Peggy Noonan wrote an article recently suggesting that no one is listening to Obama any longer:
No one’s really listening to the president now. He has been for five years a nonstop wind-up talk machine. Most of it has been facile, bland, the same rounded words and rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses. I see him enjoying the sound of his voice as the network newsman leans forward eagerly, intently, nodding at the pearls, enacting interest, for this is the president and he is the anchorman and surely something important is being said with two such important men engaged.
But nothing interesting was being said! Looking back on this presidency, it has from the beginning been a 17,000 word New Yorker piece in which, calmly, sonorously, with his lovely intelligent voice, the president says nothing, or little that is helpful, insightful or believable. “I’m not a particularly ideological person.” “It’s hard to anticipate events over the next three years.” “I don’t really even need George Kennan right now.” “I am comfortable with complexity.” “Our capacity to do some good . . . is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention.”
Nobody is!
It’s worse than that. No one trusts Obama. And for good reason. The NSA and IRS scandals have destroyed everyone’s faith in government. Obama has lied about the NSA and weaponized the IRS as a political tool.
Left wingers claim that nothing’s come of any investigations, whether Fast and Furious, NSA, Benghazi or the IRS. They confuse stonewalling for exoneration. The Obama regime has stonewalled the IRS investigation at every opportunity.
Judicial Watch filed suit to end the stonewalling:
The government watchdog Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, insisting the agency release previously demanded documents made under a Freedom of Information Act request that would clarify how conservative groups were screened for nonprofit status.
Judicial Watch filed the suit on Oct. 9 but announced it Tuesday. President Tom Fitton said in a written statement that the suit was “designed to cut through the Obama administration cover-up of its IRS scandal.”
Specifically, the watchdog said it wanted the IRS to release copies of “all communications relating to the review process for organizations seeking 501(c)(4) nonprofit status since January 1, 2012.” The group also asked the court “to order the IRS to provide records of communications by former IRS official Lois Lerner concerning the controversial review and approval process.”
Judicial Watch said it’s taking the court route to obtain the records because the IRS has failed to uphold FOIA on four requests, dating back to May 2013 — as news of the agency’s seeming biased delay of granting tax exemptions to conservative groups seeking nonprofit status was rocking national headlines.
“The Obama IRS suppressed the entire tea party movement just in time to help Obama win reelection,” said Mr. Fitton, in a written statement. “One of the most pressing questions, of course, is, ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’ We know that former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman and his political aide, Jonathan Davis, visited the White House hundreds of times during the Obama IRS witch hunt. This may help explain why the IRS is now stonewalling our FOIA requests and forced us to go to federal court.”
Christopher Being of the Tax Analysts met with the same obstruction:
The latest chapter in Tax Analysts’ ongoing efforts to investigate what did and didn’t happen in the IRS’s self-admitted abuse of power in reviewing the tax-exempt applications of mostly conservative groups was written last week. If you didn’t know, that’s not surprising, because while it got some coverage, it didn’t get a lot and in some ways that makes sense. Other than the fact that the IRS released more documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, there wasn’t much news in those documents.
The IRS released the documents in response to a court order that Tax Analysts managed to obtain after the IRS had exhausted every excuse it could think of to delay – I was waiting for “the dog ate my homework” – and continued its whining over how mean we were being in asking it to be transparent to the American people. This is the third installment of documents – documents that are training materials – that the IRS has released and, generally, they haven’t been awfully helpful. And we believe that the odds are good that the IRS’s response to a document request that the agency itself agreed was important enough to get “expedited” treatment is not really a response at all.
Last week, Tax Analysts issued a press release, and in it I am quoted as saying:
Retrieving these documents was a small victory in our continuous and ever-growing fight for transparency. But it should be noted that what Tax Analysts asked for were training materials, which should be publicly available to begin with. The fact that it took us eight months, a lawsuit, and a court order to get the training materials the agency released is not, I believe, a positive sign on how the IRS is dealing with its problems.
Since then, I have had more time to think about it, and I believe that where we are is exactly where the IRS wants us to be: Nothing newsworthy here, so just move on. I strongly suggest we not move on.
Mr. Begin comes to a terrible realization:
Anyone familiar with my writing knows that I have bent over backwards to give the IRS the benefit of the doubt in this black eye some call the “exemption scandal.” I must admit I’m getting a little tired of bending.
Back in the day, as the saying goes, I often referred to the IRS as Fortress Secrecy, a term meant to describe the agency’s obsession with hiding as much of its operations as it can get away with. I am not a casual observer, and I have never seen things this bad. Everything the IRS has done in addressing the exemption scandal leads to just one conclusion: that this agency now believes it is accountable to no one other than itself. Who is responsible for that?
Commissioner Koskinen, you have a problem. President Obama, you have a problem. America, we have a problem. An agency with this much power cannot be unaccountable to the citizens it was designed to serve.
Obama’s IRSS is out of control. It serves Obama and it serves democrats. It does not serve America.
One famous example of this abuse is Christine O’Donnell:
Powerful committees in both chambers of Congress now want answers to questions surrounding Christine O’Donnell’s personal tax records and whether the Delaware Republican’s private information was illegally accessed and ultimately used in an effort to derail her 2010 U.S. Senate bid.
The House Ways and Means Committee has joined the Senate Finance Committee in probing a string of incidents dating back to March 2010, when Ms. O’Donnell — a tea party favorite who riled Delaware’s GOP establishment by besting party mainstay Mike Castle in a primary contest before losing to Democrat Chris Coons in the general election — was told by Treasury Department investigators that her tax information had been breached.
O’Donnell has gotten nowhere either.
Since then, Ms. O’Donnell has run into roadblock after roadblock in her search for answers as officials at the IRS, in Delaware state government and at the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration remain tight-lipped.
And the kicker is that even if the IRS violates your rights, they don’t feel they have to admit it or even inform you of it.
“The IRS takes a position that they don’t have to tell you the wrongdoing by their own agency and employees because of the protections that are supposed to be afforded to the taxpayer are then reversed and afforded to the IRS employee. This is a big problem. This agency is a big problem,” said Cleta Mitchell, a Washington lawyer who has sued the IRS on behalf of the National Organization for Marriage and has worked with tea party groups who claim they were singled out by the government.
It is know that on at least four occasions politicians and donors have had their personal records accessed. Eric Holder’s response?
The Justice Department has declined to prosecute in any of the cases, and many of the details remain unclear.
Naturally.
Harry Reid claimed to have knowledge of Mitt Romney’s personal taxes.
We know the Obama’s Nazis handed over the tax records of the National Organization for Marriage.
We know that Romney donors were identified by Obama and then targeted by the IRS
We know that IRSS Chief Counsel William Wilkins met with Obama two days before the IRS targeting criteria were released:
The Obama appointee implicated in congressional testimony in the IRS targeting scandal met with President Obama in the White House two days before offering his colleagues a new set of advice on how to scrutinize tea party and conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.
On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.
We know Wilkins knew about the targeting.
What Wilkins and Obama spoke of- we don’t know as Wilkins has developed Alzheimer’s. In the hearing Wilkins said “I don’t recall” a breathtaking 80 times.
A top lawyer at the Internal Revenue Service told congressmen quizzing him over the tea party targeting scandal ‘I don’t recall’ a ‘staggering 80 times in fill or partial response to the committees questions’, a letter revealed today.
The letter was sent to Chief counsel William Wilkins by two powerful House Republicans who gave him until December 10 to ‘amend’ his statements.
The stinging letter from House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa and regulatory subcommittee chair Rep. Jim Jordan, read: ‘Your memory consistently failed when you were asked about information you shared with the Treasury Department’, adding his testimony ‘suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.’
Wilkins, who was appointed IRS Chief Counsel by Obama, has quite the resume and I’ll bet you didn’t know about it:
Wilkins was one of two IRS lead attorneys appointed by President Barack Obama. Before serving in the administration, he represented the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
That church was run by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the president’s longtime Chicago pastor whose controversial sermons once threatened to derail Obama’s White House run.
At first Obama was outraged about the IRS abuse. He was so outraged that he appointed one of his donors to investigate.
Then he “evolved” to the point that he couldn’t understand what the fuss was about.
OBAMA: That’s not — that’s not something that’s reported about. If, on the other hand, you’ve got an office in Cincinnati, in the IRS office that — I think, for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether a nonprofit is actually a political organization, deserves a tax exempt agency. And they’ve got a list, and suddenly everybody’s outraged.
The damage Obama has done to the IRS and the country is immeasurable. He once joked about using the IRS to audit his enemies:
Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn’t possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can’t audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.
And Glenn is right, conspiracy theories are not so crazy any more:
A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don’t think they’re true, they’re no longer obviously crazy. And that’s Obama’s legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.
The problem with government is that to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy. And the problem with the Obama administration is that, to a greater extent than any since Nixon’s, it is not. Do not be surprised if the result is that people mistrust those in authority, and order their lives accordingly. Such an outcome is bad for America, but bad governance has its consequences.
I think this is biggest scandal of all. Under Obama the government has become the enemy of the people.
And stonewalling is not exoneration. A word of warning. Bill Jacobson opined that the most dangerous years of Obama are upon us.
An animal is most dangerous when cornered. As a lame duck, Barack Obama is now cornered. No one is listening to him and no one trusts him. Beware.
Especially if you are a film maker.
Obama has a pen and a phone. And the IRS.
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.