The Media Coverup Tries A Variant of an Old Line

In a series of problems that have confronted president Obama, we have been told that the real culprits have been low level federal employees who just messed up.  You know the list, I am not going to repeat it again.  When the IRS scandal broke last week, we were once again told that this was the work of a few low level federal employees in the Cincinnati office.  That story was blown away quickly by the facts.  First we learned that at least four other IRS offices were involved.  It seems that those low level employees really got around.  Then we learned that knowledge of what was going on went up the chain of command at the IRS pretty quickly.  Okay, so low level really meant low, middle and relatively high level.  Then we heard that the Treasury Department was told at the Deputy Secretary level of the ongoing misconduct about a year ago.  Now we have HIGH level Obama appointees.  Remember the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury is in a post high enough that it has to be confirmed by the Senate.  We also learned that the co-chair of the Obama campaign illegally got confidential information from the IRS that was used to attack Mitt Romney during the campaign.   That takes it all out of the Cincinnati office of the IRS and puts the issue squarely in the lap of the White House.  We also learned that the IRS fed all sorts of confidential information to a George Soros funded left wing media site, Pro Publica; this was completely illegal.  We now know too that the IRS targeted individuals who supported the Romney campaign (like George Vandersloot in Idaho) or who took positions in opposition to the Obama administration.  None of that harassment came from Cincinnati; it was directed by someone at the top of the IRS.

As a result of all this information, you would think that the story line that this was just some low level federal employees going rogue would be dead.  If you think that, you would be wrong.  The mainstream media is back at that story again today.  In a front page story, the Sunday issue of the New York Times tells in detail how the Cincinnati office was disorganized and overworked.  The import of the story is that it is no wonder that things in the office went awry.  The poor overworked bureaucrats didn't really mean to do anything wrong; they were just confused and overworked.  CBS News ran a story that said essentially the same thing.

Let's do a thought experiment.  Rather than the IRS, let's use the FBI, and rather than conservative groups let's use African American organizations.  Imagine, if you will, that it is discovered that the FBI offices in Atlanta, Cleveland, Omaha and Houston have been doing special surveillance against any organization operating in their jurisdiction that have promote advancement of blacks or racial equality.  Then imagine how successful it would be were the defenders of the FBI to blame overwork and confusion for this targeting by the FBI.  Enough said.

What happened at the IRS is not an issue of overwork or confusion.  We know that the number of applications for tax exemptions had actually declined from the previous year when the targeting of the conservative groups began.  There was no overwork, but even if there had been it is no excuse for what happened.  Focusing on the Cincinnati office, however, is trivializing the scandal.  Too many people from too many offices at the IRS were involved in this mess to allow the focus to be just on Cincinnati.  The knowledge of the harassment went into the Obama Cabinet a year ago and into the White House a month ago (the Counsel to the President), but nothing was done to stop these practices.  This issue goes directly to both the ethics and the competence of the administration.  Did the administration cover up criminal activity by the IRS just to protect Obama's campaign?  We will have to see.