5/20/2013

Obama's Words Magically Make IRS Agents Investigate Teabaggers:
So we've reached the point where the narrative on the IRS "scandal" is crystallizing into something completely impervious to proof. If you think about it, it's really pretty damn impressive, considering how Obama-hating conservatives were burned by the Benghazi Email That Wasn't There. Now, from right-wingers fringe and mainstream, they've created a way to blame Barack Obama for the IRS's overworked, underfunded agents' asking some Tea Party groups for extra information before bestowing tax exempt status on them that can't be disproved. Call it the Conspiracy of the Wink.

Apparently, in addition to his Kenyan hoodoo magic and his radical Muslim America-hating agenda, Barack Obama can order low-level government workers to stretch the law by merely implying that it's something that would please him. Yes, yes, like potentates of old, Obama's minions act on their interpretation of his whims in order to please him and get in his good graces. Or something. Who the fuck can tell at this point. Either way, Obama is evil, don't you know?

Starting low on the food chain, nutzoid blog American Thinker lays out a base of cow dung to fertilize the new landscape. Obama spoke in public about how, post-Citizens United, groups were popping up whose donors were, by law, kept secret. The most basic kind of attack politics is to imply that secrets are bad and nefarious, except, of course, when Barack Obama does it. Then he's nefariously bad. Quoting a Wall Street Journal piece on the issue, Obama said, according to AT, "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation." (In that speech, Obama then said, "You don't know if it's a big oil company or a big bank. You don't know if it's a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it's good for their bottom line, even if it's not good for the American people.")

For the ironically-named American Thinker, what Obama was doing was ordering the IRS into action. Investigate these new organizations, goddamnit, and do so by using your mighty forms of doom. AT adds that another way that Obama signaled his displeasure with Tea Partyers was that he "spoke of Tea Party supporters using an obscene term referring to a homosexual act, as 'tea baggers.'" Now, the Rude Pundit is pretty much positive that teabagging, like anal and oral sex, is not an exclusively "homosexual" act. But apparently, IRS agents heard Obama say, "Teabagger," and then, it being code for gay ball play, understood it to mean, "Probe deeper. Deeper. Good god, even deeper."

But the idea that Obama used the power of his brainwaves to hypnotize IRS officials into action isn't limited to the bug fuck blog scribblers. As mentioned, the Wall Street Journal is in on the action. Kimberly Strassel says, flat out, that Obama "did in fact send [the IRS] orders," despite the, you know, fact that he didn't, which Strassel said just a paragraph earlier: "Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets." It might be close, but it ain't an order.

On Meet the Press with David Gregory's Bowl Cut, sour pickle and former lie-writer for Reagan and Bush the Not-As-Dumb, Peggy Noonan, called Obama's words a "dog whistle" to the his followers to press the IRS into action. Her proof is that Obama, get this, spoke. In public. About things.

No, no, this had nothing to do with the IRS being tossed into the post-Citizens United tsunami of shitty, inbred PACs trying to get their money for nothing. And, no, no, Congress providing absolutely no guidance at all for a massive change in tax law had no effect at all. But Obama's invisible wink while saying, "Teabagger"? That is the mountaintop on which the palace of scandal is built. And once it's done, no amount of "fact" is going to knock it down.

One more thing: There's a debate on whether Obama has become "Nixonian" in his seeming paranoia about his "enemies." In a post titled "Richard Milhous Obama," Real Clear Politics blogger Carl Cannon explores how much he thinks Obama is obviously just like Nixon. At one point, he compares how Nixon privately talked about how much he hated the press with how Obama officials have decried Fox "news." Cannon writes, "In so doing, Obama has actually gone places in public Nixon only dared go in private."

You want to know if Obama is like Nixon? You pretty much have your answer right there.