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Post-Nixon, Obama lets loose IRS rattlesnakes

May 19, 2013

Any one who works for the IRS is predisposed to hate his neighbors, to relish invading individual privacy, and to pleasure himself through harassing threats and audit interrogations. Why else would he join the agency? ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you?’ No way!

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Given the modern Imperial Presidency, it takes a truly great man to withstand the temptation. Barack Obama is weak and dysfunctional as a consequence of a disturbed childhood, essentially orphaned by two utterly selfish and dysfunctional parents.

But Barack Obama is not entirely clueless. He remembers the fate of Richard Nixon, and does not relish the prospect of an aborted second term. All those golf treats with Tiger Woods and all those basketball treats with Michael Jordan! So this president is more tricky than Tricky Dick when he sets loose his IRS rattlesnakes on his political opponents.

The right-wing media may be sleuthing for some hint that Obama picked up the phone and sicced his tax snakes on his enemies. But that is not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. All that he needed to do was exactly what he did, in full view, throughout his three-year campaign for the 2012 elections: publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious activities, publicly call out by name political opponents whom he wanted to be harassed,and publicly encourage his party to pressure for IRS investigations. Even in his 2010 State of the Union address, this paranoid president cast aspersions on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, claiming that it opened the floodgates to conservative special interests. Well guess which party expended most on the 2012 elections?

The president publicly derided ‘tea-baggers’. Vice President Joe Biden compared them to terrorists. In case the IRS missed the point, Obama publicly raised the threat of illegality: ‘All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates…And they don’t say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign corporation.’

How much more prodding do you think was necessary to set loose the IRS snakes on the names that Obama listed? Does this paranoid man think that Americans are completely stupid? Does he truly believe that Americans- independent of his left-leaning ideology – will ever believe that he played no role whatsoever in this disgusting partisan episode?

I’m from the government, and I’m here to take you down’.

Hat Tip: Kimberley A. Strassel, ‘The IRS Scandal Started at the Top’, The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

IRS targets Obama’s enemies in extraordinary scandal

May 18, 2013

“We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department’s assault on the associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, possibly irretrievably damaged….Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.” Peggy Noonan, ‘This Is No Ordinary Scandal’, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2013

President Obama, albeit sheepishly, acts as though these scandals are unconnected to the White House.Like the chief of police in Casablanca he is shocked, shocked, to discover in the newspapers what has happened! President Obama, however, is deeply connected to these scandals. He is not a bystander, like you and I. This happens to be his administration. The Justice Department and the IRS are his executive agencies. He runs and oversees them.

In this column, I focus on the IRS scandal, once again. For it is much the more serious of the two. There are two parts to the IRS scandal. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of taxes of conservative political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. When asked what its members were reading, one group responded: The U.S. Constitution! Now I can assure you from first hand experience that these questions are not routinely requested by the IRS. When The Locke Institute applied for 501 (c) 3 status in 1994, it took about a year to secure that status. But the questions were always fair and politically unbiased. And that was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, who was not above a dirty trick or two to harass his supposed enemies.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have publicly opposed the administration. Such politically-oriented audits constitute the use of government power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose is to overwhelm and intimidate – to kill the opposition, audit by audit by audit. Such behavior is to be expected of such low-lives as Vladimir Putin, Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps now it must be expected by such low-lives as President Obama, Tsar of the United States of America.

Shame on you Barack Obama! You disgrace the high office that you are privileged to hold.

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Posted in economics and public choice, nature of an autocracy, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

The IRS is a criminal agency for corrupt presidents

May 15, 2013

The Internal Revenue Service, with a few lapses – Truman, Eisenhower, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, and Bush Junior – has been a criminal agent for corrupt presidents beginning with the reign of FDR. Throughout the presidencies of FDR, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Clinton and Obama, the IRS has been manipulated malevolently by the Oval Office explicitly for political purposes.

A sequence of weak and corrupt agency beads has pursued audits and harassment against named individuals and organizations – left and right depending on the politics of the president – deemed to be dangerously critical of White House activities. A few examples will suffice to tell the story.

FDR used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal. Those so attacked included William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg. FDR also dropped the IRS hammer on Democratic Party political rivals, such as Huey Long and Father Coughlin as well as on such prominent Republicans as Andrew Mellon. In 1944, he reached out to spike an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s political career would have justifiably ended in 1944, but for that illegal intervention.

JFK was a quick learner from FDR. Within days of capturing the presidency, King Arthur of Camelot launched the Ideological Organization Audit Project. This targeted right-leaning groups such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and the Foundation for Economic Education. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for IRS audits.

Richard Nixon was determined to take Republican revenge. He created the Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called ‘all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical and similar type organizations. More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973.

There followed a lull in IRS political harassment until Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993. In 1995, The Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled ‘Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce’ that attacked magazines, think tanks, and other entities and individuals who had criticized the president. More than twenty organizations identified in that document – including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute – and almost a dozen high-profile individuals, including Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.

So now that a truly third rate president occupies the White House, it is not at all surprising to find that low-grade harassment has been meted out by the IRS against organizations that have such epithets as ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their nomenclotures. No doubt the epithet ‘Christian’ or even ‘true American’ will have elicited White House rage from the current occupant.

What manner of men and women are attracted to senior positions in the IRS? Evidently, not individuals with any regard for the rule of law or the First Amendment to the Constitution. History suggests that many IRS appointees stem from the dregs of society, no doubt from the Mafia gangs that extract protection monies from hard-working businessmen in the big cities, and from the crooked police forces that protect the guilty and harass the innocent.

Hat Tip: James Bovard, ‘A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting’, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Obama White House is corrupted by Chicago machine-politics

May 11, 2013

Just about any one who has followed this week’s discussion of the Benghazi terrorist attack knows that President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Rice repeatedly lied about the nature of the event and why American government officials were not protected by F-16s and SAS forces.

A not-uncommon response to the sequence of lies exposed by Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson and Eric Nordstrom before the House oversight committee this week is ‘who cares?’ The dead are long buried, other events now dominate public discussion, and come 2016, Hillary Clinton will be on her way to the White House. The victors get to write the history.

Now all this may be true. It is an old adage that a democracy gets the government it deserves. And the present government is showing itself to be about as despicable as one could ever imagine. So that pretty much sums up the moral and intellectual caliber of the electoral majority that currently controls the United States political market-place.

However, I beg to differ with this dismissive view of Benghazi. What Benghazi told a watching world is that the President and the Secretary of State of the United States both care more for their political prospects than for the honor of their country. Both are prepared to lie, not just to the world at large, but to the families of the fallen, about the reason for their murders and the retribution that will be exacted. For an al Qaeda attack on U.S. property and personnel, a crackpot California video-maker will be wrongly jailed. Some honor regained, some retribution extracted!

“From the day of the attack until this week, the White House spin was too clever by half. In the weeks and months after the attack White House spokesmen said they were investigating the story, an internal review was under way. When the story blew open again, last week, they saiud it was too far in the past: ‘Benghazi happened a long time ago’, Jay Carney, The White House press secretary, really said that. Think of that. They can’t give answers when the story’s fresh because it just happened, they’re looking into it. Eight months later they don’t have anything to say because it all happened so long ago. Think of how low your opinion of the American people has to be to think you can get away, forever, with that.” Peggy Noonan, ‘The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi’, The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2013

Well, not the entire American people. Just those who sheepishly voted a Chicago-machine politician back into office in the teeth of one of the worst first-term records in the history of the Republic. These voters truly got what they expected and what they deserved. Their children and their grandchildren may well live to despise them for their failure of good judgment if, that is, they are not wiped out by a nuclear terrorist attack on their undefended homeland.

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Posted in economics and public choice, media rhetoric, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, political philosophy, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized, war and peace | 3 Comments »

The left has gained no benefit from the 2008 crisis

May 8, 2013

The financial crisis of 2008 has been touted worldwide as a failure both of an economic system and a political system. More specifically, the apparent inability of democratic politics to handle its aftermath has threatened to undermine the consensus on liberal democracy and lightly regulated capitalism that emerged following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Contrary to many expectations, however, political groupings of the left have derived no benefit from the crisis. Socialist movements have waited for more than a century for capitalism to collapse from its own internal contradictions. Yet, when that prospect appeared likely to occur on their watch, leftist governments – especially in the United States and the United Kingdom – vied with each other to avert such a collapse by shoveling public money at the capitalists.

The ‘change you could believe in’, brought to the political arena by Barack Obama and by Francoise Hollande, was principally that they were not their predecessors. The failure of such leftist politics has now opened up opportunities for new political groupings – the Tea Party in the United States and the United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain – designed to destabilize the existing two party systems.

Such new groupings are disparate in nature, seemingly devoid of any unifying political program. What they have in common, however, is a new nationalism:

“Yet they share a resentment of others supposedly responsible for our problems – a media and a political class that supposedly fails to acknowledge popular concerns, and foreigners who do not share our culture or our heritage. United only in grievance, they are so varied because by their nature they can be only national.” John Kay, ‘Sinister or silly, protest politicians are united in grievance’, Financial Times, May 8, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, media rhetoric, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Illinois at last moves to control state pensions

May 3, 2013

Illinois has the dubious reputation of the worst state pension deficit in the United States: $98.6 billion.In part because of this, Standard & Poor’s gave Illinois the lowest credit rating in the nation.

Democrats, of course, control both the House and the Senate and the Governorship. So it is to their credit that the House has passed a bill to cut state pensions and to increase contributions. The Governor also supports the bill. The Senate is wobbling but may well endorse the bill.

Do not hold your breath readers, that commonsense is sweeping through Illinois. An 800 pound gorilla lurks in the shadows. The public sector unions threaten to sue the state for breach of contract should legislation go through. It is a truly hard battle to take down these dinosaurs who are the principal cause of such budgetary headaches.

Still there is a chance and that is much better than another roll-over by the state,

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Posted in budget deficits, do well while doing good, economics and public choice, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

President Obama vanishes into the ether of ego

May 2, 2013

“At the president’s news conference Tuesday, when a reporter wondered whether setbacks on gun control and the sequester suggested Mr. Obama was having problems pushing his second-term agenda, the president replied, ‘Well if you put it that way, Jonathan, maybe I should pack up and go home.’ Whoa, big fella. The presidency is a big game. We want you suited up and on the floor.’” Daniel Henninger, ‘Presidential Followership’, The Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2013

That the presidency attracts individuals focused on Number One is no revelation. That the focus sometimes reaches the psychological condition of narcissism, when a president actually lacks self-love, because of a disrupted childhood, and seeks compensatory adoration from campaign followers, is also not unknown. President Obama suffers from an excessive focus on Number One and a chronic form of narcissism. With 40 months in office remaining, this is a dangerous situation for the United States.

It is dangerous because such a leader essentially becomes a follower of any group of adoring citizens, concerned never to breach their love by an act of statesmanship. Standing essentially aloof from the major branch of government – the Congress – unable to lower his self-esteem by negotiating deals that are helpful to the public at large, Obama is trapped by his followers into a followership mode of governance. That is why he is essentially impotent on gun control laws, on fiscal policy, on Syria, and on Middle East policy.

“Whether Roosevelt, Nixon, Bill Clinton or George W Bush, every second-term president must in time come to grips with the reality that it can’t be about just him. It, the presidency, is unavoidably about offering clear leadership for all the American people and a watching, always unsettled world. If Barack Obama insists it’s about something else, everyone, including him, will have their bags packed for a long 40 months.” ibid.

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, redistributive politics, Uncategorized, war and peace | 5 Comments »

Obama confronts a bleak second term

April 30, 2013

Barack Obama ran a carefully orchestrated 2012 re-election campaign. For any one who bothered to read or to listen carefully, however, Obama had remarkably little to say on what he would do during his second term, should he be re-elected.

So it comes as no surprise to discover that Obama has only one policy initiative – immigration reform – that stands even a remote chance of passing into law, unless the House of Representatives falls into Democratic Party hands in November 2014. The optimism about immigration reform stems not from any leadership from Obama, but from concern within the Republican Party about losing Hispanic voters, many of whom should find a natural position within the GOP.

After winning a marginal tax rate increase on individuals earning in excess of $400,000 per annum, Obama’s economic policies are in disarray. The sequester, that he had signed into law was allowed to take place, so far with minimal harm to the economy. His attempt to use his presidential powers to impose maximum harm on U.S.citizens – a strange presidential tactic do you not think – failed when a vote-conscious Congress moved to protect the flying public and Obama had to confirm their intervention. He has no chance whatsoever of imposing any additional taxes on Americans – rich or poor – unless he accepts major tax reforms designed to bring down rates while eliminating exemptions. And that he will not do.

His ineffectual attempt to tighten gun laws, even following the gift-horse of the Newtown massacre, has ended in ignominious defeat in no small part at the hands of Democratic members of the Senate. That policy will not be revived certainly prior to 2015.

His parody of a foreign policy is collapsing before his eyes as Bashar Al-Assad openly flaunts the use of chemical weapons jeering at Obama’s non-existent red-line. His shift of emphasis away from the Middle East to Asia is stymied as long as the Syrian civil war results in cataclysmic death rates and as al-Qaeda watches hopefully for chemical and biological weapons’ pickings from the disintegration of what once could be called a country.

Sadly for the United States, President Obama looks increasingly like a man in an empty suit, bereft of ideas, unwilling to take time out from fund-raising to do the heavy lifting of policy formation is a divided government. The President, in short, has decided to coast through his second term.

Bring on the clowns!

Hat Tip: Edward Luce, ‘All Obama’s manoeuvres lead back to impasse’, Financial Times, April 29, 2013

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Posted in economics and public choice, immigration policy, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political philosophy, pro-union policies, progressive socialism, redistributive politics, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

President and Attorney General subvert FBI interrogation of Chechen terrorist

April 25, 2013

The Obama administration was provided with two alternative routes to grilling the Boston Marathon terrorist, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, without reading him his Miranda rights. The first route, rejected outright by Barack Obama and Eric Holder, was to treat the suspect as an enemy combatant and to interrogate him and try him by military tribunal. The second route was to rely on the public safety exception clause to allow the FBI to interrogate him for up to 48 hours prior to issuing a Miranda warning.

The FBI secured the hospital ward and began its interrogation of Tsarnaev with spectacular early results during the first 16 hours. No doubt panicking lest the FBI completely wrapped up the case, and identified a wider network of U.S. Islamic cells, Obama and Holder then authorized a federal magistrate to pierce the FBI shield and to issue the Miranda warning after only 16 hours of interrogation.

Not surprisingly, the suspect immediately clammed up, and the opportunity evaporated. Such a political intervention can be explained only in terms of extreme incompetence on the part of President and Attorney General or in terms of their covert desire to protect Islamic terrorist cells within the United States from exposure and eradication.

Take your pick!

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Posted in economics and public choice, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, political corruption, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized, war and peace | 5 Comments »

When a president forfeits the trust of his party

April 18, 2013

In 2009, President Obama begged and pressured a number of reluctant Democrats in the Senate and in the House to vote in favor of Obamacare – a policy that was unraveling in the opinion polls as the debate progressed. A sufficient number voted reluctantly in favor to carry the bill into law, albeit with reliance on a procedural dodge.

In 2010 and 2012, President Obama stood idly by as several of those reluctant political allies walked the electoral plank into the wilderness that awaits lifetime politicians who finally confront the realities of the regular work place.

In 2013, President Obama has begged and pressured a number of reluctant Democrats in the Senate to vote in favor of gun control legislation that is anathema to the voter majorities in their respective constituencies. Electoral memories may be short, but politicians memories are forever. So predictably, this time, those marginal Senators refused to walk the plank for Obama. And Obama’s bill has failed to progress.

The lesson for Barack Obama is serious indeed. For the remainder of his second term, he cannot expect to move his political agenda into law unless he tailors policies to secure political majorities.Any leader who forfeits trust places himself in such a quandary.

Predictably, Obama will now have to tack back to the political center if he desires to earn any presidential legacy for his name other than Obamacare, which is a pending disaster.

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Posted in economics and public choice, health care legislation, Personality Disorders Among Politicians, relevance of economic knowledge, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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