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Kurt Nimmo<\/strong> According to Salon<\/a>, there was no political motive behind the IRS move to target patriot groups. Instead, the scandal is about \u201cmuch confusion, poor training, unclear directives and what seems to be pretty lousy, or, at least, extremely ineffective management.\u201d<\/p>\n No political motivation? \u201cHow stupid do they think we are?\u201d<\/small><\/p>\n In other words, the IRS wouldn\u2019t target political groups. The problem is government ineptitude. This is the same old tired excuse government lovers \u2014 and in the case of the IRS, lovers of confiscatory taxation \u2014 use when government does something criminal and predatory. It\u2019s broken management and shoddy training, something that can be remedied if we throw more money at problems.<\/p>\n According to Salon, the only organization that actually lost its tax-exempt status was a progressive organization, \u201cthe Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office.\u201d<\/p>\n Salon\u2019s assertion that the IRS wouldn\u2019t target political groups is at odds with history. The IRS has been used numerous times to attack political enemies.<\/p>\n FDR used the agency to go after newspapers opposed to his socialist New Deal. Roosevelt had the IRS target Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Republicans such as former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.<\/p>\n President Kennedy used the IRS to target the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education and other groups. \u201cBy directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, [Kennedy’s] Ideological Organizations Audit Project established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting \u2018dissidents,\u2019\u201d states a 1976 report by the Senate Select Committee on Government Intelligence.<\/p>\n Richard Nixon created a Special Services Staff to go after \u201call IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations.\u201d Nixon went so far as to pass his enemies list on to the IRS in an effort to \u201cuse the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,\u201d according to White House counsel John Dean.<\/p>\n Nixon\u2019s 1974 impeachment charged him with trying to gain \u201cconfidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.\u201d<\/p>\n Following a report issued by the Democratic National Committee in 1995 attacking Clinton\u2019s political enemies, the IRS went after the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator magazine. Clinton accusers, including Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were hit with IRS audits.<\/p>\n In 1999, the Associated Press reported that \u201cofficials in the Democratic White House and members of both parties in Congress have prompted hundreds of audits of political opponents in the 1990s,\u201d Requests from Congress to audit political enemies were expedited.<\/p>\n \u201cPermitting congressmen to secretly and effortlessly sic G-men on whomever they pleased epitomized official Washington\u2019s contempt for average Americans and fair play. But because the abuse was bipartisan, there was little enthusiasm on Capitol Hill for an investigation,\u201d writes James Bovard<\/a> for the Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n Salon would have you believe the latest IRS scandal is either a managerial problem or skullduggery engaged in by out of control lower-level employees. History, however, demonstrates that orders to go after political enemies often come from the highest levels of government.<\/p>\n Both Democrats and Republicans have exploited the agency to go after political enemies, but Democrats will now attempt to portray the targeting of patriot political groups as bureaucratic bumbling or an isolated, one-off incident taken advantage of by ruthless Republicans.<\/p>\n <!– <\/p>\n –><\/p>\n This article was posted: Sunday, May 19, 2013 at 12:16 pm<\/p>\n Tags: domestic news<\/a>, government corruption<\/a><\/p>\n
Infowars.com
May 19, 2013
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