RUTHFULLY YOURS

Lois Lerner did not flinch from using the IRS to persecute conservative citizens groups and corrupt the 2012 election.  Once again she has taken the Fifth rather than come clean to Congress about what the IRS did to squelch the Tea Party and others, and who ordered it.  President Obama brazenly lies to Bill O’Reilly’s face and says there’s not a smidgeon of scandal.  This is an unrepentant crew.

Obama is channeling Clinton’s famous hair-splitting on whether oral sex is sex.  It all depends how you define scandal.  Since Democrats believe they have the right to use the IRS to persecute political opponents, perhaps in Obama’s eyes, there is no scandal.

Democrats are embracing their inner tyrant.  Voters tell pollsters they are ready to hand the Senate to Republicans in 2014 so we can repeal Obamacare.  Not to worry, Democrats have an answer, and it is not to respect their constituents and repeal the monstrosity. 

The Democrat answer to the voter’s revolt is the IRS.  From now on, the IRS will openly suppress the conservative vote. 

The White House is working to make permanent the IRS targeting of opposition groups before the 2014 election.  According to Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, “Treasury appears to have reverse-engineered the carefully tailored rule—combing through the list of previously targeted tea party groups, compiling a list of their main activities and then restricting those functions.”

Texas’s Ted Cruz offered an amendment to prohibit IRS employees from deliberately targeting individuals or groups based on political views. It was unanimously rejected by every member of the Democratic majority.

Democrats have no qualms of conscience in sending the IRS after conservatives.  Opposition to utopia is by definition illegitimate.  Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thundered that Americans are un-American for running ads protesting Obamacare.  Governor Cuomo of New York told conservatives they should leave his state.  Democrat Congressmen gave Obama a standing ovation when he asserted a regal privilege to suspend or change laws at will. 

Democrats don’t actually want a free country any more, where others can disagree and sometimes win.  Opposition is an outrage to these new Democrats.  They think the first black president has the right to rule unopposed.    

In election campaign of 2010, Obama made a dozen speeches with McCarthyite claims:

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 . . . You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation.

In March of 2010, the IRS began to flag Tea Party groups for special scrutiny.  By July 2011, President Obama’s approval rating hit a low of 41%, the lowest of his presidency. 

That month, Carter Hull, a 48 year veteran at the agency, was told by Lois Lerner’s office that he was no longer authorized to review 501(c)4 applications from conservative groups.  They were all to be routed to Counsel Wilkin’s office.  Yet Wilkins told Congress under oath that he knew nothing about it.

There are 100,000 employees at the IRS.  Two are handpicked by Obama.  One is William Wilkins, Chief Counsel of the IRS, the other is IRS Director Doug Shulman.

Wilkins. He’s a longtime Obama crony and Democratic donor who earned his spurs by successfully defending, pro bono, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Yes, that Rev. Wright) from charges that his radical politicization of his pulpit should deny his church tax-exempt status.

When Hull disagreed with the counsel’s office and Lerner about how the Tea Party cases should be handled, the files were taken away from him and transferred to a woman with only several months experience at the IRS.

Hull also described a meeting about the Tea Party applications on Aug. 4, 2011, where the IRS chief counsel’s office had three representatives present.

On April 23, 2012 Wilkins met with President Obama at the White House.  On April 24, 2012, the other Obama appointee, IRS Director Douglas Shulman, met with Obama.  On April 25, one day later, the IRS revised the criteria by which to harass the Tea Party. 

Over one hundred conservative groups were stonewalled and harassed, and lost their opportunity to take part in the 2012 election.

The IRS targeted individuals as well as groups.  Obama’s campaign published names of individual Republican donors and called them crooked businessmen.  These blameless citizens were soon audited by the IRS.  The IRS leaked confidential tax information on prominent conservatives to Obama’s Economic Advisor, who leaked it to the liberal press, where they were vilified.  In other cases, the IRS leaked confidential tax returns of Republican donors in Texas.   A pro-marriage group had their tax return sent to their political opponents. 

An exemplary citizen and small business woman in Texas who started a group called True the Vote to work against voter fraud was harassed by the IRS, OSHA, the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco, the FBI, and even her Senator knocking on the door.  They found no wrongdoing.  It was crude intimidation and punishment for free speech worthy of a police state.

This is fascism.

Democrats want it.

And Republicans?  Why is our leadership slow walking the investigation?  Is it because they like seeing the Tea Party and other citizens groups silenced? 

When the IRS scandal broke eight months ago, Speaker Boehner got in front of a camera to say,  “My question isn’t about who is going to resign. My question is who’s going to jail over this scandal?”

We’re still waiting, Mr. Speaker.  Where are the citations for contempt of Congress?  Lerner has refused to testify, Wilkins lied, and the new head of the IRS hasn’t even handed over Lerner’s emails, subpoenaed by the House Oversight Committee a year ago.

Conservative groups are still being hobbled by the IRS.

This is the best Republicans can do?

Our pusillanimous Republican leadership seems to be waiting until the election to do anything. 

If we wait, it will be too late.  We must stand up to fascism or it will stand on us.