Government as Tyranny Redux

Last week I wrote a post about Obama's exhortation to graduates at Ohio State to reject the voices of those that warn that strong governments lead to tyranny. Well, Politico beautifully repeated my argument in a post yesterday about the rash of scandals currently going on in Washington. The post is about how even if the scandals weren't directly spawned by Obama, his intolerance for leaks and constant criticism of conservative groups, would influence his underlings.

The narrative is personal. The uproars over alleged politicization of the IRS and far-reaching attempts to monitor journalists and their sources have not been linked directly to Obama. But it does not strain credulity to suggest that Obama’s well-known intolerance for leaks, and his regular condemnations of conservative dark-money groups, could have filtered down to subordinates.

The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview.

And that's the point that I and many others have been making about the big government ideals of President Obama and his fellow leftists. No matter the intentions of the policies, giving the kind of power to one entity opens up the doors for abuse, corruption, and tyranny.

Obama's Nixon Problem

US News and World Report has gone back into the public record and found that Senate Democrats have for years (at least back to 2010) begged the IRS to investigate and pressure conservative non-profits. Well, they got their wish. Of course, now those Senate Dems are now acting appalled.

From Max Baucus to Chuck Schumer to Jeanne Shaheen, key Senate Democrats publicly pressured the IRS to target groups that held differing political views and who, in their view, had the temerity to engage in the political process. The IRS listened to them and acted. And other Democrat senators like Kay Hagan and Mark Pryor said and did nothing about it.

It's not just dirty politics, but is an impeachable offense. Using a government agency to inflict harm on political opponents has no place in our republic. This is exactly the sort of thing Nixon was forced out of office for engaging in. Article 2 of the Articles of Impeachment against Nixon reads,

Article 2

Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.

This conduct has included one or more of the following:

1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

Interesting, and related to the AP phonetapping scandal, the second point in Article 2 of the Watergate Impeachment read,

2. He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.

Do we have a case of some history repeating?

IRS Sent Confidential Docs To Left-Leaning Group

Wow...just wow.

According to ProPublica, a left-leaning media outlet,

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year.

...

In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

...

(No unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.)

With the outburst of scandal in the Obama administration, I'm beginning to think it went without major scandal in its first term because the media didn't report it, not because it wasn't there.

The First Step To Fixing A Problem

They say the first step to fixing a problem is to admit you have one. Well, the media in this country has a problem. They make mountains out of mole hills and ignore the big stories. They report conjecture and rumor without fact checking. Looking back at the last several years, it's almost laughable the state of journalism in our country. Almost. Because when journalism suffers, the strength of our republic suffers.

Slip ups by the likes of Palin become huge stories and are reported and repeated ad nauseum, while stories like Benghazi and the IRS investigations of conservative (and possibly Jewish groups) is treated as a non-story and gets passing mention, if any at all.

Well, at least one member of the media might be starting to see the light. CBS' Scott Pelley recently said at a speech at Quinnipiac University, "These have been a bad few months for journalism. We're getting the big stories wrong, over and over again." (See video here.)

Some mainstream media types are finally seeing that there is something to Benghazi, and their blind following of the administration's mantra of "nothing to see here, move along" has made them look like fools. The New Yorker started a piece about Benghazi off saying,

It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession. But now there is something to it.

Hopefully the media wakes up soon. Realizes they have allowed themselves to be deluded by their love and support for the current president, and that they have a responsibility. If they do, I wonder what else we will learn?

IRS Targets Conservatives, Apologizes

The AP has a report that the IRS admits to targeting conservative groups with "tea party" or "patriot" in their name during the last election cycle. They've apologized. They are also saying that it wasn't politically motivated.

Bull crap.

It was absolutely politically motivated or groups with "progressive" or other liberal indicator terms would have been targeted as well.

An apology isn't enough, and everyone in America -- regardless of political leaning -- should take note. The US government has just admitted to targeting groups that are opposed to the current administration and, let's cut to the chase, harassing them.

This sort of thing is what everyone is upset with Putin about. This sort of thing is what people like Hugo Chavez would do. This sort of thing is what liberals hate Nixon for doing.

It's happening. It's happening in America today. It's part of the Chicago-style political machine of the Democratic Party and it needs to be exposed. The rights of a person to chose who and what they support politically is the very basis of our republic. To threaten that with witchhunts and harassment of a group is incredibly dangerous and sickening.

Media Finally Covering Benghazi

When the Benghazi attack happened, within weeks of the election, the mainstream media parroted the administration account that it was the result of spontaneous demonstrators and that nothing could have been done to protect the Ambassador and 3 other Americans killed. When the State Department finished its internal review, the media reported the findings and the story quickly died.

Now that Congress is investigating, and the White House accounts of Benghazi have been found to be a complete fabrication (people on the scene have said they knew it was terrorism right away), the media is finally waking up. ABC News reports,

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

Even the NY Times has reported,

But within days, Mr. Hicks [Deputy Chief of Mission for the US in Libya] said, after raising questions about the account of what had happened in Benghazi offered in television interviews by Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, he felt a distinct chill from State Department superiors. “The sense I got was that I needed to stop the line of questioning,” said Mr. Hicks, who has been a Foreign Service officer for 22 years.

He was soon given a scathing review of his management style, he said, and was later “effectively demoted” to desk officer at headquarters, in what he believes was retaliation for speaking up.

There are reports that the CBS News reporter covering Benghazi, one of the few that actually did some investigative journalism into the affair, has been marginalized by CBS and the White House for uncovering inconsistencies and outright lies by the White House and State Department regarding Benghazi. The same inconsistencies and lies that are now being brought to light by the Congressional inquiry and by other media outlets finally doing their job.

Government as Tyranny

According to Real Clear Politics, in a graduation speech at Ohio State our president uttered these words:

Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.

Of course, any person who is familiar with history will know that we won our independence from a government of tyranny and our Founding Fathers fully understood that. Thomas Jefferson, a champion of personal liberty and a cynic regarding government power, said, "When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." More appropriately to this president, Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "Those who think themselves injured by their rulers are sometimes, by a mild and prudent answer, convinced of their error. But where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair."