GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

The only people surprised by the Obama snooping scandals. . .

by

. . . are those who, to borrow a political expression from the left, haven’t been paying attention.

Many of us on the right have long been pointing out that Barack Obama cut his teeth in Chicago politics and long practiced the politics for which that city is famous.  Or perhaps, I should say, infamous.

The only folks in the media who believed the Democrat’s lofty rhetoric about being some new kind of politician were those who repeated his campaign’s, uh, well, talking points and gave short shrift to his actual record.  That is, they took his claims at face value and didn’t investigate his claims.

No wonder they didn’t do much investigating when Tea Party groups started complaining that the IRS was subjecting them to an unusual degree of scrutiny.  Such government behavior didn’t correspond to their image of an open and accountable administration.  The story is not a new one.  The enhanced media attention is.

UPDATE:  From Glenn Reynolds:  “JIM TREACHER: ‘The only difference between this week and every other week for the last 4 years is that for once we’re not the only ones paying attention.’”

Yup, pretty much.

NB:  Tweaked the post to fix some typographical and grammatical errors.

An administration of snoops?

by

Evidence of a pattern in this administration seems to be emerging, a pattern consistent with the way politics is practiced in a certain large Midwestern city where a certain successful Democratic politician cut his political teeth.  And what we are learning makes it increasingly unlikely that low-level flunkeys were responsible for the IRS singling out conservative groups for special scrutiny.

The IRS just happened to have leaked the files on those conservative groups to a left-of-center outfit.

It’s not just conservative groups.  The AP reports that it took has been a target:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012.

James Taranto provides a few more examples of the federal government investigating Obama’s, er, um, well, for lack of better word, uh, “enemies.”

(Okay, okay, I too thought the AP was more of an Obama ally than an enemy.  Hey, but when you’re drawing up lists. . . ”

UPDATE:  Why would the federal government want to know the names of all the volunteers working for an individuals donating to a local Tea Party in a swing state?  And to whom is it leaking the confidential information about conservative organizations?  Isn’t releasing such information a criminal offense?

IRS targeting the Tea Party: really a surprise?

by

For years, the Left has been trying to link the Tea Party with terrorism. Examples include:

Given the climate of bias, hate and fear that our top leaders and media have sought to foment against the Tea Party for years, is it any wonder that self-important IRS bureaucrats would act unethically toward it?

UPDATE: As long as my list is, I know that I’ve missed some juicy examples of our top leaders and media fomenting bigotry against the Tea Party. Please feel free to add more in the comments.

UPDATE: Rick Santelli points out the logical endpoint of the IRS’ approach – namely, your Obamacare death panel Accountability Board saying “No stent for you!” based on your politics – and predicts that Obamacare will be altered partly to prevent such a nightmare.

UPDATE: How could I not mention how they’ve also tried to link the Tea Party with racism? Latest example: a top NAACP leader claims that America’s racist Taliban deserved the IRS scrutiny.

Many questions on Benghazi and the IRS/Tea Party scandals

by

Drudge, linking this New Yorker story, is reporting that the Press Corps may be turning on Benghazi:

Screen shot 2013-05-12 at 11.21.26 PM

And while we do see the story breaking through into the mainstream media, they still seem more fascinated with human interest stories than Democratic scandals.  Last evening at the gym, I caught ABC’s “World News with David Muir” to see the eponymous anchor lead off with a story about the brothers of the creepy Cleveland kidnapper/rapist.

“What did they know?” I read on the closed captioning.

Shouldn’t journalists be asking that question not about two men (apparently) wrongly incarcerated for a crime their brother committed, but about the immediate past Secretary of State and the incumbent President of the United States?  Did Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama knew the the Benghazi talking points had undergone “12 revisions” and were “scrubbed of terror reference”?  If they didn’t know (and there is so far no evidence that they did) which White House and State Department officials did?  And why did they do the revising and the scrubbing?

Was there any coordination between the scrubbers and the Obama campaign?  Or the Democratic National Committee?

And then we come to the questions about the other administration scandal brewing, the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.  Even the most liberal Republican Senator is outraged.  Susan Collins finds it “absolutely chilling that the IRS was singling out conservative groups for extra review” and thinks “it’s very disappointing that the president hasn’t personally condemned this and spoken out.”

The gentlelady from Maine just doesn’t “buy that this was a couple of rogue IRS employees:

After all, groups with ‘progressive’ in their names were not targeted similarly. There is the evidence that higher level supervisors were aware of this. And the IRS was not forthcoming in telling Congress about the problem.

Once again, we have a similar set of questions. Who authorized this “targeting”?  Who crafted the list of crazy things the IRS asked of the Tea Party groups?   Had there been any input from the White House?  From the Democratic National Committee? [Read more…]

All hell would have broken loose had IRS under W targeted “progressive” groups

by

George Will was on a roll today, getting first at the essence of the Benghazi scandal and now about the IRS/Tea Party scandal:

“The Tea Party people have known about this and were working on this,” [George] will [said Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”] “But they said — it was just some odd underlings out in Cincinnati who did this and there was no political motive whatever involved. Now the question is, how stupid do they think we are? Just imagine, Donna Brazile, if the George W. Bush administration had an IRS underling, he’s out in Cincinnati, of course, saying we’re going to target groups with the word ‘progressive’ in their title. We’d have all hell breaking loose.”

Via Instapundit.