IRS Irony And A Compliant Press
By
Gary Gerard, dumbhoosier.com
How about that Internal Revenue Service?
For a couple of weeks now, we’ve been hearing how the IRS
over-scrutinized and delayed approving tax-exempt status to
conservative groups while rubber-stamping similar requests from
liberal groups.
On the heels of this we find out that, simultaneously, the IRS was
squandering millions of tax dollars on conventions where IRS
staffers were learning about customer service.
They were learning about customer service by, in part, watching a
guy from New Zealand on a stage painting a picture Bono. (That
little seminar was a bargain. The artist only got $27,000 for his
trouble.)
And it seems the “event planners” the IRS hired to plan these
shindigs didn’t bother to look for any bargains. They made
themselves a cool $133K booking rooms for up to $3,500 a night. No
convention rates for the IRS, apparently.
Those fun-loving IRS agents just love to ham it up in luxury
accommodations, don’t they?
All in all, the IRS blew about $50 million on such shenanigans, but
hey, what’s a few million tax dollars among friends?
And when Congressional investigators asked the IRS for receipts from
these conferences, guess what?
IRS officials reported they lost the receipts. That’s right. You
heard right. The IRS lost its receipts. If this wasn’t so tragic it
would be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.
Seriously, you can imagine what would happen to you if you were
being audited and you told the IRS agent: “Ah, sorry, but I lost my
receipts.”
That’s something that has always bothered me about the IRS anyway.
It’s like those guys are judge, jury and executioner all wrapped
into one.
There’s really no fighting them. They turn the whole notion of
jurisprudence completely on its head.
With the IRS, you are guilty until proven innocent. and they have an
army of people charged with the task of making sure you can never
prove yourself innocent. It’s you against the government.
But I digress.
I thought the government was broke? I thought we were going to have
to lay off air traffic controllers and meat inspectors and all
manner of essential government workers because times are so tight.
Guess not, because the IRS sure isn’t cutting any corners.
I just have a really hard time with stuff like this. I mean, it’s
just so wrong.
Taken by itself, the IRS stuff is pretty unsettling, but when you
link it with all the other scandals in Washington, it starts getting
a little ridiculous.
The administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance
program under which it is collecting Americans’ business
communications records from Verizon.
The Justice Department is seizing phone records of Associated Press
reporters.
And there’s the whole botched Benghazi mess where a U.S. ambassador
wound up dead and the administration misled the American people
about how and why.
And as troubling as all of this stuff is, there’s something else
that troubles me even more.
See, I’ve come to almost expect government to be corrupt and
inefficient so scandals in government aren’t all that jarring to me.
But the press is different. The press is supposed to be the Fourth
Estate. The press is supposed to be a watchdog.
The press isn’t any of those things anymore and that really bothers
me.
Of all the scandals I just wrote about, how many of them do you
suppose were uncovered by a relentlessly investigative U.S. media
outlet?
That would be zero.
Benghazi? No way. It was the Republican Congress that finally forced
the media – albeit kicking and screaming – to cover the story.
Before that, the media was too busy telling us there was no story to
tell. (There were a couple exceptions like Sharyl Attkisson and Jake
Tapper, but the vast majority of reporters ignored the story.)
IRS? Nope. The IRS planted a question at an American Bar
Association conference to reveal that it had inappropriately
targeted conservative groups prior to the 2012 elections.
That question, which prompted Lois Lerner, IRS director of tax
exempt organizations, to apologize for the agency’s actions came
from Celia Roady, a prominent Washington lawyer in private practice.
Roady told reporters Lerner called her the day before the
conference, prompting her to ask the question about tax-exempt
groups.
Now we got us a story, eh?
AP? Nah. The seizure of Associated Press phone records came to light
because the Justice Department sent the AP a letter spelling out
what it had done. How’d AP not see that one coming?
How about Verizon? Not a chance. That story was broken by The
Guardian, a British newspaper.
Sadder still is the fact that all of these stories were easily
accessible with just a little bit of investigative work by
journalists.
With regard to Verizon, in a Senate floor speech Oregon Democrat
Senator Ron Wyden talked about classified information made available
to him that he couldn’t share because of Senate rules.
He said an attack “on Americans’ privacy has been real, and it is
not hypothetical.” That was last December.
Then, in January, he said this to the Huffington Post: “When the
public finds out that these secret interpretations are so
dramatically different than what the public law says, I think
there’s going to be extraordinary anger in the country.”
The silence from the U.S. press was deafening until now, after The
Guardian broke the story.
And that’s the way it has been pretty much the whole time
President Barack Obama has been in office. I think the press as a
whole likes President Obama. I think the press as a whole tries not
to make the president look bad.
Compare and contrast that to when President George W. Bush was in
office. The press stumbled all over itself to make him look bad – to
the point where sometimes it was an overreach and some stuff
published was patently false.
But even if some of the Bush coverage was unfair, I prefer that
approach to what we have today.
The press is supposed to speak truth to power – to hold power
accountable.
I think members of the Bush administration felt like they were being
watched and held accountable. That’s the way it ought to be.
I think members of the Obama administration mostly feel like the
press is their ally.
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