Ladies and Gentlemen I Give You The Illusionist, Barack Obama!
BY JOHN MARIOTTI
Many would say that the magician is the ultimate liar. His illusions are deceptive arts of the highest skill–but they seldom portray the truth of what is happening. These illusions are, in effect, grandly produced lies. When the magician wishes to perform one of his lies of legerdemain, he must distract the audience from what he is actually doing by doing something more grandiose so they won’t notice his real trickery.
Thus, he flourishes and gestures, drawing the eyes of the audience away from his real deception. The term used to describe the deceptive motion is misdirection. Boxers use feints; baseball pitchers use off speed pitches; football players step one way, but then pull the leg back and cut the other way; basketball players use head fakes, or ball fakes. The President of the United States may have honed his craft on the basketball court or on the streets of Chicago, but wherever he learned it, he is a master of misdirection.
This misdirection has never been on display more than in recent weeks. He released a vast treasure trove of US technology to the public not long ago. But why dump this valuable information into public use, and why now? It was an act of misdirection, to reinforce how transparent his administration is, all the while withholding realms of documents on more sensitive matters (like Benghazi?).
The IRS shocking misbehavior, targeting Tea Party and conservative organizations started back prior to the 2012 election. It was done to harass, slow down, and disable Obama’s opponents, and amazing as it seems, went largely undetected. Why? There were multiple misdirection efforts buried in his campaign, most of them blatantly untrue ads about his opponent, that drew attention away from the much more serious IRS misadventures already underway.
Now the election is over and The Illusionist succeeded in fooling the American voting public once again. He told them the economy was recovering, when it clearly wasn’t, but the grandiosity with which he repeated those lies convinced many that they were true. Now, after stalling the Benghazi coverup with the “fog of war” claims, until the election was past, it is becoming increasingly clear that al-Qaeda and/or some related Islamic terrorist groups were the culprits. When the truth starts coming out, more misdirection, subterfuge, and illusions are always needed.
Enter the IRS’ criminal behavior, about which President Obama can sound righteously outraged and claim no knowledge. Really? This IRS escapade started over two years ago, so it is inconceivable that a control freak like Obama would not know of it. Add another misdirection, the disclosure of the AP press fiasco, which was precipitated by his own insiders leaking information to the media. Once again, Obama is shocked! Who knew about this? Not him; not The Illusionist.
Both the IRS and AP issues were revealed openly by the government – Barack Obama’s government! And, guess what? The timing was just right to draw attention away from Benghazi coverup facts being exposed by authoritative whistleblowers. Now, after many months, it becomes simple for The Illusionist to step up to his stage and begin yet another performance.
First, Obama fires the Acting IRS Commissioner – never once mentioning that his temporary assignment was due to expire in just a few weeks. He never touches the next levels at the IRS,since they were likely his plausibly deniable henchmen! He speaks with great intensity about how bad this IRS behavior was, always distancing himself from the failure, after the fact.
Then he proudly and loudly demands that Congress increase funding for security at embassies. This is another misdirection, a modified rerun of an earlier one, which attempted to place blame for Benghazi on GOP spending cuts. Independent sources and insider testimony both (later) confirmed that no such spending cuts caused the Benghazi attacks to turn deadly.
No matter, because the misdirection worked long enough to move on with the “show.” Release 100 pages of emails about Benghazi, to claim transparency, and hope that no one asks for ten times that many emails that were certainly not released. Misdirection works again. Or has it?
As The Illusionist–President Barack Obama, continues to deceive and either directly or by omission, lie to the American people (always insulated by layers of staff – for plausible deniability) the need for still more misdirection grows. Now that the facts, the number of problems, and the depth of the deception is emerging, even his friends in the media feel betrayed and used.
Perhaps The Illusionist’s continued tricks are becoming too obvious. But fear not–he always has a few more up his sleeve. He might create an international crisis, as in a “Wag the Dog” kind of trick. Or he might resurrect some old campaign dirty tricks, and spread rumors about his foes-usually the GOP. Who knows what–but we know it will be something new.
There seems to be no level too low for this president and his cronies to stoop to maintain the illusion that they are doing the job they were elected to do, when clearly they are not. Obama’s latest move sends a clear message of disdain for objectivity in oversight, as he appoints a 42-year old White House crony “insider” as acting Director of the miscreant IRS, which will also takeover the vast Obamacare personal databases and implementation.
This time the illusion is frightening beyond belief – and it is really happening. The only hope is that the media and Congressional fact-finding will clearly reveal the irresponsible, illegal and unethical behavior of the parties involved, and their leader – The Illusionist, President Barack Obama. Somebody needs to pull back the curtain and expose him for the charlatan he is.
- DECLARATIONS
- Updated May 17, 2013, 6:43 p.m. ET
Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
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.s
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 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.
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.
A version of this article appeared May 18, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: This Is No Ordinary Scandal.
- POTOMAC WATCH
- Updated May 19, 2013, 3:42 p.m. ET
The IRS Scandal Started at the Top
The bureaucrats at the Internal Revenue Service did exactly what the president said was the right and honorable thing to do
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.
President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.
Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.
Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.
Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.
The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn't account for what the president's vilification has done to his business and reputation.
The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone.
The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).
The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.
In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."
Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets. Especially as top congressional Democrats were putting in their own versions of phone calls, sending letters to the IRS that accused it of having "failed to address" the "problem" of groups that were "improperly engaged" in campaigns. Because guess who controls that "independent" agency's budget?
The IRS is easy to demonize, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It got its heading from a president, and his party, who did in fact send it orders—openly, for the world to see. In his Tuesday press grilling, no question agitated White House Press Secretary Jay Carney more than the one that got to the heart of the matter: Given the president's "animosity" toward Citizens United, might he have "appreciated or wanted the IRS to be looking and scrutinizing those . . ." Mr. Carney cut off the reporter with "That's a preposterous assertion."
Preposterous because, according to Mr. Obama, he is "outraged" and "angry" that the IRS looked into the very groups and individuals that he spent years claiming were shady, undemocratic, even lawbreaking. After all, he expects the IRS to "operate with absolute integrity." Even when he does not.
Write to [email protected].
A version of this article appeared May 17, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The IRS Scandal Started at the Top.
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John L. Mariotti, President & CEO, The Enterprise Group, http://www.mariotti.net, http://mariotti.blogs.com/my_weblog/
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