President Obama may or may not have known that his own IRS officials were singling out conservative groups for harassment and intimidation, but that campaign was entirely consistent with the political culture actively fostered by Obama and Democratic officialdom.
Wall Street Journal editor Kimberly Strassel published a revealing column on Friday, reminding us that the IRS scandals have a recent lineage that goes straight back to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, when the then-senator had his campaign general counsel Bob Bauer write open letters to the Justice Department and the Federal Elections Commission, demanding investigation of various conservative and liberal organizations (in the latter case, those which supported his Democratic primary opponents).
In August of 2008, as Strassel recounts, Politico reported that Bauer's words had "the effect of scaring [Clinton and Edwards] donors and consultants," even if they hadn't yet "result[ed] in any prosecution." That same year, a left-wing group calledAccountable America sent "warning" letters to about 10,000 Republican donors in an attempt to scare them against donating to conservative groups. The New York Timescalled the letters "hardball tactics to prevent [political] groups on the right from getting off the ground."
Bauer later served as White House general counsel, from 2010-2011 ... the very years when the IRS was targeting tea party and other conservative associations that applied for tax-exempt status, including several in Florida.
None of this proves that Mr. Obama was involved in the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits, Strassel writes. But it does help explain how we got an environment in which the IRS thought this was acceptable.
It isn't just Obama who's been fostering this environment. Let's set our eyes closer to home.
Back in March, RPOF Chairman Lenny Curry brought to light the contents of a secret December 2012 memo, distributed by Blueprint North Cardolina andpublished by hard-left consulting firm Project for a New America, (PNA) whose Southern director, based in Tallahassee, is former state Rep. Loranne Ausley.
This Democrat scheme outlines extremely distasteful, hyper-aggressive tactics, such as hiring private investigators to follow every move of targeted elected officials, pressuring elected leaders at every single public event, exploiting tensions between the governor and Legislature, exacerbating differences between the House and the Senate, and within Republican ranks between moderates and business-minded Republicans and their ideological base, and setting up costly, bitterly partisan, legal challenges to laws that were passed, Curry wrote.
The Blueprint articulates a "two-year vision, one of whose planks is eviscerat[ion] of political opponents.
You read that right: the same partisans who accused mainstream conservatives of inciting violence for marking coveted legislative seats on a map with crosshairs wrote gleefully about disemboweling conservatives, in a strategy memo directed to and apparently utilized by Democratic state legislators.
The memo appears to be part of a broader strategy by PNA called The Southern Project, an attempt to liberalize Southern states' political culture through the advancement of leftist-progressive social and economic policies.
What does any of this have to do with the IRS? To take a cue from James Carville: It's the culture, stupid. Whether or not the president personally orchestrated the targeting of conservative groups for tax-status scrutiny, a habitual practice of rhetorical dehumanization of political opponents created a corporate culture that made such an initiative possible. It's easy, perhaps even tempting, to abuse power you have against those you flippantly target for evisceration. Or against whom your boss routinely shouts threats like: If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun! Argue with [Republicans and independents], get in their faces! Were gonna punish our enemies and were gonna reward our friends ...
One would be hard-pressed to find the kind of rhetoric in the Blueprint or frequently resorted to by the president and his inner circle in official or semi-official GOP circles, and the mainstream media frequently pounce on any perceived conservative talk that tends in that direction.
Going forward, liberals should be held to that same standard.
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (954) 235-9116.
