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Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
Dissection carefully administered is almost always fascinating: it’s hard to look away no matter how bloody the operation, isn’t it?
From the March hearing:
****Late in the hearing, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) appeared to lose his temper.
“Let me ask you this,” said Meadows, cutting Koskinen off. “At what point should this committee hold you and your agency in contempt for not complying? What’s the timeline?”
Koskinen, who has been commissioner for four months, didn’t take the question well, and offered up about as sharp of a rebuke a member of Congress is likely to get from a witness in the hot seat.
“I think the timeline is whenever you think you could actually sustain that in a court,” Koskinen said.
He then suggested that Meadows and others hadn’t paid close enough attention to what he was saying to understand what was going on.
[…]
Even committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who also thinks the IRS could provide more documents more quickly, thought some of his members went overboard.
“Mr. Commissioner, I appreciate you were treated well in some cases, and in some cases, our members went off topic,” Issa said. “You handled yourself incredibly well.”****
And I thought I was a motherless fish.
– You gotta love the way he just blows by the double standard they hope to push off as the answer to all questions. Sort of an IRS “fog of war”, and the war is on Conservatives in general and the tea party in particular.
– That WH lawyer bitch now has fewer ways she can dodge, lest the two of them start contradicting each other.
– Tomorrow should be interesting. If she takes the fifth I think the roof will cave in.
Hell, that’s no fish, that’s a pussy.
I am quite reassured to know that that no one has committed murder, rape, or armed robbery in front of the Commissioner. Of course these things might have gone one somewhere just out of his sight and hearing but we can rest now that we know he has never witnessed any wrongdoing that he knew was wrong, personally.
The commissioner is just an ignorant smug union douche sent up to stone wall and catch softly tossed spears with a stern voice. But he’s mostly bluff. He can be rattled. Red Rover Red Rover. Let Trey come over.
The Koskinen is not smart enough to go head to head with Trey Gowdy. However, Koskinen is arrogant enough to think he can.
Notice the resoundingly out of place cocktail party chitter-chatter Koskinen chose to use when asked whether it was true he was a lawyer? “I gave it up for lent back in 19blahblahblah, and never went back.” Smug? Believes he’s clever? Thinks he can subtly denigrate lawyers or lawyering and make some connection with “the public” that way while he lies and stalls his devious path through the facts?
He doesn’t seem to know where he is, or what gravity to place on his testimony.
So the Democrat minority is back at their ” . . . poor poor IRS, it suffers under such terrible budget cuts and work-force reductions, how can it possibly be reasonably expected to not lose precisely the e-mail which would reveal the truth of these non-conspiratorial matters?” Related.
Check out Elijah Cumming as he slurps up the bullshit Koskinen has laid down…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3KICjX0R0Q
In some small way, it’s genuinely interesting that the Democrat committee members exhibit zero regard for their own personal repute, as though they cannot conceive that historical researches (let alone potential criminal procedures possible in future) will reveal clearly their deep complicity in this massive panic cover-up. Their minds don’t seem capable of extending into any realm remotely worthy of the name “truth”, just as if their web of obfuscations and outright lies cannot ever be seen, but merely by their constructions will eternally determine the skein of “reality”. This wouldn’t even qualify as idiotic, if these little geniuses gave the matter a moment’s thought.
Law school warps the mind permanently. Hell, I only took a few undergraduate pre-law courses and they scarred me for life.
Chairman Issa could perhaps have benefited from at least a couple of (trial) law language classes, if only to alert his mind to beware of “television law” terminology inappropriate to his role on a Congressional committee. But he’s a dunce, so wouldn’t ever have noticed his want.
Not only do the Democrat committee members disregard the potential of future historical researches, they delight in disregarding past historical researches which have already debunked their favorite Bush era talking points. In a way, they seem to suggest: “Why bother doing careful research and conclusion drawing, when we will simply repeat falsehoods all day and all night without the least concern? In for a dime, in for 20 trillion dollars, chumps.”
Mark Levin, intimating what will in my opinion likely be an arising due to arrive, sometime this Summer or at the latest, Fall, when the full measure of this criminal enterprise is exposed by the select committee hearings to be conducted by Rep. Gowdy and co.
Half of our standing political order, the Democrat party, is at an undeclared war with the majority of the country, a war built of frauds, threats, usurpations, and bureaucratic assaults; a war of which, in its pathetic innocence (read for innocence, “infantile ignorance”) this childish majority remains asleep, quiescent, and unaware as to detail.
Oh, sure, many people are vaguely cognizant that many things are amiss in the country, that their lives aren’t going quite so well as they had been accustomed to know or to expected to proceed. As to the fundamental frauds committed upon them? In the mass generally, they don’t know, but I think they soon will know. I also believe that Levin’s own temperate outrage may not be the limit of the response the nation will witness when the scope and particularities of this coup d’etat are exposed to view.
The mass of people aren’t used to thinking of politics primarily as a matter of life and death, everywhere and always the most fundamental characterization of the enterprise, life and death being the very grounds upon which all politics is constructed and therefore the foremost consideration whenever the subject arises. What a shock it will be when the truth of the matter sinks home again — pitiless — it having been forgotten or intentionally displaced from mind. To repeat: pitiless.
Only the Democrats? Au contraire! The Stabs are at war with the Republican base, the same as the Dems.
That’s arguable for sure McG. It’s also somewhat confused an issue though, since there are many nominal members of the Republican congressional club who will be, as Gowdy, prominent in exposing the very Democrat warlike enterprise with which we could plausibly charge the majority of the Republican club in complicity, which intentional exposure isn’t exactly in keeping with a serious effort to carry out the war. So we are forced into ridiculous parsing and distinction making, sorting out the decent from the indecent. But honest? Among the Democrats I see no such sorting to be required. Do you?
Or we could put that another way by means of a different question: From whence and to what aim was this war originated and directed?
Obvious to those who ask: the Democrat Party. To the extent that many Republicans go along for the opportunistic ride with the Democrat Party, surely we wouldn’t accuse those simpleton Republicans of being the principal theorists and movers of the war, but merely with being sheep who mistake a bad thing for a good. That doesn’t remove their responsibility when a reckoning comes, though the various distinctions of levels of causal agency are worth preserving.
The Democrat Party, yes, but they are just the vehicle which was hijacked – with inside help to be sure – by what is referred to as the “New Left.” The “New” part just being a marketing ploy to hide that they were no different in effect from the “Old” Left of the 1930s-40s and the CPUSA.
The “war” is simply a continuation of the Cold War, part 2, “The Evil Empire Strikes Back.”
I’m satisfied to leave it at Democrat Party simply, geoffb, if only because I think we can see the motive antecedents of the war on our politics in much earlier eras than the “new left” era, as for instance in the speeches and writings of W. Wilson, or in FDR’s various seminal addresses and speeches. Or to say that another way, I think the origins of the contest lie within the bounds of a far broader political opinion than merely within the narrow scope of communism as such.
The elided premise of Gowdy’s takedown is that one cannot use “common sense” to judge whether or not a crime has taken place, but instead must review every jot and tittle of the United States Code, regulations promulgated by various agencies under the authority granted by “The Secretary shall determine…” provisions of the USC, the laws and regulations of the fifty states, the various territories and the District of Columbia, the rulings of the Supreme and inferior courts upon each of the above.
Mr. Gowdy, this is a bug, not a feature. As satisfying as it is to question the head of the IRS and use this as his own minions routinely do with taxpayers, the sheer volume of laws (and regulations with the force of law, which ought to be made unconstitutional, but that’s another subject) is so large that the government charged with enforcing them all, even if it be entirely staffed by angels, must act in arbitrary, capricious, and tyrannical ways.
As the government is not in fact staffed by angels, that baseline of arbitrary, capricious, tyrannical acts is but enhanced by orders of magnitude.
I’m not so sure that this:
…isn’t directly contradicted by this:
Is it really inconceivable that the proliferation of legal and regulatory minutiae, all surely contravening some other passage quite possibly written by the same aides and certainly voted on by many the same members of Congress, isn’t in place to achieve precisely this outcome?
It’s a bug from our PoV. It’s a feature from the Progs’.
Can we articulate (a very old and possibly somewhat forgotten) account of the relation between the justness of a law, the legitimacy of that law and that law’s intelligibility to human beings — not just a legitimacy to some specific person against whom the law might be applied, but to the entire run (everyone) of all those peoples under the “nominal” jurisdiction of that law?
That is, if say, some hypothetical law could be written (and I think we have seen that indeed, they can be!) such that the written code is entirely unintelligible to anyone, even to those charged with administering it, then that “written” law is by definition unjust and can only be wrongly applied to anyone — hence a kind of self-contradictory illegitimacy as it stands.
– I disagree guys in this instance. Gowdy did not play to ALL the statutes being referenced, he pointed out that the smug asshole reviewed not a single one of them and yet made a sweeping statements about the IRS’s obvious innocence. Pure Kibuki theater.
– Whether or not the RINO based GOP old boys club and corporatist gang are deeply complicit in the whole mess, and therefore we have little chance at ever getting a the truth is another matter.
– These rats are lying with an arrogance that screams absolute assured protection. They couldn’t enjot that without GOP aid.
Courts used to overturn laws as “void for vagueness.” I have no doubt that “void for unintelligibility” would be just as worthy.
Unfortunately the legal profession has a vested interest in laws being unintelligible by the laity. If we could all make sense of the laws as written, what need would we have for lawyers?
The whole range and scope of the problem is quite long and difficult, analyzed somewhere in detail by Aquinas if I recall correctly.
One simple aspect I can readily cite to which remains prominent with us, even if requently violated by the ClownDisaster at a whim, is our “law” regarding the making and institution of law, such as “no ex-post facto” law can be made, for who can intelligibly follow what does not exist at the time he acts? And so on with other a priori guiding conditions of law-making.
Still, it’s a complicated business in itself (the relation between intelligibility and legitimacy), and probably deserves a much better treatment than I am capable of giving it.
frequently
I have to agree with BBH on this: Gowdy was indeed slapping the smug off of Mr. IRS Commissioner. He even had him stuttering before he was done with him.
“The elided premise of Gowdy’s takedown is that one cannot use “common sense” to judge whether or not a crime has taken place, but instead must review every jot and tittle of the United States Code,…”
Hoisted by his own petard!
Hard to have sympathy for a willing stooge for a lawless regime.
– Common sense is not an element in judging law applicability. Many laws are counter-intuitive, and all laws must stand on their descriptions. We don’t get to personally decide which laws we will obey based on our own interpretations.
– Justice is blind. (theoretically.)
****REP. JIM JORDAN (R-OH): Last round. I just ask you, when did you learn? You said sometime in April. I want to focus on when you did officially learn according to your definition. The Chairman asked you who told you this information, you can’t remember?
JOHN KOSKINEN, IRS COMMISSIONER: I do not remember.
J: Did someone say in person? Did someone send you an e-mail? How did you get the information?
K: I do not recall. I do not get e-mails on these subjects, so I am sure it was someone in person.
J: Someone in person? This has been a major news story for the last 13 months and you don’t remember who came up to you and said, ‘Hey, boss, we lost Lois Lerner’s e-mails.’ You don’t remember anything about that situation?
K: I remember being told in April.
J: You don’t remember who told you?
K: I do not recall who told me.
J: For something that has been a front-page story, you’d think it would have been significant to remember how it happened when they told you what the actual date was.
K: You have to remember I am running an agency with 90,000 people.
J: And this has been the biggest issue in front of your agency for the last year.
K: We were in the middle of filing season as all of this was going on.****
Spleef.
Also at RCP:
****“You worked to cover up the fact that there were missing emails and came forward to fess up on Friday afternoon only after you had effectively been caught red-handed,” Mr. Issa, the Oversight Committee’s chairman, admonished Mr. Koskinen. “I’m sick and tired of your game-playing.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting delegate for the District of Columbia, said Mr. Issa was out of line. “It’s vile enough to look a man in the face and accuse him of perjury without submitting any evidence,” she said. “It is much worse when all the evidence supports the version of the facts of the man you are facing.”
Democrats have said Republicans are looking for a conspiracy where there is only a crashed hard drive.
Mr. Koskinen testified that he had hidden nothing from Congress and that he did not learn until April that Ms. Lerner’s emails were missing. “All the emails we have will be provided,” he said in a testy exchange. “I did not say I would provide you emails that disappeared. If you have a magical way for me to do that, I’d be happy to know about it.”
[…]
While Republicans saw intentional destruction of evidence, Mr. Koskinen said no one should be surprised if a computer fails, especially “at the I.R.S. in light of the aged equipment I.R.S. employees often have to use in light of the continual cuts in its budget these past four years.”
The hearing was tense from the outset. Mr. Issa was displeased even before Mr. Koskinen could take his oath. When the congressman asked the commissioner to raise his right hand to swear to tell the truth, he scolded him, “A little higher, thank you.”****
Like Samuel Adams, I am opposed, in principle, to tarring and feathering a fellow Human Being.
However, this arrogant bastard Koskinen is definitely worthy of being made an exception.
Such behavior demands some Street Justice.
Enough is enough.