By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Blogger and professor Daniel Drezner tweeted over the weekend: "So, in all, this has been a pretty crappy week for people who dislike conspiracy theories." Well, yes.
The
week started out with President Obama disparaging those who worried
about tyranny as conspiracy theorists, and telling college students to reject them:
"Still,
you'll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more
than some separate, sinister entity that's the root of all our problems,
even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always
lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because
what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in
self-rule is just a sham with which we can't be trusted."
The rest
of the week consisted of scandal after scandal, suggesting that maybe
our government is . . . a sham with which Obama, at least, can't be
trusted.
Generating the most bipartisan outrage were the
revelations that IRS agents went after Tea Party groups for political
reasons. And -- despite repeated denials to Congress -- it turns out
that senior IRS officials knew as far back as 2011. As the editors of The Washington Post commented:
"A
bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of
government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to
political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI
and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle
threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which
this democracy depends. So it was appalling to learn Friday that the
IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was
almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack
Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a
full investigation."
I offered a similar warning in The Wall Street Journal, back
in 2009, when Obama joked about auditing trustees of Arizona State
University, after he was denied an honorary degree. But apparently the
message didn't sink in.
Abuse of the IRS against political enemies was one of the articles of impeachment
against Richard Nixon. We're not talking impeachment here yet, but
that's an indication of how serious such abuses are. We need hearings
to get to the bottom of this, and it seems likely that we'll have them.
Meanwhile,
the administration's already implausible story over the attacks on the
U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which caused the death of our ambassador and
three other Americans, also unraveled further as whistle-blowers came forward to testify that the White House knew immediately that it was a terrorist attack, and not a spontaneous protest over an obscure YouTube video, as the White House, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, nonetheless continued to claim for days despite knowing otherwise.
On
Friday, BBC Editor Mark Mardell noted that although he had previously
seen the Benghazi inquiry as a partisan attack, he was now convinced
that it was serious and predicted that "heads will roll."
A
cynic might conclude that these scandals are of a piece. The IRS
harassment, focused at an IRS office in the key swing state of Ohio,
crippled Tea Party groups during the 2012 election cycle. The
blame-the-video spin, meanwhile, obscured the administration's, and the
State Department's, culpability in terms of poor security and inept
intelligence, while protecting Obama's triumphalist
Osama-bin-Laden-is-dead-and-al-Qaeda-is-on-the-ropes election-season
line on the war on terror.
Politics over principle -- and public
safety. That's what a cynic would conclude is going on here. And you
know, these days the cynics are often right.
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