Peyton Manning plainly wasn’t at the top of his game in Sunday’s Super Bowl.
But neither was President Obama. In a pre-game interview with Bill O’Reilly, Obama also had trouble moving the ball past the line of scrimmage — especially when O’Reilly brought up the IRS scandal. In response, Obama didn’t even blame rogue agents. He blamed Fox News for keeping the story going.
Well, here’s a much-abbreviated list of people who would say otherwise:
- Groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their names. A Treasury audit found that while some groups with “progress” or “progressive” in their names were targeted, “100 percent of the tax-exempt applications with Tea Party, Patriots or 9/12 in their names were processed as potential political cases during the time frame of our audit.” Pro-life and pro-Israel groups were also targeted — and asked for donor names, Facebook entries and, in at least one case, any prayers they might have said.
- National Organization for Marriage had its confidential tax data leaked by the IRS. The info was then posted to the Internet. Now the IRS says privacy laws prevent it from revealing who leaked the info.
- Friends of Abe, a group of Hollywood conservatives applied to the IRS for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status two years ago and is still waiting. Among other things, the IRS asked for access to its private website, which would reveal the names of the group’s members. The group says it will never turn over its names, because many members fear for their livelihoods.
- Christine O’Donnell is a Tea Party Republican in Delaware who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate in 2010. Two years later, a Treasury agent left her a phone message warning “your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual.” The day O’Donnell announced her run for the Senate, the IRS slapped a tax lien on a house she no longer owned — which was used against her in the campaign. The issue is still before Congress.
Can this list really be dismissed as the result of a few “bone-headed decisions,” as the president calls it? Does it suggest there’s not a “smidgen of corruption” connected to the IRS? And what does it mean to say we’ve had “multiple hearings,” when Lois Lerner has taken the Fifth, Treasury is stonewalling Congress and the FBI is leaking its conclusions absolving the administration before the investigation is over?
The glaring scandal of this weekend is not that Fox News pressed the president on the IRS. The scandal is how so many others continue to look the other way.