The point is that FOX News, which operates as the media arm of the Republican Party, has been doing its damnedest to be to Benghazi what the Washington Post was to Watergate…
Comparisons between Benghazi and Watergate are fundamentally flawed; and here’s why: Nixon actively participated in both the conspiracy to burgle the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the subsequent cover up when the shit hit the fan. By contrast, Obama clearly had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack. What’s more, even the most rabid Republican can only impute guilt to him in the subsequent cover up, which congressional testimony indicates was directed not out of the White House (as was the case with Watergate), but out of the Department of State…
I am convinced the Administration engaged in a cover up of its security failures, which included whitewashing the infamous CIA talking points by deleting all references to terrorists to make them comport with Obama’s re-election narrative.
(“Benghazi: Obama’s Watergate? Hardly,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 9, 2013)
On second thought, FOX News may be forgiven its dogged determination to bring down President Obama the way the Washington Post brought down President Nixon; its reporters are clearly vying to be the next Woodward or Bernstein.
After all, whatever the shortcomings in FOX’s claims about Obama covering up Benghazi the way Nixon covered up Watergate, late-breaking reports about the IRS targeting his enemies are giving credence to this foreboding Nixon-Obama analogy.
The Internal Revenue Service apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was ‘inappropriate’ targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.
IRS agents singled out dozens of organizations for additional reviews because they included the words ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their exemption applications, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for lists of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said.
(Associated Press, May 10, 2013)
The Obama Administration is now in the wholly untenable position of having to disavow the activities of the IRS with the same kind of CYA zeal with which it has been disavowing the activities of the Department of State. I fear, however, that such disavowals are beginning to sound as contrived to fair-minded supporters like me as they have always sounded to congenital critics like Tea Parties.
Like al-Qaeda terrorists – who only needed one good hit to destroy the American way of life forever, Republicans (and their hit men at FOX News) only need one good scandal to destroy Obama’s presidency. Separately, Benghazi and the IRS do not qualify; but together they make for a pretty good scandal.
All the same, let me hasten to clarify that far worse than the IRS targeting conservative political groups is the scandal of so many of these groups fronting as charitable/welfare organizations to game the tax system.
This gaming can be directly attributed to the decision the Supreme Court handed down in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which effectively granted corporations and individuals the right to funnel unlimited cash into political campaigns. In fact, the IRS has been deluged in recent years with applications for tax-exempt status by groups pledging “to promote social welfare” under IRC Sections 501(c)(3)(4).
Except that under c(3):
Organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.
And under c(4)
The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.
Which means that Tea Party and affiliated groups were/are clearly in violation of not just the letter but even the spirit of this law. After all, they have been open and notorious in their political campaigning on behalf of conservative/Republican candidates ever since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. Think of all of those annoying campaign ads they ran — not advocating any cause so much as bashing Obama and other liberal candidates.
No group has been more flagrant in this respect than American Crossroads — co-founded by the former top advisor to former President George W. Bush, Karl Rove. American Crossroads raised hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2012 presidential campaign and used all of it in a brazen, but futile, attempt to help Romney defeat Obama. Yet it operated and benefited as a tax-exempt organization.
Mind you, the IRS would be the first to point out that liberal political groups were/are guilty of the similar violations. Most notable on their side is Priorities USA — co-founded by the former top advisor to Obama, Bill Burton. The IRS would also be keen to point out that the only reason conservative groups appear to have been targeted is that their patently fraudulent applications outnumbered those of liberal groups 100 to 1. Which, of course, reflected the pervasive and dogged zeal among conservatives to make Obama a one-term president.
All of this makes the carping by conservative groups as brazenly disingenuous as it is defiantly hypocritical. Not least because practically all of them participated in, or intervened in, political campaigns on behalf of conservative candidates (or in opposition to liberal ones as was more often the case). More important, not a single one of them was actually denied the tax-exempt status they sought. All the IRS did was make them jump through endless hoops by demanding answers to all kinds of intrusive questions aimed at getting them to put in writing the violations everyone knew they were committing in practice.
This is why the real scandal here is not the IRS targeting conservative groups. The real scandal is the IRS failing to prosecute them. Not to mention the hypocrisy inherent in conservatives raising holy hell in this case but voicing nary a word of protest when the IRS was targeting the NCAAP and Black churches in similar fashion during the presidency of Republican George W. Bush.
Nonetheless, I concluded in my May 9 commentary cited above that the Administration had in fact engaged in a cover up over Benghazi. Which is why, given this new IRS angle, it behooves President Obama himself to give a Nixon-like Checkers speech, and pray it absolves him from having to give a Nixon-like resignation speech.
On the other hand, he could wag this Benghazi-IRS dog by bombing Syria to smithereens, um, for crossing his red line on chemical weapons, of course.
* This commentary was originally published on Sunday, May 12, at 8:54 pm
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