Ghost of Richard M. Nixon haunts Obama administration’s IRS fiasco

By David McElroy · May 15, 2013

For months, Republicans have been trying to use what happened at Benghazi as the weapon with which to mortally wound Barack Obama’s second term. Although it seems clear to me that some terribly bad judgement was used connected with Benghazi (and it’s clear the administration lied about it subsequently), there’s no way it was something to bring an administration down. It was just politically embarrassing.

The brewing IRS scandal, on the other hand, is starting to look as though Richard Nixon rose from the grave and started giving Democrats political advice for the past few years.

You’ve heard about the scandal already, so I’m not going to waste time covering the specific allegations, partly because you can read them elsewhere and partly because it’s still early in the story, so the facts are developing. All we know is that the Internal Revenue Service used agents to give extra scrutiny to conservative groups and also leaked confidential information to media about conservative groups. (ProPublica is a progressive left media group, and it’s the one admitting that it was given the documents.)

Nobody is questioning that it happened. The question is how widespread it was and who directed it. First, we were told that it was limited to just one IRS office. Then it became clear that IRS officials in Washington were involved. How high did it go? Nobody outside the government knows yet.

I don’t have a clue whether Obama knew about the illegal activity. It’s possible that he’s just as surprised and outraged as anyone else. The White House is certainly denying knowledge of anything improper. In fact, White House press secretary Jay Carney went so far as to claim that the fact the IRS apologized for the illegal activity didn’t mean anything wrong had occurred. (Huh?)

In the early days of the Watergate scandal, nobody seriously believed that Nixon knew anything about the burglary or the subsequent activities to cover it up. Nobody knew that he had an “enemies list” which was used by the IRS to go after his political opponents, but that’s what turned out to be the case. Sound familiar? Or is that the way it happened? We don’t know.

Republicans are positively gleeful about these developments, of course, because it’s giving them a legitimate club with which to whack an administration they hate. The media is also turning on the White House, and it doesn’t help that the Justice Department just went after phone records for hundreds of Associated Press journalists. Whether you like them or not, it helps to have the media mad at the same folks you’re mad at, so this is a lucky break for Republicans.

Can we say that Democratic politicians are evil and abuse their power? Absolutely yes. But we can also say that Republicans are evil and abuse their power, too.

Here’s the real point. I don’t really care that much about the new scandal. It’s probably going to cost Obama some serious political capital. Some people will be fired. There will be congressional hearings. Somber people will say somber and hypocritical things on television. Some people might even go to jail. But this is a sideshow compared to the real issue.

Republicans and Democrats point fingers at each others and claim that the other side is evil. And everyone who supports the whole statist system says we have to have such a system because people are so inherently evil that the public has to be protected from them. Are people evil and untrustworthy? Of course. But if you give power to control a society to a group and call it government, who is going to end up winning the power? It’s people being drawn from the “evil populace” — and the worst among them are going to tend to be successful in winning power.

All of the D.C. scandals are just tempests in teapots. Some bad people on one team did bad things and then they lied about it. The people on the other team found out about the bad things and are sanctimoniously going after the bad people. That’s pretty much what every Washington scandal is about. The specifics change — and which team is on which side changes — but they all follow similar scripts.

Don’t get sucked into this scandal or the next one or the one after that. Will it make your life any better to follow the scandal and zealously hope that get the evil-doers are punished? I can’t see how it would. It certainly won’t change anything about the scandal and it won’t stop the next one from happening.

Quit supporting the statist system that gives the power to these people. This particular administration isn’t the problem — just as the Bush administration wasn’t the problem before this and the Clinton administration wasn’t the problem before them.

The problem is a system that demands all of your personal information and takes the power to control every aspect of your life. Don’t fight one random scandal after another all your life. Fight the system that allows the scandals in the first place.

Take away the power that these people have to collect information and control your life. That’s the only long-term solution.

UPDATE: Here’s a nice piece that gives the history of IRS abuses going back to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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