost defenders of the right to life, shined a light on what was missed by commentators on both sides:

What is pathetic and laughable is the statement put out by Planned Parenthood — as though Gosnell’s acts were simply an assault on the pregnant women, and not the babies. But quite as implausible may be the comments of conservative commentators who feign to believe that there is something different and more objectionable in a late-term abortions. What is killed is precisely the same, distinct human being. There was nothing in this grisly killing that Planned Parenthood would have opposed five minutes, five hours, five days, five months before the same baby emerged from the womb.

Amen.

They Say Things Happen in Threes

I hope you've heard about the IRS admitting on Friday that they unfairly targeted Tea Party and other conservative-affiliated groups as early as 2011.  In case you haven't, here is a quick rundown from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner. 

The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. 

But on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdog's report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny, the report says.

The IRS maintains that this activity for which they now feel sorry for was the fault of lower level agents in their Cincinnati office.  According to the IRS, no higher level officials knew about this (if you believe this, I have a skyscraper to sell).

Of course, this news hits just as the Inspector General of the Treasury is getting ready this coming week to release a report on political abuse at the IRS that was a full year in the making.

Hmmm...I wonder if these two things are connected in any way...

Spirits in the Political World

The White House celebrates Mother's Day:

(h/t Mollie Hemingway)

A Return to Benghazi

It seems typical in politics that once time passes after a major event -- or in this case especially when the event in question would be detrimental to a liberal administration and a possible second term of a president -- we usually never seem to hear anything about the event in question ever again.  But thankfully things seem to be different with regard to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi in which four Americans were murdered.

Since it has been some time since my last post on Benghazi, it is useful to remind oneself of some of the major facts surrounding the attack and what occurred shortly afterwords.  To begin this series of posts, I will quote Scott Johnson, who has a good summary of the administration's equivocations on the reasons for the attack:

As the massacre of our fellow Americans in Benghazi returns to the news in a big way today, with the hearing scheduled in the House, it is well to remember the promotion of the Muhammad video by President Obama and Secretary Clinton in this context. It shows the politicization of the massacre by the Obama administration from the first moment on. The Obama administration’s attribution of responsibility for the massacre to a mob enraged by the Muhammad video was deeply deceitful from the outset. It was a complete and utter fraud. 

Upon reception of the caskets at Andrews Air Force Base, Clinton remarked: “This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing do to with.” And, she might have added, that had nothing to do with the men whose bodies lay before her. Instead, she added this, reiterating the connection of the massacre to a mob enraged by the Muhammad video: “The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia, did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”
Two weeks after the massacre Obama was still yammering about the Muhammad video. Among other things, Obama declared that “there are no words that excuse the killing of innocent” and that there is “no video that justifies an attack on an embassy.” Obama decried the video as “an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well.” I doubt the video was an insult to America. If so, Obama’s speech itself constituted a far greater insult to the United States, and to the truth as well. 

When Clinton appeared before the Senate panel to testify about these events this past January, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin made the perfectly appropriate comment that has been vindicated by subsequent investigation: “[W]e were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that — an assault sprang out of that — and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that.” To which Clinton responded:

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information. The IC has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out. But you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime. 

It is hard to imagine a less fitting question to be asked, rhetorical or otherwise, than “What difference does it make?” It should be her epitaph, if not that of the Obama administration.

Tyranny? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Tyranny!!

President Obama yesterday was the commencement speaker at The Ohio State University's Commencement.  I had finally had time to skim some of the speech, which was revealing as usual.  But before I get into a closer examination of the speech I want to say something that always bugs me about a lot of conservative critiques of Obama and his speeches:  that he is in "campaign mode" or reads off the teleprompters too much.  Of course this true but it's merely window dressing for what is actually taking place.  I think probably the easiest approach is the one that is mostly passed over by many commentators:  actually taking him at his word. 

Let's take him at his word and see what we find.

Here is Obama a little ways into the address:

And I suspect that those of you who pursue more education, or climb the corporate ladder, or enter the arts or science or journalism, you will still choose a cause that you care about in your life and will fight like heck to realize your vision (emphasis added).

What if the "vision" a person realizing is not a good one -- one detrimental to to him and those around him?  What is "vision" anyway?  Is it something akin to fortune telling?

Obama goes on to say that

[citizenship is] at the heart of our founding -- that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given talents and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities -- to ourselves, and to one another, and to future generations.

So what do you call not dealing with entitlements and accumulating massive debts for future generations?

Anyway, let's move on.

Now, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m not going to offer some grand theory on a beautiful day like this -- you guys all have celebrating to do. I’m not going to get partisan, either, because that’s not what citizenship is about.

Ok, great, not going to get partisan.  Looking forward to that for a change.  Obama tells us a few paragraphs later the following:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted. 

We have never been a people who place all of our faith in government to solve our problems; we shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us; it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government.

And:

[When we turn away from our duties as American citizens] a small minority of lawmakers get cover to defeat something the vast majority of their constituents want. That’s how our political system gets consumed by small things when we are a people called to do great things -- like rebuild a middle class, and reverse the rise of inequality, and repair the deteriorating climate that threatens everything we plan to leave for our kids and our grandkids.

What happened to the whole non-partisan pledge?  But that's not even the worst part of the foregoing paragraphs.  It is the screed in the first paragraph about the danger posed by those who "warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner."  

You know, those crackpots who are always blathering on and on about the dangers of tyranny, kind of like this crazy conspiracy theorist:

The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority (emphasis added).

That of course was James Madison from Federalist 10.

All the usual strawmen aside (so conservative critics don't trust the people with self-rule?  You know, like the how liberals do with the administrative state and far away centralized planning...), unlike Obama, the Founders knew that human nature does not change and that republican government is always open to the possibility of either minority or majority tyranny.  Rejecting those truths is not progress but a diminishing of true philosophical and intellectual progress.

Like I said in the opening paragraph, it is important to understand Obama as he understands himself.

Terrorist Turned Terrorist

Former Weather Underground member and chief Obama backer Bill Ayers gave a speech yesterday at Kent State (it was the 43rd anniversary of the shootings) in which he said the following:

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said. “Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence.”

Right, Bill Ayers is obviously against violence...that's why he helped bomb the Capital building, the Pentagon, and various other government buildings in the 60's and 70's (his former lover was killed when she was preparing a bomb that prematurely exploded that would have been planted at Fort Dix military base in New Jersey).  

Also included in this speech was this gem:

The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said.

I'm surprised there wasn't a rip in the space-time continuum with the irony of that line.

Is there some way we can kick this guy out of the country?