Most people on the right side of the political spectrum view the recent revelations of the IRS targeting Tea Party and other conservative organizations for "special" treatment as proof that Barack Obama is everything that we have been saying about him for the past six years. The truth is probably far worse.
Oh it is more than probable that the Obama Administration knew of the shenanigans going on at the IRS for some time, perhaps even from the beginning, but the real problem, the reality that should send shivers up every American's spine is that probably nobody in the Obama Administration directed the IRS to do it.
If someone in the Administration and it would have to be a powerful member to do so, did pull the strings to get the IRS to harass conservative groups, well then we just have corrupt politician doing what corrupt politicians do. But the far more likely scenario is that the IRS took the opportunity of a sympathetic administration being in power to go after its, the IRS's, enemies. In other words the IRS, as an institution, sees the Tea Party and other like minded conservative organizations as a threat to their power
Since its formation the Tea Party has been portrayed as a bunch of greedy white people hell bent on protecting themselves from higher taxes. But the Tea Party movement has always made it clear that taxes are just a symptom of a far deeper threat. The primary motivation of the Tea party movement is the belief that the federal government is far too big and is trampling on American's individual and constitutional protected freedoms.
The Tea Party has always understood one important historical truth, government = control.
This is why the Tea Party so identifies with our Founders, they too understood this simple truth and devised a system of government that, if maintained, would limit the power of government thus insuring a greater degree of individual freedom than had ever existed before the founding of our nation, Of course that system of government has not been maintained and thus we have deteriorated to the point where the IRS is harassing citizens whose only crime is that they want to become more involved in the political process of their nation.
Nothing has validated the Tea Party's concerns of an out of control federal government as has the IRS targeting of those who most openly challenge big government. The IRS, like a cornered animal lashed out at its protagonist because its very existence, its institutional survival were threatened. The institutional instincts of one of the United States most powerful and feared agencies in order to protect itself has shown it not only can but will destroy American's constitutional liberties in order to maintain its power, the power which legally belongs to the very citizens it attacks. .
It is one thing for a partisan politician and his administration to use the power of governing to punish their political enemies, happens all the time. It is quite another thing for the Leviathan of a massive Federal bureaucracy to target ordinary citizens. We know this to be true regardless of the circumstances of who specifically directed these actions. With such widespread abuse of power, nobody stepped forward to blow the whistle. No IRS employee less alone manager stepped forward and declared "this is wrong". Neither publicly or with the protection of whistle blower status, did any bureaucrat think it important to protect fellow citizens from the abuse of power by a tyrannical government agency. The IRS as an agency was more important to these people than the constitutional protections of average Americans.
I sincerely wish that Obama and his petty tyrants had forced the IRS to "punish" his enemies, the solution to that is relatively simple. But the IRS and other such federal agencies are not on the ballot every four years and you do not impeach the Federal bureaucracy.
Our federal government is a amalgamation self sustaining and self defending organisms not really subject to political control, by either party. Constitutional restraints even in their current state of political demise are absolutely meaningless to soulless institutions whose only purpose are its own perpetuation. The federal government is now so big that all of its institutions are entities unto themselves divorced from and little concerned with the citizens of the rest of the nation they ostensibly exist to serve.. They exist in order to exist, there truly is no higher goal.
If Obama ordered the IRS to attack the Tea Party that would, in one sense, be good news. It would show that the IRS was subject to "civilian" control, even if misguided, corrupt and un-American control. But I fear it is far worse than that, I fear the IRS just does what it wants in order to maintain control, its control of us, to protect itself.
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