The new narrative:
"IRS office at heart of scandal was understaffed backwater; Employees given heavy workload, little direction" by Nicholas Confessore and David Kocieniewski | New York Times, May 19, 2013
NEW YORK —While there are still many gaps in the story of how the IRS scandal happened, interviews with current and former employees and lawyers who dealt with them, along with a review of IRS documents, paint a more muddled picture of an understaffed Cincinnati outpost alienated from the broader IRS culture and provided with little direction.
Then why were the letters sent out from the Washington D.C. and California offices?
Overseen by a revolving cast of midlevel managers, stalled by miscommunication with IRS lawyers and executives in Washington, and confused about the rules they were enforcing, the Cincinnati specialists flagged virtually every application with Tea Party in its name.
But their review went beyond conservative groups: More than 400 organizations came under scrutiny, including at least two dozen liberal-leaning ones and some that were seemingly apolitical.
Oh, man, the NYT distortion and soft-selling of this is stunning!
Over three years, as the office struggled with a growing caseload of advocacy groups seeking tax exemptions, responsibility for the cases moved from one group of specialists to another, and the Determinations Unit, which handles all nonprofit applications, was reorganized....
‘‘The IRS is pretty dysfunctional to begin with, and this case brought all those dysfunctions to their worst,’’ said Paul Streckfus, a former IRS employee who runs a newsletter devoted to tax-exempt organizations. ‘‘People were coming and going, asking for advice and not getting it, and sometimes forgetting the cases existed.’’
Then the illegal confiscation office should be abolished.
Who gets the blame and how far it goes are questions already consuming Washington. Two top IRS officials have resigned, including the acting commissioner, Steven Miller. The Justice Department has begun an investigation into potential civil rights and criminal violations by the IRS.
Yeah, I'm filled with confidence over Sgt. Schultz Holder and his crack investigators over there.
This week, a House committee will seek to depose five IRS employees, including a midlevel executive in Washington and a Cincinnati specialist said to have handled the cases in the spring and summer of 2010....
Which means the administration began targeting political enemies just after Repugs won back the House.
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Related: Leadership vacuum may be root cause of Obama’s scandals
That's really not a good excuse.
"Big Government is watching you" by Tom Keane | Globe Columnist, May 19, 2013
THREE SCANDALS — shifting explanations about the attacks in Benghazi, the targeting of conservative political groups by the Internal Revenue Service, and the administration’s secret inquiry into the Associated Press — dominated politics last week. All self-inflicted wounds, they threaten to upend Barack Obama’s second-term agenda as the inevitable investigations, denials, revelations, and resignations divert attention from everything else.
Any slow-down, rear-guard action is a victory.
But the real story here is less about misdeeds than it is about power. Consider how these three scandals mesh with other stories of the day: Escalating drone strikes, bullying investigations of targets such as cyber-genius Aaron Swartz, the shelter-in-place commands in the aftermath of the Marathon bombings, the rush to a never-ending surveillance state, and the like. The impression one gets is of government at all levels consolidating power unto itself and of a government that is ever more willing to use that power. It makes for scary stuff, stuff that has the potential to reset our politics.
I'm shocked to see him touch upon the issues of real concern, and you can't argue with impressions.
The story of America has been a tale of two competing visions of government: one expansionist, the other sharply curtailed. Many of those who fought for independence were suspicious of centralized authority. They had seen what a monarchy could do and they didn’t want it repeated on their soil. Thus the first government they set up under 1781’s Articles of Confederation was extraordinarily weak, without even the power to tax or enforce congressional decisions.
Eventually, those weaknesses were so overwhelming that almost everyone was forced to admit something more was needed. That led us to the 1788 Constitution (the one we still have), which gave the national government more powers but was still fundamentally grounded on a philosophy of limited government. Power was fragmented among the three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial). The idea was to make change difficult and, sure enough, it’s hard to get stuff done in Washington.
But somehow we seem to rush headlong into wars they wanted us to avoid.
Still, we’ve strayed far from the 18th century’s ideals of limited government. Much of that has been purposeful, pushed by people who see the value of a more powerful state. The 16th Amendment, for example, approved the income tax (prohibited in the original Constitution) and gave the federal government access to personal information it never had before.
Except that amendment was never ratified.
The vast social programs of the New Deal and the Great Society (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) brought about enormous new levels of spending and, necessarily, new powers to police that spending. And regulation — the automatic response to every perceived ill — means bureaucrats are deeply involved in almost every aspect of economic life.
The most profound recent change, however, has been our current era’s rapidly advancing technology. Government now has the technological tools at hand to know far more about the details of citizens’ lives than ever before. If officials wanted to, they could use surveillance cameras to follow every one of us around through almost every moment of our lives. If they wanted to, they could use electronic eavesdropping to track every web search, text, social post, or phone call we make.
Mine are right here.
We’ve comforted ourselves in all of this with the belief that, while government might potentially have all of this power, it would rarely use it or that, when it did, its use would be well-intentioned and circumscribed.
No one believes that anymore.
Plus we had rules and systems to stop any abuse: The Bill of Rights, the due process clause, oversight by the media and courts, the two-party system, and strong procedural requirements.
What the Benghazi-IRS-AP scandals suggest — and what victims of drone strikes and people such as Aaron Swartz might testify — is that these protections are inadequate.
See: Sunday Globe Special: Speaking Up For Swartz
Rules can be bent or ignored, people are venal, and in the pursuit of what government officials think are good ends, any means become acceptable. Power, as the saying goes, corrupts, and absolute power — and surely, we’re getting close to that point, aren’t we? — corrupts absolutely.
The trio of current scandals has already caused heads to roll and, doubtless, more will. More broadly, they may also cause people to rethink the intrusiveness of government in their everyday lives. There is a perception, largely correct, that Democrats favor a more expansionist view of the state while Republicans desire to scale it back. In the ying and yang of one party versus the other, the administration has handed the GOP a powerful argument for its own resurrection.
Translation: Obama will get a Republican Senate in addition to a Republican House next year.
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"Partisan agendas obscure effort to learn from Benghazi attack" May 19, 2013
Like the Marathon bombings, the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi last September was an act of terror that must be examined closely for any lessons that can be used to protect Americans in the future. In the case of Benghazi, it now appears clear that there were serious lapses in security, intelligence, and coordination between the CIA and the State Department in the aftermath of the attack.
Unfortunately, the government’s ability to process any lessons from the attack is being obscured by presidential politics — involving both the 2012 and the 2016 elections....
That's part of it, but there is so much more. The revelation that it was a staged and scripted operation to make Obama look butch gone awry must be covered up at all costs.
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Related: Globe Against Obama's Impeachment
