IRS Business, for All and Sundry: Part Two

Welcome back, folks. I’m glad that somehow you’ve decided to put up with my monologue long enough to see what else I have to say. Where were we? Stuck on the IRS, right.

In looking at all this, I honestly cannot believe that there was no government involvement outside of the IRS itself in all of this. My father always tells me to “trust, but verify,” and in verifying the facts, I have lost all of my trust that someone very high up the chain of command did not orchestrate this. I have trouble believing that Barak Obama found out about this on May 10, 2013, with all of the other Americans who learned from their computers, televisions, radios, and newspapers about this atrocity. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, now – I’m not done yet.

We have a government agency, whose basic function is to collect and distribute the money that keeps the federal government running (which is made of partisan parties), acting with partisan bias towards some of those monies. That alone is quite disturbing to me, and I hope it would be to you as wel. If this were an issue in the IRS alone, the first person to find out about it outside of the organization would have raised an alarm, because these actions that the IRS have accused themselves of (if you’re confused, see Part One) are dangerous to the very nature of the country. Yet the first people to find out about this hid it very well.

Perhaps we can forgive Lois Lerner, perhaps not. She found out about what her team of specialists were doing in 2011 and, according to the Inspector General’s report, tried to implement corrective criteria to fix the problem. But there was an obvious lack of leadership, at the very least, under her direction, because right around election time, the specialists changed the criteria again and targeted the parties contending against our current president. But Lerner was not the only one to know about this mismanagement early; top IRS officials knew about it in May of 2012. The Inspector General audit should have been reported around the same time (again, that it wasn’t is illegal), and in early 2012 Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal S. Wolin, who was nominated by Obama, knew about it. Wolin’s superior, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew, claimed to have first known about the IRS scandal on March 15, 2013. Wolin’s job is to advise and assist Lew in supervising and directing matters concerning national funds – how could he not have told his boss that the IRS was taxing organizations while delaying their applications for tax-exemption? Yes, Wolin was acting as Secretary of the Treasury until Obama approved Lew for the post, but if he weren’t trying to keep this covered for some reason it should have been one of the first things he brought up. And Lew should have told his boss, the man who put him in position.

Yet it was not until April of 2013 that the top White House officials were made aware of the problem, and one of the main lawyers for the President claimed that he was not informed of the issue so as not to concern him prematurely. There is no such thing as premature concern in matters such as these. Political parties are dependent on financial donations, and these are often substantial. I stated in Part One that if people cannot trust the IRS not to take an extra, undeserved chunk out of their donation, they will not donate to the political parties, and the political parties will not be able to exist. A president with no involvement in this would immediately move to squash this the moment he heard of it, his aides should immediately move to inform him of these kinds of activities, and they all should support the squashing in whatever way possible. It would be a danger to his administration, because the same might happen to his own party, and the voices of his country would be limited. Obama was recently interrupted several times during a foreign policy speech – who remembers that? He took the opportunity to remind everyone that all American voices are important. But the people who he put into positions in his government failed to represent that statement, in failing to report the deal with the IRS to other government officials at the very least. That is not just a communications failure. It reflects back as a failure on Obama’s part to honor his own word.

If Obama had nothing to do with this at all, he would not allow anyone high-ranking from the tax-exempt division of the IRS to touch his own legislature. He would distance himself from the department on trust issues alone, because clearly there was incompetence and a lack of responsibility displayed among the leaders of this division. To this day, Douglas Shulman, the former IRS commissioner, refuses to accept responsibility for the mismanagement of conservative applications in the Determinations Unit. Why, then, did Obama put Sarah Hall Ingram – who we remember was the head of the tax-exempt division – in charge of the Affordable Care Act office, a part of Obamacare? Ingram was in charge during the targeting of politically conservative, evangelical, and pro-Israel groups, and Obama for some reason thought it would be wise for her to manage the healthcare with his name on it. Obamacare is his baby; the only way that would be a good idea is if he had trusted her to implement something along the magnitude of this scandal. In all other possible instances, a president would be jumping away from someone like Ingram as though he had been burned.

Switching from Ingram to Lerner for a moment, I would like to point out the following: in answers to media questions about the IRS scandal, Lerner said that it was not only politically conservative groups that had been targeted. But when pressed further, she could not come up with a single non-conservative organization name, out of 170 names. Lerner also initially claimed that her comments on the IRS were prompted because someone had asked her about it, and did not reference that she planted a question. It makes sense that she did that, because if you plant a question, you’re not going to talk about it. She admitted that the question was planted, and Steven T. Miller confirmed it. Yet when asked about her revelations more closely, Lerner pleaded innocence, cited her Fifth Amendment rights to not incriminate herself, and walked away. Why would an innocent woman, who appeared to want to reveal the truth, refuse to speak out after her initial nation-shaking statements?

I do not pretend to be Rush Limbaugh, and I hope I never will – but there is a lot of control written all over this situation. I see in this both a lack of and an excess of control, all with the purpose to shut conservative political organizations up. In a way, it is reminiscent of Watergate (heck, there was even a list involved), and I very much hope that it does not conclude in a like manner. We the people put our elected officials in place, and if they fail, it tells us that we also have a problem. It might be time to reevaluate our own “criteria” on the qualities we desire in those we decide are fit to rule over us, because when I consider all that has happened, I find myself at the unfortunate conclusion that the current administration orchestrated at least part of, if not all of, this mess that we’ve found ourselves in. If they did not start it, then they at least encouraged it, and timed it to coincide with important election periods. This is an administration that has polarized the United States to a degree that has not been seen in the history of the nation, and in retrospect, an action such as this should come as no surprise. I find myself wanting to put my trust in my government, but in light of recent events and actions I am unable to. As more information comes to light from the IRS scandal, I would ask you to consider everything you hear from everyone with a critical mind, and at this point I would dare to advise you to put your trust only in God - everything else seems nothing more than quickly shifting sand.