“It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true, it’s old news.” Standard Washington crisis management says to deflect and deny political scandals until they can be ignored—preferably without the powerful punished. The guilty have deftly used this strategy in the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting scandal. Fleeting hours of feigned indignation quickly morphed into assigning blame to laws governing nonprofits and, that all-purpose scapegoat, the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United.
Those who cultivated the scandal by pressuring ideological allies inside the IRS shrugged and moved on. Those within the agency lawyered up, pled the Fifth, and moved on. Those defending the IRS in court engaged in unconscionable dilatory tactics that continue today. New faces replaced old and nothing changed. That the government’s most feared agency had blatantly discriminated against the president’s ideological foes was declared history.
But “the past,” as William Faulkner declared, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” The IRS scandal never ended, because the behavior never stopped...
Read more at:
http://thefederalist.com/2016/11/01/despite-investigations-obamas-irs-never-stopped-targeting-conservatives/
