I know. Shocking, right? — particularly coming from a non-political, dedicated civil servant who insists she’s done nothing wrong while heading the Exempt Division at the IRS?
Meet your new Obama fall gal. Because this one they’ll throw to the GOP wolves, then lament the misogynistic Republican war on women that led to her professional demise.
That’s how these shitbags operate. And useful idiots like Lerner who exist to protect the king and his court will always one day find that they were all along considered disposable.
TWS:
Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency’s growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct.
Still, Lerner has her defenders in the government and the media. Shortly after the scandal broke, The Daily Beast published an article headlined “IRS Scandal’s Central Figure, Lois Lerner, Described as ‘Apolitical.’” Insisting Lerner, and the IRS more broadly, were not not politically motivated has been a central contention of those trying to minimize the impact of the scandal.
The trouble with this defense is that, prior to joining the IRS, Lerner’s tenure as head of the Enforcement Office at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was marked by what appears to be politically motivated harassment of conservative groups.
— and here’s where it gets interesting. The left always attempts to circle the wagons around one of their own right up until they feel the floodgates can no longer hold, at which point they’ll be forced to sacrifice this one for the Greater Good they are after. Each operative swears fidelity to the Cause — and each one believes, truly, that it will never be s/he who will have to make a personal sacrifice to it. Which fits in perfectly to the mindset of those who believe passing laws to steal other people’s money and re-distribute it makes them charitable and compassionate: it’s a form of delusion, and one that is useful to those who work them. Hence, useful idiots. Each too arrogant and too much of a special snowflake to believe it will ever be he or she who is offered up at the altar of future progressive Utopianism.
Lerner was appointed head of the FEC’s enforcement division in 1986 and stayed in that position until 2001. In the late 1990s, the FEC launched an onerous investigation of the Christian Coalition, ultimately costing the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours in lost work. The investigation was notable because the FEC alleged that the Christian Coalition was coordinating issue advocacy expenditures with a number of candidates for office. Aside from lacking proof this was happening, it was an open question whether the FEC had the authority to bring these charges.
James Bopp Jr., who was lead counsel for the Christian Coalition at the time, tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD the Christian Coalition investigation was egregious and uncalled for. “We felt we were being singled out, because when you handle a case with 81 depositions you have a pretty good argument you’re getting special treatment. Eighty-one depositions! Eighty-one! From Ralph Reed’s former part-time secretary to George H.W. Bush. It was mind blowing,” he said.
All told the FEC deposed 48 different people—and that doesn’t begin to account for all the FEC’s requests for information. Bopp further detailed the extent of the inquiry in testimony delivered before the congressional Committee on House Administration in 2003:
The FEC conducted a large amount of paper discovery during the administrative investigation and then served four massive discovery requests during the litigation stage that included 127 document requests, 32 interrogatories, and 1,813 requests for admission. Three of the interrogatories required the Coalition to explain each request for admission that it did not admit in full, for a total of 481 additional written answers that had to be provided. The Coalition was required to produce tens of thousands of pages of documents, many of them containing sensitive and proprietary information about ?nances and donor information. Each of the 49 state af?liates were asked to provide documents and many states were individually subpoenaed. In all, the Coalition searched both its offices and warehouse, where millions of pages of documents are stored, in order to produce over 100,000 pages of documents.
Furthermore, nearly every aspect of the Coalition’s activities has been examined by FEC attorneys from seeking information regarding its donors to information about its legislative lobbying. The Commission, in its never-ending quest to find the non-existent “smoking gun,” even served subpoenas upon the Coalition’s accountants, its fundraising and direct mail vendors, and The Christian Broadcasting Network.
One of the most shocking things about the current IRS scandal is the revelation that the agency asked one religious pro-life group to detail the content of their prayers and asked clearly inappropriate questions about private religious activity. But under Lerner’s watch, inappropriate religious inquiries were a hallmark of the FEC’s interrogation of the Christian Coalition. According to Bopp’s testimony:
FEC attorneys continued their intrusion into religious activities by prying into what occurs at Coalition staff prayer meetings, and even who attends the prayer meetings held at the Coalition. This line of questioning was pursued several times. Deponents were also asked to explain what the positions of “intercessory prayer” and “prayer warrior” entailed, what churches speci?c people belonged, and the church and its location at which a deponent met Dr. Reed.
One of the most shocking and startling examples of this irrelevant and intrusive questioning by F EC attorneys into private political associations of citizens occurred during the administrative depositions of three pastors from South Carolina. Each pastor, only one of whom had only the slightest connection with the Coalition, was asked not only about their federal, state and local political activities, including party af?liations, but about political activities that, as one FEC attorney described as “personal,” and outside of the jurisdiction of the FECA [Federal Election Campaign Act]. They were also continually asked about the associations and activities of the members of their congregations, and even other pastors.
[…]
The Christian Coalition was ultimately absolved of any FEC wrongdoing in 1999, and Lerner was promoted to acting General Counsel at the FEC in 2001 before eventually moving on to the IRS. Bopp, who’s all too familiar with the aggressive and inappropriate tenor she set leading the FEC’s Enforcement Division, says he became concerned about what would happen as soon as Lerner joined the IRS. “When she left the FEC, I thought, ‘Wow, this means the not for profit division is gearing up politically,'” he said. “It didn’t bode well, because of the way [the FEC] approached cases.”
I tire of repeating this, but here it goes: it’s the political left. This is who they are. It’s what they do. They despise any real intellectual independence and religious liberty, which is why they write up and support egregious speech codes and use identity politics and its political correctness enforcement arm to “nudge” speech and thought into something that must first, in practice if not in law (yet), pass government sanction. It is why they seek tirelessly to re-imagine traditional American tropes and imbue them with new meanings, essentially preserving the labels while deconstructing and then resignifying them until they come to mean their opposites: “fairness” becomes about redistribution and equality of outcome; “tolerance” becomes about not giving offense and the “right” not to perceive any offense even where none was intended (I like to call this the READER POLL school of post-textual textualism, essentially, a motivated heckler’s veto suffused into law and culture); “liberty” becomes a product of government largess and help (“you didn’t build that!”), a product of collectivism and not of individual autonomy.
They will, as statist ideologues, always and forever pressure the Constitution, because they cannot as a political movement officially act within its constraints and remain committed to their collectivist cause. This is why they pretend to revere the Constitution when it favors them (usually through some wholly unjustifiable judicial interpretation) and in other instances insist we abandon it as old and the product of racism and antiquated notions of individual liberty and self-reliance.
Anti-foundationalism absolves them of the need for consistency. It instead promotes the idea of a will to power, where the ends justify the means, always. And it is why they’ve worked so hard to take meaning away from the individual and grant it to politicized consensus groups, who can be bought, corralled, controlled, and motivated to create and then assert a manufactured consent that stands in for “truth.”
eg., READER POLL!
People like Lerner are the mid-level officers in such a war against the Enlightenment and its flowering political achievement: a Constitution that takes the ultimate authority for granting certain rights away from men entirely, one that grants ownership of the government to a free people and one that is suspicious and hostile to entrenched ruling class ideas and attitudes, and about the centralization of governmental authority.
To achieve statist Utopia, the left must defeat our Constitution. And that’s what they have worked tirelessly to do — through a hostile takeover of the language and the kernel assumptions that undergird its use and function; through control over message dissemination; through the popular culture and the academies; and through the courts and bureaucratic agencies whom they lard with political activists and operatives, the overarching narrative of the righteousness of their causes seeming so overwhelming at times that it will nudge conservative justices and Republican politicians to the left, where they find a sense of belonging and raw personal power.
Lerner is like many other statist leftists in positions of power: directing her particular hive of drones to do their part to molest the free and disrupt liberty, to create pain for those who don’t hew to leftist orthodoxy while rewarding those who do.
This happens everywhere in “our” government, form the EPA to the FCC to the FEC to Interior to the IRS and on and on and on.
Which is why we must of necessity begin to dismantle the bureaucratic state, dismantle the activist press, and return to our Constitutional moorings. One way to do that is by reclaiming he language.
But history has taught me, personally, that there are those on our side who are content to operate within the left’s framework and in fact embrace it. This gives them the best of both worlds: they can use the methodologies of the left to their own personal advantages, and they can remain “warriors” for a conservative cause they help guarantee will always be under siege and can never win the long term battle.
I suppose it’s no secret to say that in many ways, I despise those types most of all.
At Powerline:
I like that. “You don’t have a constitutional right to a government job.”
Government jobs don’t have a Constitutional right to Public Sector Union representation diametrically opposed to or contrary to the interests of the people whom the government is intended to serve. Public Sector Unions delenda est.
it’s a form of delusion
Examples of “delusional exegesis,” wherein left-wing clergy utterly mangle scripture to their own ends.
That passage is a bit difficult to parse, because it DOES look like Jesus is being a jerk, at least at first. However, even a hardened atheist can properly interpret Acts 16 (or at least I hope so):
Sheesh, these people are a menace.
George Orwell called this doublethink, another prime example of which is also to be found in the Weekly Standard, Charlotte Allen’s “Beyond the Pale.”
As Ed Driscoll observes “Ahh Frankfurt School, you’ve poisoned the well so effectively, no one can detect your fingerprints[.]”
And useful idiots like Lerner who exist to protect the king and his court will always one day find that they were all along considered disposable.
It shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a Demotivator for that.
sacrificial pawn, marty for the cause
potayto, potahtoh
martyr
For a moment, I thought “Marty for the Cause” was going to be a new series on ABC prime time.
About a dumb but likeable guy who keeps Gumping his way up the political food chain maybe?
– and here’s where it gets interesting. The left always attempts to circle the wagons around one of their own right up until they feel the floodgates can no longer hold, at which point they’ll be forced to sacrifice this one for the Greater Good they are after. Each operative swears fidelity to the Cause — and each one believes, truly, that it will never be s/he who will have to make a personal sacrifice to it. Which fits in perfectly to the mindset of those who believe passing laws to steal other people’s money and re-distribute it makes them charitable and compassionate: it’s a form of delusion, and one that is useful to those who work them. Hence, useful idiots. Each too arrogant and too much of a special snowflake to believe it will ever be he or she who is offered up at the altar of future progressive Utopianism.
Here are the $64 trillion questions. (Literally, that may be what it costs us in the long run):
1. Can any of these snowflakes be “turned” (as Soviet agents sometimes were back in the day)? Used to patriot advantage?
2. Will any of them wise up? If it happened to a Red Diaper Baby like David Horowitz, after all, can it happen to any of them?
3. Even if they come around for the wrong reasons, are they useful if they still come around? I am thinking of Dick Morris, who is frankly motivated by an anti-Democrat vendetta rather than a full change of heart/mind, but he’s at least firing his cannons in the right direction.
David Horowitz has character. These clowns are characters. They couldn’t stand being abandoned by all their pals for their apostasy.
They couldn’t stand being abandoned by all their pals for their apostasy.
But surely discovering they aren’t the special snowflakes and are expendable has got to hurt. That’s got to be a teachable moment for them.
Don’t count on it. Do lemmings strike out on their own?
It took a dead woman, a young lady Horowitz knew and liked personally, for him to wise up. And Morris isn’t really all that useful since Morris is all about Morris. Not unlike any number of folks on the right, in politics or the commentariat, really.
The point being that that these snowflakes are more likely to play Rubashov than Terry Malloy.
Ernst gets it.
O/T Try to read this front page tease at Pravda without sniggering:
“Capehart: Take Anthony Weiner seriously”
And yet, Arthur Koestler did come around.
And even if the snowflakes won’t, certainly people under them might learn something? I knew one Berkeley mushyhead who got her dream political job on Congressbitch Maxine Waters’ staff, and lets just say she learned a lot.
It’s either that or giving up and going back to my doomsday plan.
Persons who are willing to turn their backs on their comrades and rat them out to their political opponents are few and far between. Whitaker Chambers had his personal and professional life ruined and his corporeal life threatened when he became a witness against Alger Hiss and others. It takes tremendous courage and we are, sadly, a nation of cowards.
SW: I saw one this morning “Cuomo Slaps Weiner”. The jokes just write themselves.
And yet, Arthur Koestler did come around.
I’m not sure that he did come around, unless anti-communisim is synonymous with pro-liberalism (in the classical sense).
Orwell soured on communism, without giving up on democratic socialism —at least not entirely.
He was no Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Adding to leigh’s comment on Whittaker Chambers, don’t overlook that Chambers was convinced that he was joining the losing side.
The Republican party has become so worried about winning that it’s forgotten how to stop worrying about losing.
without giving up
Coming to terms with the failure of god is a hard business. Maybe even especially for those who are willing to try it, for they more than most are under a kind of coercion.
Solzhenitsyn is in his own category (almost). The man hated godless matieralism in all its forms from top–down command and control central planning to bottom–up market oriented mass consumerism.
He’s kind of like the Pope that way.
I think that’s an excellent way of describing Orwell sdferr.
in re: Charlotte Allen’s piece, search “there’s no such thing as race (and it’ a good thing too) to see my answer to this line of reasoning — originally written in 1996 and published in the U of Denver newspaper.
Why are conservatives just now, 17 years after the fact and 11 years after I first posted it here (with repeated repostings), realizing any of this?
And will the next step be to talk about how language the way it is currently granted its legitimacy is complicit in the rise and success of leftism?
I can hardly wait for the big boy blogs to teach us of these things!