Re: ##Peggy Noonan: Why This Scandal Is Different
Group: talk.politics.guns Date: Sat, Jun 1, 2013, 10:15am (EDT-3) From:
smapper...@gmail.com
(GOP : Caged monkeys flinging shit that won't stick)
On Saturday, June 1, 2013 11:42:11 AM UTC-5, Kurt Nicklas wrote:
Why This Scandal Is Different
Peggy Noonan
Sometimes when you're writing part of a column you keep getting close
to the meaning of what you want to say but you don't quite get there,
the full formulation of the idea eludes you. Then two days later,
relaxing in conversation with friends, the thought comes to you whole,
and you think: That's what I meant to say. That's what I was trying to
geuuuu
This week I had one of those moments. I kept trying, the paragraph
kept not quite working, the deadline came.
I got an email last night that had the effect of a clarifying
conversation. It was from a smart friend who works in government. He
understood the point I was trying to make about how the current IRS
scandal is different from previous ones and more threatening to the
American arrangement. I had written that this scandal isn't a discrete
event in which a president picks up a phone and tells someone in the
White House to look into the finances of some steel industry
executives, or to check out the returns of some guy on an enemies
list.
But my friend got to the essence. He wrote, "The left likes to say,
'Watergate was worse!' Watergate was bad—don't get me wrong. But it
was elites using the machinery of government to spy on elites. . . .
It's something quite different when elites use the machinery of
government against ordinary people. It's a whole different ball game."
It is.
That's exactly what I meant.
In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a
White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures
who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at
their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal
erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The
dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this
is the elites versus regular citizens. It's the mighty versus normal
people. It's the all-powerful directors of the administrative state
training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended
Americans.
That's what makes this scandal different, and why if it's not stopped
now it will never stop. Because every four years you can get yourself
a new president and a new White House, but you won't easily get
yourself a whole new administrative state. It's there, it's not going
away, not anytime soon. If it isn't forced back into its cage now, and
definitively, it will prowl the land hungrily forever.
One more thing.
One of the reasons a lot of people in New York and Washington are not
deeply distressed by the IRS targeting of conservative groups is that
they have it in their heads that it only involved the tea party and
the tea party is full of nuts, weirdoes and radicals whose
discouragement wouldn't be a grave national loss. It's not only tea-
party groups that were targeted, of course, but the IRS was only too
happy to get the idea out there that it was. But if you're the kind of
person who thinks Tea Party people are low and extreme, that they're
the kind of people who'd hurt our country, take a few minutes to look
at this. It's a website that will take you to videos of a town hall
meeting of the SouthWest Cincinnati Tea Party. It was held Wednesday
night. Its subject was "IRS Intimidation—Are You Next?"
Do those people really strike you as weird and radical? Do they ses
destructive? They are normal citizens. And they feel besieged.
The IRS job is to find tax dodgers and Real Americans know those
fraudulent scams done by the tea baggers were to laundry money. S
=================
What fraudulent scams were done by homosexuals?
And who needed laundry money?