IRS and Benghazi Scandals Get Yawns: Is America Becoming Stupid?

The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday it had found no basis for a criminal prosecution over the Internal Revenue Service’s mishandling several years ago of requests for tax-exempt status by political groups aligned with the Tea Party.

In 2013, the IRS was embarrassed by its worst scandal in decades when a government review found the agency had targeted political groups seeking tax-exempt status for greater scrutiny by looking for keywords such as “Tea Party” and “Patriots.”

The Justice Department said it found that IRS employees used politically charged keywords to select groups for review, but no evidence that they did so because of bias. Rather, the method was an inept effort at treating similar types of non-profit groups with the same form of review, Kadzik said. [reported by Newsmax.com 10-23-15]

Let’s get this straight.

The Justice Department, charged with investigating the matter, acknowledges that IRS employees deliberately used politically charged keywords to select groups for review; but that this does not constitute evidence of bias.

How is this not bias?

If the IRS was found to deliberately seek out groups favoring civil rights for blacks, marriage for gays, or social welfare spending for the poor, the outrage would be deafening. The media establishment would consider it bias. There would probably be protests in the streets, and threats on white policemans’ lives by groups like “Black Lives Matter.” And there’s little doubt that the Obama Justice Department would have found bias and initiated legal action, in such cases.

It’s no surprise that this happened. Obviously, the Obama-controlled Justice Department is part of the same corrupt and biased system of which the IRS is only a part.

There is no justice without objectivity.

If the Justice Department were objective, it would not deny bias when bias so plainly exists. It’s self-evident that when you deliberately seek out certain types of groups for IRS review, you’re engaging in bias. It does not matter who those groups are.

The Justice Department is itself biased when it claims these biased actions of IRS agents are not bias, and therefore could not be considered criminal or illegal.

It all starts with the idea that American citizens’ money does not belong to American citizens themselves. This is the one idea nobody is willing to question.

Once you stop considering the money and property of citizens the property of the citizens themselves, the door is open to all kinds of corruption. Government shifts from the role of protecting private property to the role of redistributing wealth and rewarding some politically favored groups at the expense of others. With that goal always in mind, powerful government agencies such as the IRS do what they have to do.

The Obama administration does not like Tea Party groups, or any other group who challenges their policies in a principled or boisterous way. As a result they do not consider it biased to single out these groups for punishment or audits, even when — by the evidence of its own investigation — this is what happened.

Power-oriented people do not like dissension or questioning. While the IRS undoubtedly has people like this working in their agency, the real root of the problem is at the top. The IRS is ultimately doing the political bidding of the rulers who make value judgments with other people’s money, rather than simply “collecting revenue” so the nation may pay for its defense force, courthouses and other government buildings.

Americans of all political views — or even no particular political view — should be outraged and upset. Because it’s not in anybody’s interest to have a government so out of control.

If you’re a liberal and a Democrat, you presumably would not like it if a conservative and Republican administration utilized methods to single out groups or organizations you support for review. What would your defense be, if that happened? What if the Republican administration did an audit and investigation of its own IRS and said, “While it’s true that the IRS did single out left-wing groups for review, this does not constitute bias; incomptence maybe, but not bias”?

Two things will bring down any nation or civilization. One, a dictatorial mentality in the part of the rulers. A dictatorial mentality is one whereby laws and principles apply in one set of circumstances, but not in others. In other words, groups that the authority likes will be subject to easier enforcement of tax and other laws, while groups who challenge the authority of the rulers will face a different set of rules.

That’s exactly what’s happening in America now. It did not originate with Obama, but it’s happening more openly than at any time since the republic was founded. Even the pretense of objectivity is withering away.

What’s missing in the majority of Americans is critical thinking.

Too many of us seem unable to grasp that if Obama can get away with this against the Tea Party, then some other President they don’t like can get away with it in regard to a group or organization they do like — or even themselves.

In response to the similarly farcical Benghazi hearings the other day, commentator Charles Krauthammer said, “We’re not going to get the contradictions, we’re not going to get the facts, we’re not going to get the real story underlying it. We’re living in an age where what you say and its relation with the facts is completely irrelevant as we see in the presidential campaign. And it’s carrying over into the hearings.” [realclearpolitics.com 10/22/15]

Krauthammer is right — whether it’s Benghazi, the IRS scandal or so many other things. People we put in charge routinely and blithely lie and get away with it. Is it because most people are stupid? In a sense, yes. But what does “stupid” mean? In this context, “stupid” means unable or unwilling to think in logical and objective terms.

As Krauthammer points out, we’re living in an age where facts and statements are completely disconnected. It’s because the emphasis is on emotion rather than logic or facts. Hillary Clinton was reported as “calm and collected” throughout the Benghazi hearings. What about the evidence? Did she disprove it? What about contradictions between her past statements and more recent ones? If she was lying then, or now, what does it say about her character? Or is the only thing that matters is that she’s “cool and collected”?

These are issues which never get addressed, because the questions are never asked. Not by our teachers, not by our members of Congress, certainly not by anyone in our media and not even by our highest level Justice Department.

America is becoming stupid, and it’s fixable. But only objective, rational and critical thinking can fix it. We’re all capable of it, but we first have to learn it and resolve to use it. Everywhere.