On 05-06-13, BOB KLAHN said   
      
      
   Couldn't sleep so I got up, put on the coffee and powered up the computer to   
   see whats on the early news pages.   
      
      
   Almost immediately I found a column by Peggy Noonan on the Drudge Page. She is   
   addressing the IRS scandal, and she hits the nail on the head.   
      
      
   Noonan is one of my favorite columnists. She's a very smart woman, and usually   
   when she goes after a news story in her column something worth while comes of   
   it. This time was no exception. Her way of talking about this scandal puts it   
   in a real harsh light. She gets to the fact that, with the bending of a   
   government department with the power of the IRS, into a `political' tool that   
   serves the partisan purpose of going after the party *in* the White House, we   
   have lost the integrity and basic decency we should have a right to expect   
   from those who run our country's highest departments.   
      
      
   But more than that, she exposes the absolute lie perpetrated by those at the   
   top, and not just in the IRS itself, but the two top people who, in front of   
   cameras, act astounded...and un-knowing; Hussein Obama and Holder.   
      
      
   Holder got his nose open and acted all indignant to Issa the other day,   
   demanding he was entitled to be treated with more respect. That from a guy who   
   came into his appointed position five years ago, and immediately shut down an   
   investigation into an intimidation incident where members of the so-called New   
   Black Panther Party had stood on a porch outside a polling place and waved   
   weapons at people and verbally intimidated people.   
      
      
   `Oh....nothing to see here, folks....nothing to see. Move along, move along.'   
      
      
   And Hussein comes out on camera the other day when this IRS scandal broke out   
   in the news, and faked up blank-faced outrage. As if he wasn't aware of any of   
   this!   
      
      
   Noonan calls for people to get prosecuted over this. And not just low-level   
   people either. My hope is this leads to the entire Hussein Obama family   
   packin' their bags and movin' out of America's house at 1600 Pennsylvania   
   Avenue a whole lot sooner than 2016:   
      
      
   Updated May 17, 2013, 6:43 p.m. ET  This Is No Ordinary Scandal   
      
      
   WSJ   
      
      
   Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.By   
      
      
   PEGGY NOONAN   
      
      
   We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The   
   reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from   
   sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No   
   one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the   
   Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service   
   have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably   
   damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-   
   mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.   
      
      
   Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.   
      
      
   As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when   
   he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober   
   and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the   
   Justice Department? You do not.   
      
      
   The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him.   
      
      
   He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about   
   it in the papers, just like you.   
      
      
   But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration.   
   Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.   
      
      
   A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is   
   arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of   
   political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and   
   then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across   
   town.   
      
      
   The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and   
   targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups.   
      
   The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.   
      
      
   In order to suppress conservative groups - at first those with words like "Tea   
   Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed   
   ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment - the IRS demanded donor rolls,   
   membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents   
   of all speeches made by members, Facebook FB +0.46%posts, minutes of all   
   meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its   
   questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for   
   office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group   
   sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.   
      
      
   The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have   
   opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho   
   businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars   
   to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first   
   time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were   
   also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the   
   government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on   
   my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare."   
      
      
   Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was   
   targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages   
   faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these   
   stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only   
   afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.   
      
      
   All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012   
   election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the   
   privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose,   
   obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate - to kill the opposition, question   
   by question and audit by audit.   
      
      
   It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake.   
   Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even   
   remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.   
      
      
   Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who   
   finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some   
   of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of   
   "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including   
   Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just   
   a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out:   
      
   Get the Democratic Party's foes.   
      
      
   It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until   
   very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative   
   groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012 - far earlier than   
   the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials,   
   including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.   
      
      
   The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the   
   scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they   
   didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS -   
   the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government - is revealed as a low, ugly   
   and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans   
   would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's   
   cellphone number.   
      
      
   And why - in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too - does no   
   one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric   
   Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks   
   in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems   
   indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to   
   address this. That fate put it on his plate.   
      
      
   We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the   
   partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its   
   work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in   
   the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating   
   people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals   
   should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often   
   come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.   
   But that bias does not fit these circumstances.   
      
      
   Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.What happened at the   
   IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls   
   out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position's powers.   
      
   Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone   
   involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the   
   politicization of the IRS will continue - forever. If it is not stopped now,   
   it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have   
   even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.   
      
      
   And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator   
   to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan   
   arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not   
   about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system   
   of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to   
   function.   
      
      
      
      
      
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