If you feel like you need a program to keep up with the rash of scandals coming out of Washington, you’re not alone. There’s stifling of political opposition, lying to Congress, intimidation of whistle blowers, lying to the public and a healthy dose of general incompetence.
Suffice it to say that Obama has found his legacy. He has set the new presidential speed record for achieving lame-duck status, going from inauguration to irrelevance in just four months. With three major scandals all coming to a boil at the same time, Democrats will be distancing themselves in droves before the dust settles.
The IRS Hokey-Pokey
All of America just found out what many conservative groups have known all along – that the IRS has spent years targeting them in order to minimize how effective they can be.
New information confirms that over a course of three years the IRS singled out groups for abuse if their names or descriptions included certain keywords like “tea party”, “9-12”, “patriot”, “constitution”, “voter fraud”, “government spending”, “limited government” or “Bill of Rights”.
The IRS demanded that such groups turn over more information about their activities, their donors, their websites and social media accounts, even asking questions about the political beliefs of personnel. Worse, at least one liberal group has admitted that the IRS sent them confidential copies of applications and other documents from thirty-one conservative groups.
Despite initial White House claims that the problem was just a bunch of low-level bureaucrats, we now know that top IRS appointees in Washington knew all about it – including IRS commissioners and chief counsels.
In the end, the abuse affected almost five-hundred conservative groups, with none receiving tax-exempt status for over twenty-seven straight months – time enough to reduce their impact on the 2012 elections. Meanwhile, liberal groups with words like “progressive” in their titles zipped right through the approval process.
There even seems to be evidence that such government abuse extended to other agencies. One group that was founded to fight against voter fraud found itself the target of an alphabet soup of government agencies, including a series of FBI inquiries about the group and its founders, ATF demands to see the family’s firearms, surprise audits of the founder’s gun dealership, and an OSHA audit of a family manufacturing business.
There are already calls from Congress for a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation, and once such a process gets started it can lead pretty much anywhere. Just ask Bill Clinton.
The Benghazi Shuffle
Despite months of disinterest by the press, the Obama administration is facing serious questions and a probable congressional select committee over how it dealt with the September 11th attacks on our consulate in Benghazi.
There are three key elements to the scandal:
First, why did our State Department ignore repeated requests for more security from our diplomatic personnel in a place that intelligence agencies had reported as being frequented by terrorists?
Second, when our people were under attack, why didn’t our government begin moving Heaven and earth to help them? The White House claims there wasn’t time, as it would have taken too long to respond. But since they didn’t know “when” it would be over, why weren’t assets put in motion and kept in motion until it was?
Third, in the immediate aftermath why did the administration insist that this was just a violent movie review instead of a terrorist attack? Who whitewashed the official story of any references to terrorists, and why? (OK, you probably know the answer to that one, but they’ll never admit it.)
The biggest loser in this one is going to be Hillary. The odds that she will now actually have to fight for the 2016 nomination are increasing by the day.
The Telephone (records) Blues
This is the most recent and, for the press, the most creepy of the scandals.
The Justice Department admitted this week that it grabbed two months worth of phone records for over twenty phone lines used by the Associated Press in the Capitol Building, in addition to the personal phone records of at least five reporters in the process of investigating who leaked a story about a potential terrorist attack back in 2011.
Of course subpoenaing phone records is nothing new, but there are rules and procedures to follow which were ignored, plus two months worth is a rather wide net to cast. What future sources and whistle blowers are going to be confident that their anonymity will be protected now? Will they have to return to the days of trench coats and dark parking garages in order to avoid the prying eyes of Big Brother?
This scandal probably has shorter legs than the others, but it has burned a lot of goodwill in what has otherwise been Obama’s steno pool. Goodwill he will probably need when it comes to how they cover the other scandals.
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The danger for Democrats is that Americans will note that these abuses of government power come courtesy of the same people who keep asking us to trust bigger and bigger government with more and more influence over our lives.
In case you missed it, the Associated Press recently made some changes to its official “Stylebook”, the guide journalist use to determine what words and phrases they should or should not use in their reportage. The new edict declares terms like “illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented” as verboten.
Welcome to the surveillance state
Today it is the collection of phone records, emails, Facebook posts, text messages, chat room sessions, Google searches, credit card transactions and online documents that we know about. Tomorrow, who knows?
If you can imagine it, odds are that it can probably be collected eventually. In fact, at this point you have to assume that anything that is transmitted digitally is either currently being seized, copied and stored for future reference or will be just as soon as someone on the government payroll can figure out how.
It will be a historical database of your entire digital life.
It is safe to say that this is well beyond the scope of anything our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment. But now our right to “be secure in (our) persons, houses, papers, and effects” is almost non-existent just because most of our “papers” are now digital.
It is the foundation for a total surveillance society. Why employ an army of snitches and spies to keep tabs on your population when you can outsource the job to the population itself? Just fix it so that everything you potentially want to know goes through one “pipe” and make copies of everything that goes through. Easy peasy.
The logic of those who support this hangs on the contention that the government isn’t actively “looking” at what they are collecting…yet. They will only peak if they need to. Please raise your hand if you think that Thomas Jefferson would have been fine with regularly copying every document he owned, every receipt for every purchase, every letter he ever sent or received or a transcript of every conversation he ever had and putting it into a really big box that the government could look into any time it saw fit.
It’s almost comical to think back on how worked up so many politicians got about preventing those awful telemarketers from calling during dinner, and making sure that we had a “Do not call” list we could use to opt-out of further calls; and how they worked so hard to pass laws against email spam. The next time you see statist politicians pounding the table about a consumer’s need for privacy vs. corporations, feel free to politely burst out in uncontrolled laughter, because the surveillance state doesn’t have an “opt-out” list.
It should not be overlooked that the driver of this massive increase in surveillance is that Obama’s pullback from an “offensive” strategy in the war on terror requires developing a “defensive” one…which means a lot more “Big Brother”.
Why is it that a President and many leading politicians who are so squeamish about water-boarding a few terrorists have no problem with violating the Fourth Amendment rights of over three-hundred million American citizens? It’s the same approach that liberals take with gun control. Instead of focusing on the criminals, they just decide they’ll intrude on everyone’s rights en masse and hopefully that will take care of the problem.
Part of the reason politicians are so anxious to look worked up about the IRS scandal is that it undermines the trust needed to continue to expand big government. A recent Fox News poll measuring “trust and confidence” in the federal government found sixty-three percent of Americans having either “not much” or “none at all” – which explains why the same poll found sixty-two percent opposed to the government secretly collecting their personal information.
And how long will it be before we find out about IRS style political abuse of this information? How long before your entire digital life is poured through for political reason or because you have certain beliefs? How long before it just “makes sense” to some bureaucrats that this database is made available to other government agencies, or is accessed by every prosecutor for every trial in America? Like sunrise, it’s inevitable.
From ancient times to today, government has proved that it can’t be trusted because its main interest is always itself and its own growth. Always. When is the last time any government ever voluntarily reduced the scope of its own power? On the contrary, it always excuses itself and rationalizes the power it has – or the need for more – for our own good.
When it comes to any future hope of privacy, we are at a crossroads. If we allow this, how much of a fight will we put up against the next incremental step? And you can bet your life there will be more steps.
There’s an old Chinese proverb that says “the place to kill a serpent is in the egg”, but unfortunately this egg has hatched, and the serpent is growing at the pace of technology. If we don’t do something soon the only privacy we’ll know is what we read about in history books.