They
say two wrongs don’t make a right, but ignoring one of those wrongs
while vilifying the other is intellectually dishonest and violently
hypocritical, among other things. And certainly that’s the case
surrounding news that the
IRS targeted tea party groups
as a means of determining and verifying their tax-exempt status has
resurrected a familiar debate about government overreach and abuse of
power.
As of right now, it’s unknown whether the IRS was acting on the
behalf of the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party. What we do know,
however, is that it’s not the first time something like this has
happened. We also know that the Democrats have almost universally
condemned the actions of the IRS, as they’ve done when the congressional
Republicans and, naturally, the Bush administration used the nearly
unlimited might of the government to engage in similar investigations —
or worse. And we know that the lock-step party, the Republicans, spent
eight years defending, applauding and enabling Bush abuses on this
front, while subsequently cheerleading the congressional Republicans as
they carry forward the politics of intimidation and government overreach
into the Obama era.
Let’s begin there. The congressional Republicans are outraged by the
IRS story, but they haven’t been able to scramble to the floor of the
House quickly enough to target left-leaning groups.
1. Planned Parenthood. After a hoax video was
produced by James O’Keefe and released by a professional clown-wrangler,
the late Andrew Breitbart, the Republican Party has engaged in a
years-long effort to strip the organization, which offers cancer
screenings and other affordable medical services for women, of
critical funding from the government.
The votes in the House as well as in state legislatures from Arizona to
New Jersey to Texas and New Hampshire — to the tune of
at least $60 million — are nothing more than assault against a political enemy.
2. ACORN. The government attack on ACORN,
traditionally a left-leaning organization, might be hilarious if it
wasn’t so tragic. As with Planned Parenthood, the Republican inquisition
against ACORN was nothing more than a politically-motivated witch hunt
based on, once again, a selectively-edited prank video by a scam artist,
O’Keefe, who’s been
convicted of wiretapping a sitting U.S. Senator and forced in court to pay
$100,000 in restitution to a fired ACORN employee. Yet the entire Republican congressional delegation lined up behind Breitbart and O’Keefe and destroyed ACORN, which entirely
shut down in 2010.
But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans from continuing to vote on at
least several occasions to defund the nonexistent group. In fact,
last week
the chairman House Appropriations Committee Hal Rogers (R-Ky.)
introduced a section into a spending bill that reads: “None of the funds
made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or
successors.”
3. Voter ID Laws and Voter Purges. Whether it’s Governor Rick Scott of Florida
purging voter rolls
of minority voters who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates or
states like Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Tennessee passing restrictive
Voter ID laws, the Republicans are making sure that fewer and fewer
Democrats will be able to freely cast a ballot — our most sacred right
as citizens in a representative democracy.
What about the Bush years?
4. The Bush Justice Department Targeted Democrats for Prosecution. Back in 2007,
the House Judiciary Committee investigated charges that attorney
general Alberto Gonzales singled out prominent Democrats for
prosecution, specifically Pennsylvania Democrats — an assertion that was
backed up by Dick Thornburgh, the attorney general under Reagan and
Bush 41.
5. The Attorney Firing Scandal. Of course there was the
attorney firing scandal
in which the Bush Justice Department fired a slate of U.S. attorneys
for strictly partisan reasons, either because the attorneys were
prosecuting too many Republicans or because they weren’t prosecuting
enough Democrats.
6. The Bush IRS Audited Greenpeace and the NAACP. Not only was the
NAACP suspiciously audited during Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, but high profile Republicans
like Joe Scarborough
had previously supported an audit of the organization even though he’s
suddenly shocked by the current IRS audit story. Also in 2004, the Wall
Street Journal reported that the
IRS audited the hyper-liberal group Greenpeace at the request of Public Interest Watch, a group that’s funded by Exxon-Mobil.
7. The Bush IRS Collected Political Affiliation Data on Taxpayers. In 2006, a contractor hired by the IRS
collected party affiliation
via a search of voter registration roles in a laundry list of states:
Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana,
Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina,
Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin.
This begs the obvious question: why? Why would the IRS need voter
registration and party affiliation information?
8. The Bush FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force Targeted Civil Rights / Anti-war Activists. In 2005, an ACLU investigation revealed that both
the FBI and the JTTF surveilled and gathered intelligence
about a variety of liberal groups including PETA and the Catholic
Workers, along with other groups that it hyperbolically referred to as
having “semi-communistic ideology.”
9. The Bush Pentagon Spied on Dozens of Anti-war Meetings. Also in 2005,
the Department of Defense tracked 1,500 “suspicious incidents” and
spied on four-dozen meetings involving, for example, anti-war Quaker
groups and the like. Yes, really. The Bush administration actually kept
track of who was attending these meetings down to descriptions of the
vehicles used by the attendees, calling to mind the pre-Watergate era
when the government investigated 100,000 Americans during the Vietnam
War.
10. The Bush FBI Targeted Journalists with the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yesterday, it was learned that a U.S. attorney, Ronald Machen,
subpoenaed and confiscated phone records
from the Associated Press as part of a leak investigation regarding an
article about a CIA operation that took place in Yemen to thwart a
terrorist attack on the anniversary of Bin Laden’s death. Well,
this story
pales in comparison with the Bush administration’s inquisition against
the reporters who broke the story about the NSA wiretapping program. In
fact, the Justice Department considered invoking the Espionage Act of
1917, the archaic sequel to the John Adams-era Alien and Sedition Acts.
The Bush FBI seized phone records — without subpoena — from four
American journalists, including Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. How do
we know this for sure? Former FBI Director
Robert Mueller apologized to the
New York Times and the
Washington Post.
Adding… Bush White House Warns Bill Maher After 9/11. Congressional Republicans Condemn Moveon.org.
I’ve coupled these two instances into one simply because they each
underscore the Republican penchant for bullying dissenters. Shortly
after 9/11, Bill Maher committed the mortal sin of suggesting that
terrorists weren’t “cowards” (he was merely agreeing with conservative
fire-eater Dinesh D’Souza). White House press secretary Ari Fleischer,
speaking from the White House, warned Maher: “people have to watch what
they say and watch what they do.” Maher’s show at the time,
Politically Incorrect, was cancelled shortly thereafter. Years later,
Moveon.org criticized
conservative superhero David Petraeus with a full-page ad featuring the
awkward play-on-words “General Betray Us.” George W. Bush himself
pilloried Moveon and the Senate voted to condemn the ad while lionizing Petraeus (a love affair that came to an end last year).
With the IRS and AP stories, any cursory glimpse at the news will prove that Democrats — even liberal bloggers — have been
critical
of the Obama administration’s actions, just as they had been with the
actions of the Bush White House and the Republican Party. But
Republicans? No such fairness or honesty. Of course. And it’s also
important to note the distinction between these recent stories and
what’s obviously a Republican textbook strategy of employing any means
necessary in suppressing its opposition — from the ballot box to the
pages of our top-shelf newspapers. This is what they do: they
intimidate, bully, prosecute and silence their critics as a matter of
routine. And they rarely apologize or accept responsibility for it.
