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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