Posted on 01/29/2014 9:07:52 AM PST by Starman417
Peggy Noonan wrote an article recently suggesting that no one is listening to Obama any longer:
No one's really listening to the president now. He has been for five years a nonstop wind-up talk machine. Most of it has been facile, bland, the same rounded words and rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses. I see him enjoying the sound of his voice as the network newsman leans forward eagerly, intently, nodding at the pearls, enacting interest, for this is the president and he is the anchorman and surely something important is being said with two such important men engaged.But nothing interesting was being said! Looking back on this presidency, it has from the beginning been a 17,000 word New Yorker piece in which, calmly, sonorously, with his lovely intelligent voice, the president says nothing, or little that is helpful, insightful or believable. "I'm not a particularly ideological person." "It's hard to anticipate events over the next three years." "I don't really even need George Kennan right now." "I am comfortable with complexity." "Our capacity to do some good . . . is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention."
Nobody is!
It's worse than that. No one trusts Obama. And for good reason. The NSA and IRS scandals have destroyed everyone's faith in government. Obama has lied about the NSA and weaponized the IRS as a political tool.
Left wingers claim that nothing's come of any investigations, whether Fast and Furious, NSA, Benghazi or the IRS. They confuse stonewalling for exoneration. The Obama regime has stonewalled the IRS investigation at every opportunity.
Judicial Watch filed suit to end the stonewalling:
The government watchdog Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, insisting the agency release previously demanded documents made under a Freedom of Information Act request that would clarify how conservative groups were screened for nonprofit status.Judicial Watch filed the suit on Oct. 9 but announced it Tuesday. President Tom Fitton said in a written statement that the suit was “designed to cut through the Obama administration cover-up of its IRS scandal.”
Specifically, the watchdog said it wanted the IRS to release copies of “all communications relating to the review process for organizations seeking 501(c)(4) nonprofit status since January 1, 2012.” The group also asked the court “to order the IRS to provide records of communications by former IRS official Lois Lerner concerning the controversial review and approval process.”
Judicial Watch said it’s taking the court route to obtain the records because the IRS has failed to uphold FOIA on four requests, dating back to May 2013 — as news of the agency’s seeming biased delay of granting tax exemptions to conservative groups seeking nonprofit status was rocking national headlines.
“The Obama IRS suppressed the entire tea party movement just in time to help Obama win reelection,” said Mr. Fitton, in a written statement. “One of the most pressing questions, of course, is, ‘What did the president know and when did he know it?’ We know that former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman and his political aide, Jonathan Davis, visited the White House hundreds of times during the Obama IRS witch hunt. This may help explain why the IRS is now stonewalling our FOIA requests and forced us to go to federal court.”
Christopher Being of the Tax Analysts met with the same obstruction:
The latest chapter in Tax Analysts' ongoing efforts to investigate what did and didn’t happen in the IRS’s self-admitted abuse of power in reviewing the tax-exempt applications of mostly conservative groups was written last week. If you didn’t know, that’s not surprising, because while it got some coverage, it didn’t get a lot and in some ways that makes sense. Other than the fact that the IRS released more documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, there wasn’t much news in those documents.The IRS released the documents in response to a court order that Tax Analysts managed to obtain after the IRS had exhausted every excuse it could think of to delay – I was waiting for "the dog ate my homework” – and continued its whining over how mean we were being in asking it to be transparent to the American people. This is the third installment of documents – documents that are training materials – that the IRS has released and, generally, they haven’t been awfully helpful. And we believe that the odds are good that the IRS's response to a document request that the agency itself agreed was important enough to get "expedited" treatment is not really a response at all.
Last week, Tax Analysts issued a press release, and in it I am quoted as saying:
Retrieving these documents was a small victory in our continuous and ever-growing fight for transparency. But it should be noted that what Tax Analysts asked for were training materials, which should be publicly available to begin with. The fact that it took us eight months, a lawsuit, and a court order to get the training materials the agency released is not, I believe, a positive sign on how the IRS is dealing with its problems.Since then, I have had more time to think about it, and I believe that where we are is exactly where the IRS wants us to be: Nothing newsworthy here, so just move on. I strongly suggest we not move on.
Mr. Begin comes to a terrible realization:
Anyone familiar with my writing knows that I have bent over backwards to give the IRS the benefit of the doubt in this black eye some call the "exemption scandal." I must admit I'm getting a little tired of bending.Back in the day, as the saying goes, I often referred to the IRS as Fortress Secrecy, a term meant to describe the agency's obsession with hiding as much of its operations as it can get away with. I am not a casual observer, and I have never seen things this bad. Everything the IRS has done in addressing the exemption scandal leads to just one conclusion: that this agency now believes it is accountable to no one other than itself. Who is responsible for that?
Commissioner Koskinen, you have a problem. President Obama, you have a problem. America, we have a problem. An agency with this much power cannot be unaccountable to the citizens it was designed to serve.
Obama's IRSS is out of control. It serves Obama and it serves democrats. It does not serve America.
One famous example of this abuse is Christine O'Donnell:
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Koskinen and Obama don't have a problem. The IRS is functioning exactly as they want it to - as a vehicle for political retribution. WE are the ones with a problem.
The problem is there’s bi-partisan support for suppressing the tea party.
Bingo. Bonehead hates us as much as Pelousy. Chinless hates us as much as Dingy Harry. It's quite bipartisan, in fact, it's one of the few things they agree on. That and growing government. All the aforementioned people want that.
In my view some of the blame here goes to W. There was ample information indicating the Clintons used the IRS in the same way. In another example of the Bush’s stupid political pacifism he just let it slide which set the table for even egregious abuse. Bush and that fool Rove did huge damage to the nation by their limp wrist-ed or non responses to so many outrages.
Bush’s Fault.
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