Battering Rams in Wisconsin

This is America, where a citizen is free to express opinions and participate in politics without fear of retribution. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but the ideal seems to be slipping away. The diminution of fresh speech is not just a matter of the increasingly confined parameters of polite opinion, enforced by boycotts and restricted career opportunities and the howling of mobs, or even the usual heavy hand of government, such as the harassment of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service or the politicized prosecutions by the Department of Justice or the extra regulatory scrutiny applied to those businesses donating to the wrong candidates. It has now come to the point that armed agents of the government have been invading homes, seizing property, and bullying ordinary citizens into silence for no reason other than their political beliefs.

If this sounds like the most far-fetched sort of paranoid right-wing fantasy, we’d urge you to read David French’s chilling article, headlined “Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought it Was a Home Invasion,'” at The National Review. Although there had already been scattered reports about the outrageous “John Doe Investigation” that a renegade prosecutor and a rubber-stamping judge had launched against various groups that supported Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to reform the state’s collective bargaining laws regarding public sector unions, a fishing expedition which was eventually halted by a higher court that rightly considered it a clear attempt to intimidate the prosecutor’s political opponents into silence, only now are those targeted in the investigation coming forward with stories about doors being broken down with battering rams, computers being confiscated, children being terrified, neighbors being scandalized, and dozens of heavily armed police officers shouting warnings that no lawyers were to be contacted and no was to be told. The descriptions evoke Nazi-era Germany or the Soviet bloc, but it happened in Wisconsin, the birthplace of the “progressive movement.”

One can hope that it was a rare occurrence, now ended by the prevailing cooler heads of a higher court according to constitutional design, but one can only hope. There’s no way to be sure that other similarly terrified citizens are still staying silent as warned, and that an indifferent press is happy to leave it to the likes of a high-brow and relatively little-read right-wing publication such as The National Review to report on such inconsequential news if they ever come forward. Given the gleeful ostracizing of anyone who dissents from the consensus of progressive opinion regarding same-sex marriage or global warming, the hateful lies of the lynch mobs that are roused by racial hustlers and Rolling Stone fabulists and the “community outreach teams” of the Justice Department, the presidential rhetoric that warns any critics their dissent “needs to stop,” the increasingly apparent realization that no one at the Internal Revenue Service or the Justice Department or any of those regulatory agencies will ever suffer any consequences for their misdeeds, the indifference of the press, and the sheer seething hatred toward anything conservative we hear from all the liberal media and all the liberals we know, a hatred that seems to have overwhelmed whatever love they once had for freedom and the rule of law, we are no longer surprised to hear even the stories that evoke Nazi Germany and the Soviet bloc.

Please pass along that chilling story about what happened in Wisconsin, because we expect that most of the mass media will regard it as local and of little consequence and not nearly so important as anything slightly embarrassing they might come up with about Gov. Scott Walker. At the risk of a battering ram at the door, we’ll say it’s a matter of the greatest consequence. This is America, after all, where a citizen should be free to express an opinion and participate in the political process without fear of retribution.

— Bud Norman

New Details on an Old Scandal

Now is the perfect time for it, if you’re hoping to spare the Obama administration any further embarrassment, but there have been even more revelations about the Internal Revenue service’s targeting of conservative groups.

Although it was not widely noticed in the midst of all the post-Zimmerman racial hysteria, a report in the impeccably mainstream Washington Post puts the scandal as high up as the agency’s presidentially-appointed chief counsel and close enough to the administration that the paper is obliged to note that “No evidence so far has definitively linked the White House to the agency’s actions.” Even without all the Zimmerman hubbub you might have missed a story in Accounting Today, a web site for certified public accounts and anyone with an interest in certified public accountancy, which reports that the tax records of donors to conservative candidates and organizations were illegally made public.

Both stories are worth noting, even with a riveting racial morality play on the other pages, but much of the press would probably find some reason to underplay them in any circumstances. Using the IRS to harass political enemies was one of the articles of impeachment brought against President Richard Nixon, even though no evidence so far has definitely linked the White House to the agency’s actions, and prospect of the agency’s unbridled powers being used to squash dissent is no less serious today.

There’s a lot going in the world, including the Justice Department’s efforts to limit the citizenry’s right to self-defense in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, and much of it deserves the public’s close scrutiny. The IRS scandal certainly merits more attention, and more outrage, that it has lately been getting.

— Bud Norman

Laugh Lines and the IRS

The latest scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service is a serious matter, involving as it does an agency of the government using its awesome powers to quash the free speech rights of a significant portion of the country, but there’s something undeniably comical about the excuses being offered.

There was the heartfelt apology from the IRS, offered in all sincerity just moments before an inspector general’s report was about to expose the misdeeds, and then the president’s strongly worded indignation that anyone in his government would ever do harm to his political enemies. This was followed by the explanation that only a few rogue employees in a far-flung Ohio office were involved, that although subsequent testimony showed the practices were ordered from Washington it did not go any higher than the middle levels of the bureaucracy there, that the agents were only demanding extra paperwork and extraordinary questions of conservative groups because the IRS was understaffed and over-worked, and that in any case those damnable Tea Party types had it coming. The lattermost explanation was somewhat undermined by the strongly worded indignation of the president, who insisted that much like Will Rogers he only knew what he read in the papers, and although it has since been revealed that his closest aides were aware of the outrages long before they hit the papers we are assured that they just didn’t want to bother him with such trivialities.

Just as it seemed that the scandal couldn’t become any more farcical, along comes David Plouffe. The former senior advisor to President Barack Obama took to the airwaves on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to trot out the latest lines, and somehow maintained a straight face as he assured the viewers that “This was not a political pursuit.”

The assertion proved too much for fellow guest Karl Rove, the former senior advisor to President George W. Bush, who promptly declared the utterance “Baloney, baloney.” Rove rightly pointed out that conservative groups had been targeted for extreme scrutiny and long delays before being given tax-exempt status, while groups more friendly to the administration were given cursory glances and quick approval, and demanded to know how that could not be political. Plouffe insisted that liberal groups were also targeted, but when he failed to name a single one he seemed rather flustered by the frank rebuke. Eventually he sputtered that “This was no an effort driven by the White House. It would be the dumbest political effort of all time. OK?”

This wasn’t OK by Rove, who continued to blame the president for at the very least failing to police the IRS, and one needn’t be a former Bush advisor to be skeptical about Plouffe’s assurances. The harassment of the Tea Party groups began just after they had helped the Republicans to a landslide in 2010 mid-terms and seems to have helped in a concerted effort to blunt their political power just in time for the president’s re-election, so if it was indeed the dumbest political effort of all time it was somehow quite successful. Even if it were dumb to target conservative groups, that’s no reason to believe that the White House wouldn’t do it. It was dumb to sell guns to Mexican drug gangs, and loan hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to unviable “green” companies that had contributed to the president’s campaign, and restructure the American health care system along lines that will raise premiums and discourage employers from hiring anyone for more than 29 hours of work a week, and any number of other policies that a reasonably well-informed critic could think of, but in each case the White House went ahead and did it.

The political consequences were always mild, thanks to the complacency of a supportive press, and there was no reason anyone at the White House should have expected for this scandal to be any different. They might just get away with it yet again, always a possibility given the complacency of the general public, but in the meantime they’re provoking some unintended laughs that can’t be good for business.

— Bud Norman

Meeting the Press

By happenstance we spent much of Wednesday evening in the company of some veterans of the local news media, and not once did anyone mention the government’s latest assaults on their profession. It was a friendly social gathering, with the conversation mostly devoted to the pleasant weather we’ve been having lately and a good bit of personal gossip about colleagues and local notables who were not present, but the absence of any alarmed shop talk was conspicuous nonetheless.

More than 30 years in the news business have taught us that journalists are typically as self-interested as they are self-righteous, and they instinctively regard any perceived infringement of their occupational rights as a threat to democracy and civilization. There are valid reasons for this attitude, aside from how neatly it serves a journalist’s heroic self-image, and it has usually been a popular topic of conversation in journalistic circles. In past years news of the Department of Justice snooping through the Associated Press’ phone records, treating a cable news reporter’s efforts to question sources as a criminal conspiracy, and allegedly poking around in a network reporter’s computer, along with an administration’s longstanding disdain for an adversarial press, would have been topics of inexhaustible interest at a party such we as attended on Wednesday.

The obvious explanation for the noticeable disinterest in these outrages is that they have all occurred during the Obama administration, a cause much of the press has been passionately devoted to since it was first proposed, and we cannot think of anything more convincing. Other than ourselves, one radio guy, and one outsider who has never worked for any media, everyone present at the gathering had voted for Obama or would be embarrassed to admit they had not, and had we been rude enough to broach the subject of the recent bullying of the press we suspect they would have felt obliged to defend their man against any allegations of wrong-doing. The Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups for audits and harassment did come up briefly, with one reporter making a brief attempt to defend the practice before backing out of that quicksand, but the conversation quickly moved on the subject of a local celebrity’s wife’s recent weight gain.

This was in Wichita, where the conservative-to-liberal ratio was probably skewed rightward by several degrees relative to the nation at large, and most of the almighty Washington-New York-Los Angeles news media seem even more uncomfortable with the conversation. The editorialists at The New York Times have done some obligatory harrumphing about the administration’s treatment of the press, The Associated Press has been predictably peeved, there has been some rallying around at the usually hated Fox Network, and the administration’s spokespeople have lately been amusingly flustered by unaccustomed hard questions, but it has all been lacking in the outraged vigor of the recent past. Compared to the clamor that would have surely occurred if a Republican administration was responsible it has been rather quiet.

Conservatives have long pipe-dreamed about the possibility of the press turning on Obama, which would surely be a catastrophe for his presidency and an end to his legislative agenda, and the stark evidence of his hostility to a free press has fueled these hopes. A few hours and a couple of glasses of wine with a circle of reporters can dash these hopes, however, and the best that can be hoped for is that the press will be a little bit less adoring of the powers that be.

— Bud Norman