Obama’s IRS Nightmares

by Robert Cleveland | May 23, 2013 12:01 am

With so many scandals going on, and so many Obama administration officials claiming so much ignorance, it really makes you wonder: just who is running things in the White House, anyway?

From all appearances, the answer is “no one.” It’s like watching Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz, as President Obama is constantly trying to cover his incompetence, and Press Secretary Jay Carney never seems to know what the heck is going on.

President Obama has supposedly taken decisive action, requiring the resignation of the temporary IRS chief, who was set to resign next month anyway.[1] That isn’t accountability, it’s a cop-out.

No one in the mainstream media seems to be looking at it this way, but what is going on here constitutes a major violation of the civil rights of U.S. citizens. The Obama administration used the Internal Revenue Service to violate the rights of free speech, religion, and assembly of conservative Americans, yet somehow President Obama thinks the American people can be placated just by laying off a man who was already on his way out. In short, the President of the United States thinks that our nation is peopled entirely by idiots, and all he needs to do to get away with gross violations of the Bill of Rights is the token firing of a temp bureaucrat.

The Obama administration has rounded out their violations of the First Amendment through the covert seizing of phone records from reporters at the AP. In just these two actions, the IRS and the DOJ have violated freedom of speech, assembly, religion, and the press. And a new revelation shows that the Department of Justice may have been spying on Congress[2] as well, potentially violating Separation of Powers.

As it turns out, conservatives’ warnings about President Obama’s “Chicago-style politics” were true after all, as were all of those voices warning about government tyranny that President Obama recently told us all to ignore.

The outgoing IRS chief, Steve Miller, has insisted that the IRS’s targeting of conservative political groups was “a mistake,” and they’re treating it as though this was just going on at the IRS office in Cincinnati. But the truth is that Tea Party and other conservative groups were being targeted nation-wide by the IRS. The big question is, what effect did this have on last November’s election — because with all of these shenanigans going on in the lead-up to that election, there can be no doubt that the goal was to block conservatives’ ability to organize effectively in the lead-up to the 2012 Presidential election.

But when you put together all of the Obama administration’s spurious claims, it really does sound quite ridiculous:

1. Hindering the ability of conservative groups to obtain tax-exempt status, while left-wing groups were fast-tracked, was a “mistake,” and not a deliberate attempt to effect the election.
2. Despite the fact that no one at the IRS seems to be able to name any leftist groups that were affected by this “mistake,” it was not a targeting of right-wing groups; it was an across-the-board screw-up.
3. Even though the news first came out and was reported to the White House months ago, no one in the Obama administration had any idea what was going on until the IRS publicly admitted to what they were doing.

This is the absurd thing about all of the scandals the Obama administration has been involved in since President Obama took office in 2009, including Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and the seizing of phone records from the AP and Fox News: no one at the top seems to have the slightest clue what is going on! There are only two possibilities that explain the Obama administration’s extreme ignorance of these scandals: either every high-ranking official in the Obama administration is criminally negligent, because they are doing nothing to keep this massive federal government in line, or every high-ranking official in the Obama administration is criminally culpable, because they have been plotting each and every one of these scandals, and doing so in such a way as to give the people at the top of the food chain “plausible” deniability. Fortunately, as more time goes on, more information comes out about just how corrupt the Obama administration is. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is banking on their ability to obstruct Congressional investigations until the American public forgets about the issue entirely.

And now it gets even more interesting, with one of the primary conspirators simultaneously declaring her innocense and invoking the Fifth.

It is more important than ever for conservatives to fight to keep these issues alive. According to the Left, Benghazi is only becoming a part of the public vernacular because the GOP just won’t let a dead issue die. But that criticism primarily emanates from the same people who are still trying to convince us that Obamacare was a good idea.

It is high time that the criminal element in the Obama administration – up to and including the president himself – are brought to justice.