The IRS Story Keeps Getting Worse

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary:

The liberal line about the IRS and other administration scandals in the last week has been that even if there was some low-level wrongdoing, an American public that is worried about the economy isn’t really interested in any of it. They are convinced that the only people willing to connect the dots between the demonization of the Tea Party by President Obama and the liberal press and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups are Republican partisans. As Seth wrote on Friday, Democratic complacence is based on the idea that Republicans are overreacting to the current scandals in much the same manner that they oversold the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998. But the revelation of two new angles to the IRS story in recent days shows that contrary to the hopes of Democrats, it is not only not dying down but could get worse.

By now, just about everyone has seen the videos of IRS employees line dancing at a conference paid for by taxpayers. The videos, like another bizarre IRS project previously discovered in which government employees acted out “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island” parodies, illustrates an agency that is out of control and unaccountable in the way it wastes the money that it so zealously collects from the public.

But just as hard to explain is the news first reported on Friday by the Daily Caller that the wife of the IRS commissioner on whose watch the targeting of conservatives occurred is a senior official of a Washington group that has advocated for this kind of discriminatory scrutiny. One of the top talking points for liberals about the IRS has been to point out that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman was appointed to his office by President George W. Bush, therefore lending a bipartisan gloss to the problem. But now it seems as if what was going on during Shulman’s frequent trips to the Obama White House isn’t the only question about his conduct that needs answering...

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