Sunday, May 19, 2013
About the IRS "Scandal"
Guest host Mark Thompson, author David Cay Johnston, “The War Room” contributor Brett Erlich, Ana Kasparian and Jayar Jackson discuss whether there’s any validity to comparisons between President Obama and former President Nixon in the wake of recent White House scandals involving the Internal Revenue Service and the Associated Press. Johnston says, “The Republicans aren’t interested in running a good government. They want to destroy President Obama.”
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
The Watergate scandal looked small in the beginning. The primary job of any branch of government is to keep the other branches from getting too powerful. Everything else is secondary.
ReplyDeleteThe Watergate scandal was small, it was business as usual. The real problem was not unlike the Lewinsky thing, the attempts to cover it up after the fact and the president lying to the entire country and getting busted.
DeleteOne thing Obama has to worry about that Nixon and Clinton did not is the Republican racists who hate him (Obama) with a passion and all their racist supporters.
He's going to have to be one Slick and Tricky Barack to get out of this alive, so to speak. My money's on him though.
And Mike returns to his old slander: The only reason you could hate Obama is because you're a RACIST!
DeleteForget Fast and Furious, forget all of these scandals, forget his abuses of civil liberties that even have the people at MSNBC scratching their heads and saying, "But I thought he was a Constitutional Law professor--he wasn't supposed to keep doing this!"
Clearly, none of those things could be the motivation behind the dislike of Obama--it's just racism.
Mike, Please pull your head out of your ass, wipe your eyes, and try to take a real look at the world.
1. There you go again with your unsubstantiated accusations of racism.
Delete2. The key thing that protects Obama is his choice of a vice president.
Well, what do you guys think? There is no racism element in the Obama hate? Are guys actually saying racism is a thing of the past, that most people have moved on and no longer suffer from it?
DeleteI'm afraid I don't see it like that.
We've been over this before. Now that you're getting some push back from us, you're falling back on your old habit of shifting the debate: "Do you guys think that Obama's opponents are 100% racist free?"
DeleteOf course, this standard can't be reached--there's racists on all sides, and because there are SOME racists who oppose Obama, you feel free to paint most or all of those who oppose him as such.
Your line of argument makes as much sense as me going on about how progressives like you and Laci, and even Dog Gone, promote a culture of rape. After all, look at the progressive "Occupy" rallies where rapes were happening and not being dealt with.
So, yes, there are some racists in the anti-Obama camp--as Larry Niven said, there's no cause so just that it won't attract some fools.
However, if you look at the core of the opposition, it's based on principles, some conservative, some libertarian. You don't agree with these principles, but it's dishonest to claim that you can't see them and that racism is the basis of most people's opposition to the man.
T., if I'm not mistaken you're the one who went to the 100% accusation. I never said it's ALL about racism, but racism is a much bigger element than you seem to want to admit.
DeleteDon't tell me it's dishonest to claim what I claim. It's my opinion and I can't believe you don't agree with it. Aside from the principles the Left and Right always squabble over and in spite of the legitimate failings of Obama's administration, it is my opinion that racism is driving most of the Obama hate.
I don't know what kind of La-La land you live in. Come to think of it, you're in Tennessee and you're telling me you don't see much racism???!!!???
Mikeb, your bigotry is tiring, but look at your own statement. You can't believe that Tennessean disagrees with your opinion. What an arrogant thing to say: How dare he not see the wisdom in your beliefs? Then you go on to attack his state again. I lived in Tennessee for ten years. Is there racism there? Yes. Just as there's racism everywhere. Just as there's bigotry everywhere. But I knew a large number of people who were not racists or bigots. I know many here in Arkansas.
DeleteUnlike you, I'm also willing to listen to someone without putting the person through a test to see if any bigotry is present. After all, I talk to you.
Your comments imply that racism is the major, driving factor--something that someone with their eyes open can see is ludicrous.
DeleteThe people drawing the most support for their opposition to the President, and most of the media's ire, are libertarians or libertarian leaning conservatives. These are the people who are loudest in their opposition to the president, and who have been consistently calling him out for his abuses of executive power and civil liberties. These people's principles are based on freedom and equality before the law--not things that jive well with racism.
As for your comments regarding Tennessee, and other comments regarding the South in the past, we've covered this ground before, but I'll go over it once more:
You are a northeasterner who lives overseas--you don't have day to day contact with this region, and as far as I can remember from your comments and posts, I don't know that you have spent any appreciable amount of time down here to get to know the region, so you're operating off of your perception from the news, from popular culture, and from your prejudices against the area. It doesn't seem to register, to you, that most of the media and popular culture's framing of the South is based on the prejudices of people like you (popular culture especially).
What popular culture and you have not yet caught on to yet is that #1 The south is not uniform, and #2 Things have been changing.
As for the first point, I'm in East Tennessee--The part of the state with the mountains and all the ignorant hillbillies. Guess what: We were also a hotbed of abolitionism--it was a few miles from where I sit that the first exclusively abolitionist newspaper was published.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elihu_Embree
The cabin where Embree published is preserved as a landmark--we visited it on a couple field trips when I was a kid.
Interestingly, we're also known as the conservative end of the state--the part with most of the Tea Parties, etc. The KKK came from the much more liberal end of the state--incidentally the part where the most hardened racists I've met came from. Interestingly, these racists from the West end were STILL about half Democrats--the Republican ones were a weird kind of idiot who would volunteer at black churches and help the black communities down there, but didn't like miscegenation.
Still, even areas aren't uniform, and one does encounter racists everywhere, including up here in the mountains, but that brings me to the second point: The times they are a changin'.
DeleteWhen I do meet racists, they're mostly of my parents generation--baby-boomers hanging on to prejudices they've learned at home. They'll die off soon enough, and their children aren't like them.
Even with these individuals, there are few of them that are racists like in the days of yore--most have softened their views as time has passed, and some of them are even learning the error of their ways. The bulk of what I run into is people who will make a racial comment about Obama after hearing about some policy they disagree with--if you ask them what the color of his skin has to do with that and point out that one of their black friends (yes, they have them) doesn't care for Obama or his policies either, they get a sheepish look or an indignant one, but the seed begins to sink in and sometimes grow.
Even when it comes to these folks, if you know them, you see that the racial remarks, while a sign of a perverse stain on their thinking, are merely a way of them lashing out at someone whose policies they dislike, and would dislike regardless of the president's race. Is this wrong of them? Hell Yes! But it's in the same vein as Stupid Fat White Men comments--it's picking physical features that have nothing to do with the topic at hand and focusing on them.
That covers the bulk, but there are still the outliers--the old school racists who don't like black people and want nothing to do with them except maybe as laborers. Sure, there's a few of them around, but they too are a dying breed. The Wealthy ones have well educated children who mostly hate them. The Poor ones are typically drunk welfare recipients. Some of their kids perpetuate the stain of racism, but many don't.
So, yeah, I see residual racism down here, but it's mostly dying out. I've also traveled in other parts of the U.S. and in Europe, and I've seen as much racism and other similar prejudice or more in other places.
I think you're much too generous in your assessment of people. Maybe you're too young. maybe when you're as old as your parent's generation is now, you'll see it differently.
DeleteGee, Mike, You know where I've heard that exact same line before?
DeleteFrom some older people who I've confronted when they called the president a nigger or said something derogatory about a mixed couple or a couple who adopted a child who wasn't white.
Good company there, Mike.
But thanks for replying and letting the universe know that you prefer to stick with your own prejudices which have been formed without the benefit of first hand experience because you LIKE your prejudices better than what those with first hand experience are telling you.
I'm sick and tired of all of the apologies for the administration, so I'm not wasting my time listening to another one.
ReplyDeleteFrom Fast and Furious to these latest three scandals, this administration has had quite a few scandals. If they were all orchestrated from the top, or near it, they would show a level and a breadth of manipulation that would make tricky Dick look like a piker.
If they're not orchestrated from the top, and we are to believe the official stories that these are all just the actions of a bunch of rogue agents in various agencies who were not properly overseen by their bosses, then this is quite possibly the most inept, incompetent administration in history.
Either your messiah is Nixon on steroids, or he and his inner circle have the competence of Biden, and have attracted the worst kind of corrupt hangers on.
The corrupt hangers on are Bush appointees, which Obama should have gotten rid of. M. Miller's statements before the committee investigating shows he knew who was doing this, and did nothing to stop it. Probably laughing all the way to the bank with his government pension and watching false Republican emails create a non scandal. Just another Bush mole trying to discredit Obama with by allowing this kind of illegal behavior under his supervision.
ReplyDeleteWOW! It's Bush's Fault! I've got a feeling that things that happen 50 years from now will still be "Bush's fault."
DeleteEvery single Iraq casualty will always be on Bush's head.
DeleteAs far as the policies Bush started that Obama failed to curtail or end, that's no longer Bush's fault.
You can delegate authority, but not responsibility. He is the President, the big man. He gets to claim credit for killing because it happened on his watch, and he has that perogative. But in that case, he also gets credit for the bad stuff also.
ReplyDeleteIf the people involved are from the previous administration, he still made a possibly flawed judgement to keep them on. Trying to tap dance around this responsibility doesnt help him.
Those are ood points with which I agree, but how big a deal is this really? To the Obama Haters it's the Holy Grail, or at least they hope so.
DeleteThe government's taxing arm was targeting political opponents--tea party, pro life, pro Israel, etc.--for several years, lying about it, and covering the matter up. Higher ups learned about it at LEAST when they checked into Congressional questioning, but it took them until now to "fix" the problem and admit what had been happening.
DeleteSo we have a tyrannical abuse of power big enough that it even offended the dingy lout Piers Morgan, and we have a coverup that extends much further up through the IRS than the wrongdoing itself (If the internal report is accurate--a big if considering various parts of the Executive branch's history with the truth during this administration).
So, yeah, this is kinda a big deal.
Whether or not it's a big deal can depend on whether you're the one that the federal government is applying its power to. If the IRS issue was standin there all by itsself, then if might not be as big an issue as it is now. However, there is a growing list of what seem to be bad decisions.
ReplyDeleteWe have Fast and Furious. The administration starts out saying that it was just a dumb plan by a couple of guys in a field office. Eventually, the President invokes executive privilege. While it might secure the direct evidence from examination, it introduces the perception of deception.
Then there is the investigation into the death of one of our ambassadors. So we seem to be having a perceived series of coverups, or a better way of putting it might be a series of events in which the administration puts a lot of effort into block investigation.
There might be a good reason somewhere in the mess which is Fast and Furious to invoke executive privilege, but the perception of deceit could be eliminated for example by bringing it before an oversight committee of the type which regularly handles classified issues.
So we are now getting to the point where some people are saying if we're seeing this, what are we missing? And possibly wondering if what we are seeing is an expansion of the Chicago political machine writ large.
Fast and Furious was trumped up bullshit orchestrated by some passionate Obama haters. It has nothing to do with the IRS thing, which to me is not a big deal. Those organizations selected for audit because they are unfriendly towards the current administration should have kept themselves squeaky clean. Then there'd be nothing to worry about.
DeleteIf its trumped up BS, then why did the President have to invoke executive privilege in order to block the release of evidense? Wouldnt it have been better to release the data and prove your innocence? If the Obama administration is keeping themselves squeaky clean, there would be nothing to worry about in releasing evidence.
DeleteThe intense auditing of taxes by the IRS was also a tactic used against those thought to be undesirable during the McCarthy anti-american hearings. The only difference being which side of the political spectrum was in charge. Whatever side uses it, it's wrong.
Mikeb, why can't you get the main point? Any president who gets a second term gets mired in scandal. That's because the power of the office corrupts the person. And yet, you want to give the president and government even more power.
DeleteAh, yes! That sounds like the line I hear from dumbshit Republicans who support the Patriot Act and every form of Fourth Amendment violation: If you don't have something to hide, what are you worried about!
DeleteAside from the evil of such an excuse for tyranny, we're not even talking about extra scrutiny alone. We're talking about ridiculous delays so that several groups STILL have not received tax exempt status. We're talking about a pro-life group that was forced to send in affidavits stating that they would never picket outside a Planned Parenthood office--restrictions on expression not placed on groups friendly to the administration. It's a lot bigger deal than you're talking about, Mike.
As for F&F, it's far from bullshit. Your side always likes to talk about Wide Receiver starting under Bush. However, Wide receiver was shut down after losing a much smaller number of guns. It failed because the traffickers got tipped off that trackers had been placed in the guns, so they drove around in the desert until the trackers died, and then ran the guns into Mexico. Since the plan to track the guns had been so easily frustrated, the mission was canned before more guns could make it south.
THEN along comes F&F with no plan to track the guns, no follow up, and thousands of guns sold and lost--All with the benefit of Hindsight into how this plan had already failed when it was executed better during the previous administration.
Looking at these facts, it's pretty easy to say that either the Administration wanted this program for some reason, or that they were asleep at the wheel and not properly supervising a bunch of idiots in that ATF office. This looks pretty similar to these other scandals where the White House was either in on the action, or was fiddling while Rome burned.