It’s getting tiresome watching Democrats stand before phalanx of microphones spouting the party line about the thousands of pages of IRS documents supplied to a half dozen or so House and Senate committees and, enough already, there’s no “there there.”
No “there there” means, you’re not going to tie the scandal to anyone in the White House, especially the president. They usually follow with a reference to a Republican “witch hunt” or a “fishing expedition.” This is serious. We cannot give up.
As I pointed out in Part 1 of my blog series, Understanding the IRS scandal, March 10, 2014, the president used his bully pulpit during the State of the Union Address on January 2010 to publically chastise members of the Supreme Court for their decision on Citizens United. A host of Democrat senators, led by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), got the message and sent letters to the IRS to tighten the rules.
It’s the way President Obama works. He tells us what he’s going to do, as when he told us he had a pen and a phone, and if Congress stood in his way, he’d find a way to get something done.
Nobody believes that the hard drives of Lois Lerner and others crashed, and all the January 2009–April 2010 e-mails Congress is seeking are gone. Simply gone. Do they really believe we’re going to fall for that? It’s all the more reason to continue the investigation of where the corruption in the IRS leads. “Old and useless binders of information are stored and maintained on federal agency shelves; official records, like the e-mails of a prominent official, don’t just disappear without a trace unless that was the intention,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), pointing to the computer crashing story as another attempted deception.
Hats off to Rep. Paul Ryan(R-WI) for making this statement after hearing the testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen on Friday:
“You are the Internal Revenue Service. You can reach into the lives of hardworking taxpayers, and with a phone call, an e-mail or a letter, you can turn their lives upside down. You ask taxpayers to hang onto seven years of their personal tax information in case they’re ever audited, and you can’t keep six months of employee e-mails?”
If you’re not watching Fox News you’re not getting the full story on the IRS scandal. For instance, The Media Research Center noted that neither the NBC Today Show nor ABC’s Good Morning America covered the story of the computer crash the Monday following the usual release of bad news in Washington late Friday. ABC did find time to provide footage of the Royal baby walking for the first time.
