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Peter Wehner on the administration that gives answers that are the “least untruthful.”
Talk about collapsing standards. When Barack Obama ran for office, his promise wasn’t that he’d simply improve our politics; he would transform them. He would appoint men and women of unblemished integrity who would serve the public interest. Mr. Obama would hold people accountable. He boasted in 2010 that he had put in place the toughest ethics rules in history. His administration would be the most transparent in history. And all of this would restore faith and trust in government.
That was then. Let me tell you about now.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, clearly mislead Congress when in March of this year Clapper was asked by Senator Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
“No, sir,” Clapper responded.
“It does not?” Wyden asked again.
“Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”
That statement was false, since we know that the NSA has collected phone records of millions of Americans.
And so what is Mr. Clapper’s excuse? Try this one on for size. The New York Times reports that in an interview on Sunday with NBC News, Mr. Clapper acknowledged that his answer had been problematic, calling it “the least untruthful” answer he could give.
That phrase–what Clapper said is “the least untruthful” answer he could give–should live on in scandal lore. …
Daniel Henninger on the same theme.
Here is Barack Obama commenting last Friday on the National Security Agency’s antiterrorist surveillance programs: “We’ve got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”
Uh-huh.
Herewith a partial list of political groups that said they were subjected to over-the-top audits by the Internal Revenue Service:
Greenwich Tea Party Patriots, Greater Phoenix Tea PartyPatriots, Laurens County Tea Party, Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, Myrtle Beach Tea Party, Albuquerque Tea Party, San Antonio Tea Party, Richmond Tea Party, Manassas Tea Party, Honolulu Tea Party, Waco Tea Party, Chattanooga Tea Party and American Patriots Against Government Excess.
What that target list shows is there was never one “tea party.” It was collections of citizens spontaneously gathering all over the country under one easy-to-remember name. Their purpose was to do politics. For that, their government hit them hard.
In January the pollsters at the PewResearchCenter reported that for the first time a majority of Americans—53%—now agree that “the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms.”
This is far beyond concerns about the size of government. A majority of people now see the government of Madison, Jefferson and Franklin as a direct, personal threat.
So yes, we have “some problems” here. …
Mark Steyn with a Corner post.
When the IRS is accused of “targeting,” don’t assume they’re speaking metaphorically. From Politico:
As chairman of the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, [Jeff] Duncan (R-S.C.) toured a federal law enforcement facility in late May and noticed agents training with the semi-automatic weapons at a firing range. They identified themselves as IRS, he said.
“When I left there, it’s been bugging me for weeks now, why IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15, which has stand-off capability,” Duncan told POLITICO. “Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability..?
“I think Americans raise eyebrows when you tell them that IRS agents are training with a type of weapon that has stand-off capability. It’s not like they’re carrying a sidearm and they knock on someone’s door and say, ‘You’re evading your taxes,’” Duncan said.
A bureaucracy is bad. A politicized bureaucracy is worse. A paramilitary politicized bureaucracy is nuts. And, in fact, evil. There is no reason in a civilized society why the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Paperwork should have his own SEAL Team Six. …
George Will says Lois Lerner is the “scowling face of the state.”
As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.
He lost his campaign. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later, when he was a prosperous lawyer and won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin.
In the fall of 1996, at the campaign’s climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Election Commission charges against Salvi’s campaign alleging campaign finance violations. These charges dominated the campaign’s closing days. Salvi spoke by telephone with the head of the FEC’s Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.” He was speaking to Lois Lerner.
After losing to Durbin, Salvi spent four years and $100,000 fighting the FEC, on whose behalf FBI agents visited his elderly mother demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son’s campaign, where she got “that kind of money.” When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner.
More recently, she has been head of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, which has used its powers of delay, harassment and extortion to suppress political participation. For example, it has told an Iowa right-to-life group that it would get tax-exempt status if it would promise not to picket Planned Parenthood clinics. …
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote a WSJ column about IRS abuse in May 2009.
Barack Obama owes his presidency in no small part to the power of rhetoric. It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate the damage that loose talk can do to America’s tax system, even as exploding federal deficits make revenues more important than ever.
At his Arizona State University commencement speech last Wednesday, Mr. Obama noted that ASU had refused to grant him an honorary degree, citing his lack of experience, and the controversy this had caused. He then demonstrated ASU’s point by remarking, “I really thought this was much ado about nothing, but I do think we all learned an important lesson. I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets. . . . President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
Just a joke about the power of the presidency. Made by Jay Leno it might have been funny. But as told by Mr. Obama, the actual president of the United States, it’s hard to see the humor. Surely he’s aware that other presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, have abused the power of the Internal Revenue Service to harass their political opponents. But that abuse generated a powerful backlash and with good reason. Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. …
The Economist reports on a carbon fiber cable invented in Finland for elevator shafts. It will allow more sky to be scraped because at 100 or so floors, the weight of the steel cable began to be a height limiting factor. Economics will still be in play though as there are limits to the amount of each floor’s space that can be dedicated to elevator shafts. One solution was the sky lobbies used in the World Trade Center which saw three cars in one shaft.
WHEN Elisha Otis stood on a platform at the 1854 World Fair in New York and ordered an axeman to cut the rope used to hoist him aloft, he changed cityscapes for ever. To the amazement of the crowd his new safety lift dropped only a few inches before being held by an automatic braking system. This gave people the confidence to use what Americans insist on calling elevators. That confidence allowed buildings to rise higher and higher.
They could soon go higher still, as a result of another breakthrough in lift technology. This week Kone, a Finnish liftmaker, announced that after a decade of development at its laboratory in Lohja, which sits above a 333-metre-deep mineshaft which the firm uses as a test bed, it has devised a system that should be able to raise an elevator a kilometre (3,300 feet) or more. This is twice as far as the things can go at present. Since the effectiveness of lifts is one of the main constraints on the height of buildings, Kone’s technology—which replaces the steel cables from which lift cars are currently suspended with ones made of carbon fibres—could result in buildings truly worthy of the name “skyscraper”. …