What is the difference between fascism and progressive ideology? If you don’t know the answer to this, you can probably blame a public school teacher who identifies as a progressive. Both “are very hostile to individualism, especially in the field of economics.”
Recently, our Dear Leader claimed that there was “Not even a smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS run by his political appointees.
Well, as we have learned, everything that BHO says has an expiration date. Sometimes that date is even before the words come out of his mouth. Remember that the left leaning Washington Post, among others, selected one of Barry’s Catch Phrases as the Lie of the Year.
So we should take his claim of no corruption with several large barges worth of salt.
Now let’s review what the Inspector General for the IRS had to say on the matter, “Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012.” There are a few more gems in his report to Congress:
In total, 30 percent of the organizations we identified with the words ‘progress’ or ‘progressive’ in their names were processed as potential political cases. In comparison, our audit found that 100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriots,’ or ‘9/12’ in their names were processed as potential political cases during the timeframe of our audit.”
…
“While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria we described in our report, including employee interviews, emails and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention.”
Of the 296 organizations flagged with “political” keywords, only six were “progressive” groups. That is 2% of the 296 organizations selected by the IRS.
Clearly, there is more than just “smidgeon of corruption” at the IRS under the reign of our Dear Leader. This Culture of Corruption probably runs much farther and deeper in the Obama administration than just the IRS.
“Essentially, the Tea Party are the Hell’s Angels, but with sun visors instead of switch blades. They push macaroni instead of meth. Mess with the Tea Party and they’ll put your dog in an American flag sweater on a hot day.”
“When the Tea Party burst out on the scene in 2010, the co-opted techniques used by the left to show that they were The People. Popular revolt, demonstrations, rallies, all of it— all of it from the left’s playbook.
This wouldn’t do for the media for many reasons. They immediately attempted to claim the Tea Party was astroturf, artificial. Of course it must be! After all, the media is on The Side of the People, and if we have 30,000 people demonstrating here against the media’s agenda, why, that would mean the media is not on the Side of the People, and that can’t be! So this must be a corporate astroturf campaign paid for by the Koch brothers.
The media continues to despise the Tea Party for putting a lie to the media’s claim that they’re Just on the Side of the People. And they doubly hate the Tea Party because the media are among the people to whom that lie has been exposed.”
That is how Ed Driscoll tags it, and he’s probably right.
“In Wetumpka, we are patriotic Americans. We peacefully assemble. We petition our government. We exercise the right to free speech. And we don’t understand why the government tried to stop us.
I’m not here as a serf or a vassal. I’m not begging my lords for mercy. I’m a born free American woman. Wife, mother, and citizen. And I’m telling my government that you’ve forgotten your place. It’s not your responsibility to look out for my wellbeing and to monitor my speech. It’s not your right to assert an agenda. Your post, the post that you occupy, exists to preserve American liberty. You’ve sworn to perform that duty, and you have faltered…
What the government did to our little group in Wetumpka, Alabama is un-American. It isn’t a matter of firing or arresting individuals. The individuals who sought to intimidate us were acting as they thought they should, in a government culture that has little respect for its citizens. Many of the agents and agencies of the federal government do not understand that they are servants of the people. They think they are our masters. And they are mistaken.
I’m not interested in scoring political points. I want to protect and preserve the America that I grew up in. The America that people crossed oceans and risked their lives to become a part of. And I’m terrified it is slipping away.
“And the IRS scandal was a subversion of democracy on a massive scale. The most fearsome and coercive arm of the administrative state embarked on a systematic effort to suppress citizen dissent against the party in power. Thomas Friedman is famous for musing that he wishes America could be China for a day. It turns out we’ve been China for a while.”