It’s time to clean up the agency:
…it all boils down to trust. One reason for the resonance of not only the IRS scandals but also the NSA scandal, the Benghazi scandal, Fast and Furious, and so on is that fewer Americans than ever trust the federal government. It’s a mess that needs to be cleaned up, and denying that the mess exists only exacerbates the lack of trust.
But the denial is strong, even among some in this comments section. Of course, it’s partisan denial.
Cleaning up the IRS or any other federal bureaucracy is easier said than done. First, if people broke the law then they should be prosecuted. But who will do it, Eric Holder? Not likely. Second, there are the Civil Service laws to consider. They make it extremely difficult to fire “civil servants” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) and changing those laws isn’t possible with the current Congress and president.
Reynolds is distorting the letters beyond recognition. For example:
Rather than being conducted by a few rogue employees in the Cincinnati office of the IRS, the Tea Party targeting was regarded by Lerner as something “very dangerous” politically
Yes, she said it was very dangerous politically, and it’s easy to see why — if the IRS was seen to be handling the tea party applications unfairly, that would be a big story (duh). But Lerner recognizing the political sensitivity of those applications is hardly proof that she wanted them handled unfairly!
and she observed that “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”
Exactly — because they were so politically sensitive, and at that point Cincinnati had already been disciplined for using keyword searches that only flagged groups on the right. Lerner’s email is completely consistent with what we already knew: that the tea party applications were improperly flagged by the Cincinnati office, until higher-ups tried to correct the problem. It’s as if Reynolds isn’t even reading the emails.
The emails also reveal Lerner’s concerns that the Democrats might lose their Senate majority
Reynolds is just making this up; the emails reveal no such thing.
and her hopes that the Federal Election Commission might “save the day” by interfering with right-leaning grassroots activity
Again, he’s engaging in speculation; Lerner doesn’t say why FEC action would “save the day”. Occam’s razor would suggest that an FEC ruling on 501c4 groups like Crossroads GPS would “save the day” by removing that political hot potato from her department’s purview, but that’s too boring a conclusion for Reynolds.
Reynolds’ exercise in speculative mind reading yields a Lerner who’s a Democrat, and wants Democrats to win simply because she’s a Democrat (and not, say, because she actually believes in the laws she’s supposed to execute). But even his imagination doesn’t uncover any evidence of Lerner actually doing anything wrong, much less evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of anyone in the Obama administration.
fewer Americans than ever trust the federal government
Follow the link — it’s to Gallup polls on trust in the federal government when it comes to handling domestic and international problems. It has nothing to do with their faith in the impartiality of the civil service, or even the ethics of political leaders (as Gallup says: “There are a number of possible explanations for this loss of confidence: controversy surrounding potential U.S. action in Syria, an enduring low assessment of the state of the economy, or low levels of confidence in Congress.”). Reynolds completely misrepresents the meaning of the polls. Is he always this dishonest?
So it’s up to congressional investigators to get to the bottom of it. Stay tuned.
We’ve been tuned for two and a half years. The House GOP has most of their committees investigating the administration, but so far they’ve found nothing that’s stuck. Don’t hold your breath.
She knew it was happening, failed to stop it, and claimed she didn’t know.
No reasonable person would consider anything she has said or done about this scandal, exculpatory.
“Reynolds is distorting the letters beyond recognition.”
Seems to be a lot of that going around…
For the faction that holds that President Obama can do no wrong and that the allegations about the IRS are just allegations from the Right Wing fever swamp, persons with nothing better to do, never mind that what President Obama represents is using the power of government to do good things for the people it serves, and doing those good things requires collecting taxes and in some instances raising taxes, as Mr. Obama has made plain on many occasions, and doing anything to raise doubt in people’s minds about the fairness and even-handedness of the IRS is a Bad Thing, even if a short-term tactical advantage is gained by finding out about the public prayers of Right Wing groups, so let’s set that aside.
I want to talk Syria. I guess, I suppose that the U.S. had (notice past tense) two interests in Syria. One was maintaining a good-honest insincerity about which side of the Syrian conflict we favored — we are not fans of Mr. Assad’s despotism, but there are factions in the rebellion who don’t support American values of religious and cultural pluralism, especially important with regard to Druze, Christians, Alewites, Shia, and whatever religious minorities reside in Syria and may be persecuted if the Sunni opposition gets the upper hand.
A second interest is the “loose nukes” question, in this case, loose chemical warfare munitions or capability of making the active ingredients out of organo-phosphate insecticides or whatever the process of which I don’t know how it works. We (the U.S.) were not to keen on Mr. Assad, but we weren’t too keen on the regime falling and the chemical munitions ending up in gosh knows whose hands.
OK, the talk about how Mr. Obama’s foreign policy is a comedy of errors and how we have just surrendered to Putin’s Russia (In New York Times, Russia’s Putin finds nothing exceptional . . . about you!). Like the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, Mr. Obama has somehow landed on his feet, with an agreement in hand for Syria to secure its chemical arsenal. Who would have dreamed that he could have pulled that off?
That said, is that a good outcome? In order to secure the chemical weapons, an American security interest if there ever was one (Jim, do you agree with me on this?), the U.S. has in effect conferred legitimacy on the Assad Regime as the entity upholding the agreement to disarm, essentially granting the Assad Regime legitimacy in speaking for the Syrian people? So to achieve Interest Number 2 (if this works, and if it doesn’t, the Mr. Obama is stating that he reserves some unspecified military action in the future), we have completely given up on Interest Number 1, maintaining an honestly insincere neutrality that leaned towards supporting the rebels as a counterweight to Mr. Assad and what he stands for, and that we are now “in bed” with Mr. Assad in carrying out the disarmament?
To our esteemed forum participants who are not knee jerk anti-Obama, I have some questions. Do people agree that whether it was by accident or on purpose, the Mr. Obama made an “engineering trade”, pursuing Interest #2 of securing the chem arsenal that could otherwise fall into who knows whose hands in exchange for selling out the Syrian Opposition? And is this a good outcome?
With all respect, the subject of this thread is the IRS. Rand has provided several recent opportunities to discuss Syria on this blog.
Well, one obvious problem is that Assad has been given considerable latitude by the US and its few allies to kill people – just do it with Russian-supplied weapons, not unreliable chemical weapons. For example, they could use MLRS systems like the Russian BM series. That was very effective in Libya (Qaddafi used it to break groups of poorly armed and prepared rebels) prior to military intervention from the West.
And betraying an ally, even one who is such only in rhetoric, will have its own consequences.