Don's Tuesday column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/21/2013

The stench of lies, corruption, tyranny

Plan to come to tonight’s Tea Party Patriots meeting and hear from our new Supervisor, Sandy Bruce, at 6 PM at the Westside Grange. I believe the format will allow for questions; it’ll be a great way to hear what she has to say and see where she stands on local issues.

We are now witnessing not one, not two, but at least three separate scandals: the Benghazi fiasco—failure to protect our personnel from terrorist attacks, doing nothing to respond in real time to the attacks, and lying to the American people about the attacks; the possibly illegal seizure of reporters’ phone records; and political assault on conservative organizations seeking 501 (c) (4) tax-exempt status by using the IRS to delay, harass, hamstring and intimidate citizens exercising their constitutional rights.

These have in common the official abuse of power, the crass, political pursuit of keeping that power by any means necessary and at hand—the electoral ends justifying the corrupt means. The truth about the attacks on our consulate by radical Islamic fighters, together with the needless (warnings unheeded, measures not taken, security unimproved) deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three other brave Americans—had to be manipulated and hidden before last November’s election. Why? For the morally corrupt reason that President Obama’s narrative—Al-Qaeda was a spent force harmless to America after Osama bin Laden’s death—was proven wrong. Also that, after helping remove Gaddafi from power, an America-loving normalcy prevailed.

With the seizure of reporters’ phone records, we can also ascribe a politically corrupt motive in that another of Obama’s cherished phony narratives came undone: that we were no longer threatened by attempted terrorist attacks. Maybe you weren’t told but the White House didn’t want the public to know how close a Yemeni Al-Qaeda terrorist came to blowing up an airplane bound for America, prevented by a CIA operation. By seizing via subpoena those phone call records in pursuit of the leaker, Obama’s people could proceed to intimidate or harass reporters’ contacts, chilling the vital process of independent and aggressive news investigation. Eric Holder does not appear to have signed the warrant and his Department of Justice appears to have engaged in bad faith non-negotiation with the Associated Press. Reporting on Obama might get more hard-hitting, the administrations’ cover-ups, lies and hypocrisies get more scrutiny.

I gave the short hand version of those because the main event, for me and many other conservatives, is the still-emerging scandal of how high up the IRS/White House food chain goes the trail of those who orchestrated the abuse of IRS regulatory power. Recall that one of the articles of impeachment against President Nixon had to do with his and his subordinates’ use of the IRS to attack his political opponents. We’ve already seen lying to Congress last spring by an official who flat-out denied in writing that conservative groups were targeted when he positively knew that the Inspector General’s report, then already circulating in IRS circles, had found just that.

We’ve already seen the story that the abusive political scrutiny was limited to low-level employees in Cincinnati fall apart when some Tea Party groups reported receiving inquiring letters from Washington. We’ve also come to find out that the IG report detailing the abusive practices was finalized well before the election but conveniently kept under wraps until just recently in a staged disclosure at a lawyers’ gathering with a planted question. Then we’ve heard Obama and his mouthpieces disingenuously, and unbelievably, claim to have had no knowledge of the abuse until the rest of America found out at that staged disclosure. I was born but not, as they say, yesterday.

Conservative and Tea Party groups have been reporting for years that they were being subjected to improper, unjustified and discriminatory written anal exams and inquiries on the most irrelevant topics imaginable; we’re to believe none of that ever came to the attention of Obama’s people and they never raised an eyebrow in alarm. No hint of concern that such reprehensible treatment might be abusive of citizens’ right “to peaceably assemble” and “petition the government for redress of grievances” (Yeah, that’s in the Constitution). Really?!

Readers might understandably wonder if cries of “tyranny” overstate things. Obama certainly dismissed such alarms as he warned graduating students at Ohio State University against “voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems (and) do their best to gum up the works … They’ll warn that tyranny always (sic) lurking just around the corner. You should reject those voices.”

What happened after the shamefully manipulated, popular-opinion-defying jam down of Obamacare in early 2010 was the massive rise of Tea Party and other patriotic, constitution-defending groups; they figured out a legal way to pool the fruits of their labor and pursue their political happiness. They peacefully assembled, organized and began petitioning to redress their collective grievances, while protecting themselves from the retaliation of the vindictive and unhinged left by donating anonymously. For the “separate, sinister entity,” the IRS, to attack, intimidate and “gum up” the efforts of these citizens and their groups, such that fundraising was diminished, donors scared off, potential leaders demoralized and their efforts stymied—for all that to have been done by Obama’s government to help get him reelected sure smacks of tyranny to me.