When there is so much coverage on the NSA and IRS abuses I think it is smarter to wait a while to let the facts settle.  What I think I see is a daily outrage from the bloggers on the right and an unusual silence from those on the left.   Occasionally there is an exception from the more radical on the left praising the IRS for harassing those nasty Tea Partiers.  It is limited but it may give you an insight into how fascists get a hold on power.  It is often to protect the greater society from some imagined conspiracy or evil.

It is fascinating to note that the government was infiltrating, spying on, and possibly harassing evangelical churches:  Obama snoops part 2: infiltrate, target, harass churches, while at the same time avoiding any appearance of monitoring the activities in radical Mosques on American soil: Obama’s Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers, in Investor’s Business Daily.

Excerpt from the IBD article:

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel’s formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061213-659753-all-intrusive-obama-terror-dragnet-excludes-mosques.htm#ixzz2WPKwOAhv
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HKO

It appears that different agencies have different priorities but that the collection of their actions defies credibility.  What is the missing ingredient that ties the vast net work of government agencies into a logical and common objective?

Leadership.

These recent collection of scandals point to a corruption in our political system, and an absolute vacuum in leadership.

Daniel Greenfield writes in his blog Sultan Knish, The Art of Building Things, 6/10/13.

Excerpts:

Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams.

American exceptionalism emerged out of a society which empowered the creative talents of the individual, not through grants, regulations, instructional pamphlets, inspectors and guidelines, but through the simple virtue of leaving men alone to do their work.

Freedom is the greatest creative force because it liberates the individual to build and as freedom diminishes within a society so does its creativity. Progress in restricted areas dwindles to a trickle as collectives expend a thousand times the money and effort, and still fail to equal the achievements of individuals operating on shoestring budgets.

HKO

When government is perverted from the constitutional purpose of protecting individual human rights to fulfilling human needs and wants it stifles the progress that has done so much to advance human growth.  All great progress has come at the expense of rules and institutional order.  Human progress will suffer when we are required to serve the institutions that should serve us.

Robert Zubrin writes Green Anti-Humanism in The National Review 2/21/13

Excerpts:

The use of fictitious necessity to rationalize human oppression is not new. Whether the justification is a putative lack of food (e.g., Malthus, 1817, “A great part of the [Irish] population should be swept from the soil”), shortage of Lebensraum (e.g., Hitler, 1941, “The law of existence requires uninterrupted killing, so that the better may live”), overpopulation (e.g., Ehrlich, 1967, “India . . . will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain”), or global warming (e.g., Cafaro, 2013), the argument has always been the same:

1. There isn’t enough of x to go around.
2. Therefore human numbers, activities, or liberties must be severely constrained.
3. Those of us enlightened by wisdom must be empowered to do the constraining.
4. And having obtained such power, let’s make the best of it and stick it to those we despise anyway.

All these cases were frauds. Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire “great famine,” the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn’t afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures. Germany never needed additional living space. It has a bigger population now than it did under the Third Reich, on much less land, yet it has a far higher living standard. Hitler just used theLebensraum imperative as an excuse for genocide. Contrary to Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, the world was not overpopulated in 1967. In fact, since that time, as world population has doubled, average GDP per capita has nearly tripled. Yet, unfortunately, that did not stop population-control advocates from obtaining billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to help Third World regimes stop reproduction among their poor, in general, and despised national minorities, in particular. And there is certainly no moral case for limiting carbon emissions.

Daniel Greenfield writes in his excellent blog The Sultan Knish, Government is the New Race, 6/7/13.

Excerpts:

While you might think that it would be impossible to run an entire cable news network around accusing people of racism, MSNBC has taken your bet and now expects you to buy it coffee for a month. It would be impossible for reasonable people to constantly talk about racism. But unreasonable people racialize everything.

Rather than bringing the racial healing that some expected, the Obama years so dramatically racialized national politics that even IRS is now a racial slur. And that racialization reveals how dependent on race the entire liberal program has become.

Liberalism racialized itself by defining itself entirely in terms of social justice. To oppose the liberal expansion of government was to be a racist.

The abstraction of political racism from real racism and social justice from the actual interests of the black community has gone so far that an administration that has presided over record black unemployment is always defended in racial terms.

Liberalism has not only become identified with racial politics, it has swallowed racial politics so completely that they no longer exist on a national level. National racial politics is just liberalism misspelled and when an MSNBC anchor equates IRS with a racial slur, it becomes rather clear that there is no longer any race in racism. Racism in politics has become so abstract that it no longer has anything to do with black people.  …racism no longer refers to policies that disadvantage black people, but policies that limit the power and scope of big government.

And that reduces the civil rights movement to an apologetic for the uncontrolled expansion of government. It turns “I Have a Dream” into “I Have a Government Office” and the Selma to Montgomery March into a commute to a Washington D.C. bedroom community that most of the black population of the city can’t afford to live in.

 

HKO

Racism has become a pejorative that is used to silence the opposition when there is no rational argument to make.  What I liked about Andrew Breitbart is that he refused to be intimidated by such charges.

A true liberal would take great offense at the racialization of American politics because it demeans the very real racist struggle of our recent history and ignores its great victories.

Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan writes in The Wall Street Journal, The IRS Can’t Plead Incompetence, 6/6/13

Excerpts:

If the agency didn’t know what it was doing, it wouldn’t have done it so well.

In March 2012, the organization, which argues the case for traditional marriage, found out its confidential tax information had been obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, one of its primary opponents in the marriage debate. The HRC put the leaked information on its website—including the names of NOM donors. NOM not only has the legal right to keep its donors’ names private, it has to, because when contributors’ names have been revealed in the past they have been harassed, boycotted and threatened. This is a free speech right, one the Supreme Court upheld in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to compel the NAACP to surrender its membership list.

Some have said the IRS didn’t have enough money to do its job well. But a lack of money isn’t what makes you target political groups—a directive is what makes you do that. In any case, this week’s bombshell makes it clear the IRS, from 2010 to 2012, the years of prime targeting, did have money to improve its processes. During those years they spent $49 million on themselve—on conferences and gatherings, on $1,500 hotel rooms and self-esteem presentations. “Maliciously self-indulgent,” said chairman Darrell Issa at Thursday’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings.

Finally, this week Russell George, the inspector general whose audit confirmed the targeting of conservative groups, mentioned, as we all do these days, Richard Nixon’s attempt to use the agency to target his enemies. But part of that Watergate story is that Nixon failed. Last week David Dykes of the Greenville (S.C.) News wrote of meeting with 93-year-old Johnnie Mac Walters, head of the IRS almost 40 years ago, in the Nixon era. Mr. Dykes quoted Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, who told him the IRS wouldn’t do what Nixon asked: “It didn’t happen, not because the White House didn’t want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said ‘no.’”

That was the IRS doing its job—attempting to be above politics, refusing to act as the muscle for a political agenda.

Man—those were the days.

HKO

When one partisan group tries to create power to abuse its opposition, they are very shortsighted not to realize that this power will likely one day be used against them.  This power does not just go away when they leave office.  The IRS scandal is not because of rogue agents but systemic corruption.  To try and make this go away by throwing lower agents in remote locations under the bus is not only deceitful but cowardly.

Harry Truman was famous for his accountability statement, “The Buck Stops Here.”  Such accountability is totally foreign to this administration.