e2c781f8   
   XPost: alt.society.liberalism, can.politics, talk.politics.guns   
   From: kurtnicklas@gmail.com   
      
   Why This Scandal Is Different   
      
   Peggy Noonan   
      
   Sometimes when you’re writing part of a column you keep getting close   
   to the meaning of what you want to say but you don’t quite get there,   
   the full formulation of the idea eludes you. Then two days later,   
   relaxing in conversation with friends, the thought comes to you whole,   
   and you think: That’s what I meant to say. That’s what I was trying to   
   get.   
      
   This week I had one of those moments. I kept trying, the paragraph   
   kept not quite working, the deadline came.   
      
   I got an email last night that had the effect of a clarifying   
   conversation. It was from a smart friend who works in government. He   
   understood the point I was trying to make about how the current IRS   
   scandal is different from previous ones and more threatening to the   
   American arrangement. I had written that this scandal isn’t a discrete   
   event in which a president picks up a phone and tells someone in the   
   White House to look into the finances of some steel industry   
   executives, or to check out the returns of some guy on an enemies   
   list.   
      
   But my friend got to the essence. He wrote, “The left likes to say,   
   ‘Watergate was worse!’ Watergate was bad—don’t get me wrong. But it   
   was elites using the machinery of government to spy on elites. . . .   
   It’s something quite different when elites use the machinery of   
   government against ordinary people. It’s a whole different ball game.”   
      
   It is.   
      
   That’s exactly what I meant.   
      
   In previous IRS scandals it was the powerful abusing the powerful—a   
   White House moving against prominent financial or journalistic figures   
   who, because of their own particular status or the machineries at   
   their disposal, could pretty much take care of themselves. A scandal   
   erupts, there are headlines, and then people go on their way. The   
   dreadful thing about this scandal, what makes it ominous, is that this   
   is the elites versus regular citizens. It’s the mighty versus normal   
   people. It’s the all-powerful directors of the administrative state   
   training their eyes and moving on uppity and relatively undefended   
   Americans.   
      
   That’s what makes this scandal different, and why if it’s not stopped   
   now it will never stop. Because every four years you can get yourself   
   a new president and a new White House, but you won’t easily get   
   yourself a whole new administrative state. It’s there, it’s not going   
   away, not anytime soon. If it isn’t forced back into its cage now, and   
   definitively, it will prowl the land hungrily forever.   
      
   One more thing.   
      
   One of the reasons a lot of people in New York and Washington are not   
   deeply distressed by the IRS targeting of conservative groups is that   
   they have it in their heads that it only involved the tea party and   
   the tea party is full of nuts, weirdoes and radicals whose   
   discouragement wouldn’t be a grave national loss. It’s not only tea-   
   party groups that were targeted, of course, but the IRS was only too   
   happy to get the idea out there that it was. But if you’re the kind of   
   person who thinks Tea Party people are low and extreme, that they’re   
   the kind of people who’d hurt our country, take a few minutes to look   
   at this. It’s a website that will take you to videos of a town hall   
   meeting of the SouthWest Cincinnati Tea Party. It was held Wednesday   
   night. Its subject was “IRS Intimidation—Are You Next?”   
      
   Do those people really strike you as weird and radical? Do they seem   
   destructive? They are normal citizens. And they feel besieged.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)