[At the end of citing a long list of laughable pro-Obama liberal media damage control, spin and excuses to diminish an undeniable crisis regarding the IRS corruption: ]
Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman took a few minutes out of his vacation to write on his New York Times blog that "it seems that there weren't actually any scandals, just the usual confusion and low-level mistakes that happen all the time, in any administration." He bases this on a Washington Post blog post from Journolist founder Ezra Klein, who claimed late yesterday morning that "the scandals that could reach high don't seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don't reach high enough."
The IRS scandal falls into the latter category, Klein claims:
- If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit's decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there's no evidence of that. And so it's hard to see where this one goes from here.
Again, Klein is analyzing this in terms of ordinary political gamesmanship. But he has it backward.
Suppose the IRS's abuses were not ordered or explicitly encouraged by the White House. That would mean, as Commentary's Jonathan Tobin puts it, that the agency "has so thoroughly absorbed the views of its political masters that it doesn't even recognize when it has crossed the line into illegal activity."In other words, if this is the case,
the left's hateful and slanderous campaign against its political foes, especially the Tea Party--the demagoguery of Obama, his fellow Democrats and their supporters in the media, led by the New York Times editorial page--
was sufficient to prompt the IRS agents to cast aside their professional obligations and embark on a campaign of political abuse whose effect was to ease Obama's re-election.In his testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee--whose hearings opened 40 years ago today--John Dean famously called that scandal "a cancer on the presidency."
If Obama, his campaign or his White House aides are directly implicated in the IRS's abuses, this will be another cancer on the presidency, remediable by resignation or impeachment.But if the IRS acted without direction from above--if it "went rogue" against the Constitution and in support of the party in power--then we are dealing with a cancer on the federal government. That, it seems to us, is a far direr diagnosis, one whose treatment is likely to be radical and risky.
