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The ‘Obvious and Commonsense Conclusion’ about the IRS Scandal
Posted By Roger Kimball On July 14, 2014 @ 10:26 am In Uncategorized | 8 Comments
Even as Establishment Washington, Republican [1] as well as Democrat, does it’s ostrich imitation and pretends that there is Nothing To See Here, Move Along, two organizations, and two courageous judges, are beginning to peel back layer after layer from the fetid onion of corruption that is the scandal of the IRS’s “lost” emails. As the Washington Free Beacon reports [2], law suits brought by True the Vote [3] and the invaluable watchdog group Judicial Watch [4] have resulted in court orders that the IRS answer the complaints and show eft-sone and right speedily (i.e., within a month) what steps were taken to retrieve the supposedly lost emails from Lois “I’ll take the Fifth” Lerner. As Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, noted, “These extraordinary court rulings are key steps in unraveling the Obama IRS’s ongoing cover up of its abuses against critics of this administration.”
Commenting on this development, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit had the obvious ( also the correct) response [5]: “They were incriminating, and show White House involvement. So they were ‘lost.’”
It was ever thus. I am just re-reading bits of David Fromkin’s classic Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? [6] In a chapter called “Shredding the Evidence,” Fromkin details how the French and Germans both did their best to muddy the historical record, and thereby escape blame for the catastrophe of the war, by concealing, destroying, or falsifying incriminating documents. Gradually, modern scholarship has managed to piece together the truth, at least in broad outline. It has been a painstaking process. Looking back over the many efforts by the chief players to distort the truth and thereby escape blame, Fromkin notes soberly that “On the whole, we have to draw the obvious and commonsense conclusion that documents destroyed or hidden probably were embarrassing or incriminating, and that the effort to blot out or falsify the record was undertaken in order to deny responsibility for the IRS’s criminal activity in persecuting opponents of the Obama administration.”
Actually, Fromkin writes “war” where I have substituted a contemporary reality. But the same “obvious and commonsense conclusion” applies.
President Obama, to his shame, said that there wasn’t “even a smidgeon of corrpution” [7] at the IRS. Quite right. There is a boatload, and it stinks to heaven. Pace the David Brookses and Bob Godlattes [1] of the world, talk of impeachment — beginning, perhaps, but only beginning, with John Koskinen, the smarmy Democratic apparatchik who is head of the IRS — occupies a place not in “cloud-cuckoo land” but here in the terra firma of responsible political discourse. Anyone who cares about the future of the country — which is not the same thing as the results of the next election — should remember and act on this truth early and often.
Article printed from Roger’s Rules:
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimballURL to article:
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2014/07/14/the-obvious-and-commonsense-conclusion-about-the-irs-scandal/URLs in this post:
[1] Republican:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/382607/representative-goodlatte-there-are-no-grounds-impeach-obama-katherine-Connell[2] Washington Free Beacon reports:
http://freebeacon.com/issues/two-judges-order-irs-to-explain-lost-emails/[3] True the Vote:
http://www.truethevote.org[4] Judicial Watch:
http://www.judicialwatch.org[5] response:
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/191717/[6] Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/037572575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=037572575X&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20&linkId=6C45FKTMOBTR2V2T[7] “even a smidgeon of corrpution”:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/02/03/not-even-smidgen-corruption-obama-downplays-irs-other-scandals/
