The other day, I stopped by to see my friend BOB!^tm and noted he was rather glum. I asked why and he said that it was the recent revelations regards the IRS had come as a shock.

This seemed odd to me since nothing about it had surprised me and, indeed many of us including him had been aware of much of the situation a year ago...so why now that it was belatedly getting  exposure was it getting him down.

He pointed out a tidbit from Friday that I'd missed...and I've been rather morose ever since.

Here's the bit that I'd missed.

ACE has the Readers Digest Version with the money quotes.

IRS employees interviewed during a Treasury inspector general’s audit would not say who ordered them to target conservative groups, the inspector general told members of Congress on Monday. "We did pose that question, and no one would acknowledge who, if anyone, provided that direction,” Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George said

....the original article is at The Hill.

So the IG was able to determine that there was direction from Washington and after interviewing 88 IRS agents, couldn't get one to name names, only that the orders had come from someplace "high". 

This is the mob.

The system is getting close to the point where it doesn't work anymore.

At least the inspector general seems to be appalled.

"During the Nixon administration, there were attempts to use the Internal Revenue Services in manners that might be comparable in terms of misusing it. I'm not saying the actions taken here are comparable," he told a House Appropriations subcommittee. "This is unprecedented."

Emphasis is mine.

Remember, Nixon didn't actually do it. He just talked about it. That was scary enough to be up near the top of his list of impeachable offenses. The IRS has admitted that they went through this. Targeting Opposition get-out-the-vote organizations during an election year. THAT'S THEIR COVER STORY. One wonders what their deep dark secret is.

The implications are troubling.

We now know that the IRS asked for donor lists from the groups and gave those donor lists to political opponents, so that those who donated to these groups could be harassed. There is evidence that the IRS audited those who donated to those groups. (note the misleading headline on that ST article, which makes it seem that this wasn't Conservative specific at all.)

One result of this seems to have been that Republican's grass-roots Hispanic outreach as well as their get out the vote organizations essentially collapsed in the run-up to the 2012 election. Professor Jacobson has a good round up of the implications of the IRS scandal regards that here.

This alone massively stacks the deck against any opposition parties because fear of audits or having your name slipped to ones political opponents is going to seriously dampen enthusiasm for political activism...unless its approved by the powers that be.

So I can see why Bob!^tm was upset....While it's good that there is someone asking questions, the code of silence the IG's run into is a bit scary. They are more afraid of who told them  to do this than the guy who could send them to jail.

This is reminiscent of the mafia and indicates deep, systemic corruption.

It gets worse.

The IT industry in general and Facebook and Google in particular,  are pretty much completely run by Democrats. Facebook seems to be a data mining operation for the Democrats which might explain why Zuckerberg hasn't had any IRS issues following his problematic IPO.

Google which is pretty damned far left, is now essentially he gatekeeper of knowledge, and that can be problematic.

Now...this is getting into crazy paranoid land. Google assures us that they don't adjust their searches except for accuracy so there's no reason to suspect that Duck Duck Go is going to have vastly different results on an inquiry critical of Goo....oh wait.








Yeah..we're screwed.


Fighting to get our fairly complex and nuanced message out despite the bias of the Media in general and Google in particular is an extremely tall order. Doing that while anyone who volunteers for grassroots organizations that don't meet federal approval being audited and harassed...and the chilling effect on political speech that implies is going to be nigh impossible.

My activating my Google account the other day was eye opening, suddenly, my you tube account, my AIM account...by College Blackboard account all harmonized under my Full name. It was like pulling hens teeth to get my You Tube Channel renamed Brickmuppet again....all the while being scolded by the internet for doing so.

Given the close relationship between Google and the Dems, pretty much everything involving our search history is available to the Dems...which is probably not a problem unless one makes a fuss or advocates for something they don't like. Like making a post that does not meet the someone's standards.


We're increasingly run by people who see 1984 at a how to manual instead of a cautionary tale and increasingly, the telescreen is real and way more effective than Orwell imagined it..

Back to the scandal at hand....

The deck is stacked. They can't get anyone at the IRS to name who ordered them to do this thing. This is downright...Sicilian.

The federal government bureaucracy has been turned into Tammany Hall. The chances of holding Obama or his direct underlings accountable for this seem similar to the odds of successfully building a snowman in a blast furnace.

The IRS is also going to be administering Obama care. One won't want to be a Republican who needs surgery beyond an ER vist come next year. It's already becoming politicized.And so most people will clam up rather than deal with a hassle, or a risk...and the ratcheting will get that much worse.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE!

There also is looking to be similar targeting of conservatives by the EPA. If you don't pay your dues to the party in lucre and praise you will find yourself in a pickle.

Yikes! This is developing world stuff.

What scares me almost as much as all this, is that when people feel helpless and conclude that their voices cannot be heard and they cannot seek redress from the government for their grievances...they go one of two ways...they become sheep...or they become violent.

So yeah...Like Bob!^tm even as this scandal comes into the open. I'm a bit down. Because if heads don't roll over this, then the ultimate point of this affair won't be to demonstrate that no one is above the law and fix the problem, but to show that no one can stop the abuses going on, the jig is up and the Republic is dead.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:21 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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