On May 18, 12:11 pm, "Robert Westergrom,1900 Harvey
Bush Used the IRS, FBI, CIA and Secret Service to Go After Opponents.
Where Was the Fox and GOP Outrage?: in 2005, Bush’s IRS began what
became an extensive two-year investigation into a Pasadena church
after an orator dared to speak out against President Bush’s Iraq War
http://www.alternet.org/bush-used-irs-fbi-cia-and-secret-service-go-a...
/ By David Sirota [2]
Bush Used the IRS, FBI, CIA and Secret Service to Go After Opponents
-- Where Was the Fox and GOP Outrage?
May 14, 2013 |
As your kindergarten teacher probably told you, two wrongs do not make
a right. But the discrepancy in reactions to wrongs does, indeed, show
how Washington so often serves the interests of the political right.
That’s one of the big – if deliberately ignored – takeaways from the
reaction to news that the Internal Revenue Service allegedly targeting
conservative organizations for extra scrutiny in their larger review
of political groups’ tax exempt status. In the last few days, the
allegations have generated a wave of national headlines,
a congressional investigation [3],federal legislation [4] and ever-
louder [5] calls for impeachment [6].
Considering the gravity of the allegations against the Obama IRS from
the Treasury Department’s inspector general, congressional scrutiny is
certainly warranted. However, there’s just one problem: most of the
lawmakers and pundits today decrying the use of public resources
against a White House’s political opponents had little – if anything –
to say about equally troubling revelations about the Bush
administration’s deployment of public resources against its opponents.
In fact, conservatives said so little back then that Fox News
apparently doesn’t even know [7] (or is pretending not to know) the
Bush administration used the IRS in the same way the Obama
adminstration allegedly did.
And here’s the even more incredible thing: the Bush cabal didn’t just
use the IRS for its political hackery – it mounted a full-scale
government-wide assault on its enemies, marshaling disparate agencies
in its smear efforts.
Bush’s use of the IRS was but one part of that larger assault. As my
Salon colleague Alex Seitz-Wald notes today in greater detail [8], in
2005, Bush’s IRS began what became an extensive two-year investigation
[9] into a Pasadena church after an orator dared to speak out against
President Bush’s Iraq War. Not coincidentally, the Los Angeles Times
[10] reports that the church targeted just so happened to be “one of
Southern California’s largest and most liberal congregations.” That
IRS church audit came a year after it launched a near-identical attack
on the NAACP [11] after the civil rights organization criticized
various Bush administration policies.
That is not where the story ends, however. The Bush administration’s
crusade against its enemies moved from the IRS into the Secret
Service.
Under the Republican president, that law enforcement agency
was repeatedly [12] deployed [13] to physically block suspected
antiwar activists from attending public presidential events. As
the San Francisco Chronicle [12] reported, the scheme eventually
targeted some peaceful antiwar activists for arrest for the alleged
crime of “holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the
designated zone” of free speech (yes, the Bush White House cemented
the precedent that the right to dissent is no longer a fundamental
right, but is instead only allowed in certain “free speech
zones” [14]). Ultimately, in a case dealing with a man who was
arrested for simply telling Vice President Dick Cheney that his
“policies on Iraq are disgusting,” the Republican-dominated Supreme
Court upheld the Bush administration’s use of “retaliatory
arrests” [15] against the administration’s ideological critics.
Then, in 2010, we learned that Bush’s targeting operation was also
operating inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Recounting
findings from the Justice Department’s Inspector General,
the Washington Post [16] reported that “the FBI improperly
investigated some left-leaning U.S. advocacy groups after the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks…citing cases in which agents put activists on
terrorist watch lists even though they were planning nonviolent civil
disobedience.”
A year later, we learned that along with the IRS, Secret Service and
FBI, the Bush administration may have also been using the Central
Intelligence Agency against its political enemies. As the New York
Times [17] reported, “A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who
was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of
President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked
intelligence officials to gather sensitive information” on prominent
Iraq War critic Juan Cole. That story had an eerie similarity to the
Bush administration’s effort to out CIA operative Valerie Plame as
retribution for her husband’s criticism of that same war.
Unlike the noisy outrage that met today’s allegations of IRS
misconduct under President Obama, these earlier – and well-documented
– revelations of systemic IRS, Secret Service, FBI and CIA misconduct
were met with a collective shrug of the shoulders in Washington. Sure,
a few newspapers wrote about them, and a few Democratic lawmakers
[18] tried to raise questions about the Bush administration’s actions,
but compared to today’s sound and fury over the IRS allegations, there
was veritable silence. Indeed, as alluded to before, so little outrage
was voiced about this kind of thing during the Bush years that a Fox
News’ headline this week summarizing a Karl Rove interview
blared: “What if IRS Under President Bush targeted liberal
groups?” [7] – as if that never actually happened…even though it most
certainly did.
What explains this obvious double standard in the reactions to Bush
era and Obama era misconduct? Partisanship, expectations and
ideological bias.
In terms of partisanship, Republicans now screaming bloody murder over
the IRS allegations clearly don’t care about the principles of equal
protection, nonpartisan public services or impartial governance. We
know this because most of them had nothing to say about the Bush
administration’s actions against the GOP’s ideological opponents. In
the context of that record, the GOP is really saying it is outraged
when government resources are aimed at its friends, but more than
happy to have those resources aimed at its enemies.
That context, though, hasn’t been publicly referenced by most
Democrats. Indeed, other than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) [19], most
Democratic lawmakers have not dared to mention that the problem of
politicized government goes back many years.
That gets to expectations and ideological bias – simply put, the
expectation in a Washington where both parties and most media outlets
tilt to the right is that conservative groups should never be treated
the same way liberal groups so often are. Why? Because conservative
causes (say, the anti-tax movement) tend to be aligned with the
interests of the transpartisan moneyed establishment while liberal
causes (say, the anti-war movement) tend to be at odds with those
interests.
Thus, when conservative groups happen to be treated like liberal
groups, the Washington Outrage Machine turns the noise up to 11 – even
though when liberal groups were targeted, that Outrage Machine
remained dormant. And with today’s national press corps reoriented
around amplifying – rather than challenging – power, this double
standard is then predictably reflected in a corresponding discrepancy
in coverage.
Taken together, the lesson should be straightforward: according to
Washington, politicized government is perfectly fine when it is
punishing liberal forces that challenge the status quo, but totally
outrageous when it is targeting conservative groups that preserve the
status quo.
Neither should be acceptable, of course. But that truism is ignored by
a hypocritical political culture whose unquestioned assumptions so
obviously favor the right.
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