— by Polydamas
Modern-day liberals and progressives are very practical. They are always result-oriented. Because their eyes are always on the prize of winning, they win early and often. In contrast, conservatives care less about accomplishing the result and more about the worthiness of the means or of the process or of the journey to reach the result. Whoever said “it’s not about winning or losing but how you play the game” was a conservative. If he or she was a high school coach, the players on the sports team would always play a clean game without fouling. They would also lose often to opposing teams that were willing to bend and even break the rules in order to win.
Conservatives are like Elmer Fudd who plays and loses by the book. Liberals are like Bugs Bunny who always manages to flip the script on Elmer Fudd and finds a way to win. After doing whatever it takes to win, Bugs Bunny collects gold medal after gold medal. Elmer Fudd, who has perfected the art of losing, consoles himself that he will do better next time. But he never does.
One of the best ways of accentuating the differences between conservatives and liberals is to recall the 1986 FIFA World Cup quarterfinal soccer match between the national teams of Argentina and England. Argentinian captain Diego Maradona scored his first goal of the game by punching it in with his hand. The referees did not see Maradona’s hand touching the ball, which is a penalty in soccer. Had they seen it, the goal would have been invalidated. After the game, Maradona claimed that the goal was scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God”. This classic game became known as the “Hand of God” game. Argentina went on to win 2-1 in the quarterfinal and ultimately won the World Cup. Twenty years later and after world renown as one of the best soccer players in history, Maradona admitted that he purposely touched the ball with his hand.
Soccer purists condemn as illegitimate Argentina’s victory in the 1986 World Cup. Likewise, baseball purists condemn the 1998 home run duel between St. Louis Cardinals player Mark McGwire and Chicago Cubs player Sammy Sosa. Both players had shattered New York Yankees player Roger Maris’ single season home run record of 61 which was set in 1961, McGwire hitting 70 home runs and Sosa 66. Later on, it became known that both McGwire and Sosa had used performance-enhancing steroids. The same is true of American cyclist Lance Armstrong who had won the Tour de France a record seven straight times from 1999 to 2005, but was discovered to have used performance-enhancing drugs.
Conservatives are also purists — and libertarians even more so — who extol the purity of the process over the end result. However, getting results is the only thing that counts to liberals. Losing is the only unpardonable sin in the liberal firmament. Pointing out that 42nd President Bill Clinton was disbarred on October 1, 2001 by the United Supreme Court for lying under oath and committing perjury in the Paula Jones lawsuit generates yawns by liberals. Instead, the only thing that matters to them is that he appointed Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the United States Supreme Court in 1993 and 1994, respectively, 66 judges to the federal courts of appeal, and 305 judges to the federal district courts. As long as Bill Clinton delivered liberal legislation that benefited women, liberal women loved him even though he preyed on women around him, including Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, and others. Liberals stood by him during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, supported him throughout his impeachment by the United States Congress, and every Democrat in the United States Senate voted against his removal from office.
It is for these same reasons that liberals defend to the hilt their current President Barack Hussein Obama. President Obama and senior members of his administration believed that the United States Supreme Court’s 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was wrongly decided. The Supreme Court had invalidated a part of the McCain-Feingold Act and ruled that the First Amendment protected political speech by corporations, unions, and other business organizations which could spend their own money to opine about political candidates. President Obama railed against the Supreme Court’s decision because its effect was to erode the overwhelming traditional advantage that Democrats had with the mainstream media. The mainstream media happily carries water for the Democrats, providing every Democrat president and candidate with a bully pulpit, extolling the virtues of his liberal policies, and viciously attacking his Republican opponents, all for free. In contrast, at election time, Republicans and Libertarians must pay significant sums of money to buy network and print advertising to get a small portion of the spotlight that the mainstream media gives Democrats for free.
Undermining the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was the stated goal of the Obama administration. President Obama and/or senior members of his administration recruited (or she readily volunteered) Lois Lerner, who was head of the tax-exempt department of the Internal Revenue Service, to use this agency as a very selective gatekeeper. By imposing onerous disclosure requirements, illegally intimidating applicants and donors, and delaying and, ultimately, unjustly denying tax-exempt status to all conservative and libertarian groups while approving liberal groups, the agency did its part in suppressing political advertisements in the 2010 mid-term elections and in the 2012 presidential elections.
Lois Lerner’s choke hold on First Amendment political speech could very well have been the difference between President Obama’s re-election to a second term in office and losing to his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. The polling prior to the November 2012 election showed a much closer horse race between the Democrat incumbent and the challenger, which certainly made sense in light of the poor showing of the American economy and the Obama administration’s succession of foreign policy blunders that rivaled President Jimmy Carter’s tenure in the late 1970s. Had conservative and libertarian organizations been timely and appropriately approved for tax-exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service, critiques of President Obama’s ineptitude would have received more air time and would have cut through the mainstream media’s kevlar cocoon of loving protection for their idol.
As a results-oriented liberal administration, President Obama’s key advisers did whatever it took to make sure that they secured the win for their leader. They perceived that the supposed noble end of four more years of Democratic rule justified any stealthy and illegal maneuver that was needed to pull it off. They knew that, after their idol won again in November of 2012, if their chicanery were exposed, some people might have to pay the price and take the proverbial bullet to secure the continued rule of Emperor Obama I, but the meek Elmer Fudd Republicans could never overturn the results of the election any more than the British soccer team could reverse their loss to Argentina in the 1986 World Cup. In her heart of hearts, a liberal like Lois Lerner truly believes that she was only doing the right thing which was for her to do anything it took to forestall the evil forces of Republican and conservative darkness. Viewing herself as a martyr to the liberal cause, she was and still is willing to spend a few years behind bars if it means that her hero would enjoy four more years to irreversibly transform America into an unassailable bastion of liberalism. Of course, she knows very well that her liberal messiah would not forsake her, but would make sure that she is not prosecuted by an Attorney General who is similarly sworn to the cause. Even if she were prosecuted, she knows that she would be swiftly pardoned by President Obama in gratitude for the electoral victory that she guaranteed to him. She also knows that, at the end of the rainbow, there would be the financial reward of being selected as the well-paid chancellor of a liberal arts school in New England.
Lois Lerner and her ideological cohorts in the Internal Revenue Service and in the administration attempted as best as they could to scrub all evidence of their illegal coordination of activities. However, intentionally destroying evidence is difficult in a triple-redundancy computer age and working for a government that has fail-safe procedures to save every digital scrap of paper in triplicate. In an article in the Washington Times by Stephen Dinan titled “IRS Watchdog Reveals Lois Lerner Missing Emails Now Subject of Criminal Probe” (http://tinyurl.com/pgrnpp9), reproduced below, the missing e-mails may have been recovered.
We here at The Cassandra Times somehow doubt that there will be an absolute “smoking gun” recovered from the e-mails that will directly tie Lois Lerner and President Obama. Anything truly incriminating would be transmitted orally to maintain plausible deniability. However, the e-mails recovered will likely prove how deeply the Internal Revenue Service had been penetrated by liberal true believers and how they transformed a supposedly apolitical Washington bureaucracy into a wholly-owned and operated subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee. The myth will be irretrievably shattered of an impartial civil service that continues to operate fairly and professionally regardless of any turnover in the political appointees at the top. The retrieved e-mails will, instead, show that the targeting of conservatives was not a simple bureaucratic mistake by a few loose cannons at the IRS who sought in good faith to uphold the law, but a carefully-orchestrated partisan abuse of the vast powers of the federal government designed to benefit one political party at the expense of its rivals. The American people will finally get to see what President Ronald Reagan meant when he famously quipped that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help'”.
Finally, we here at The Cassandra Times believe that there are very strong similarities between this scandal and Watergate, but there is one crucial difference. Let us explain. The 37th President Richard Milhous Nixon was a Republican. However, he was more of a Republican in name only. He may have been a religious Quaker from California and personally disliked the hippies of his era, but he was far from being a conservative. At most, he was somewhat of a social conservative. In any other era, he would have been considered a liberal. As President, he governed as a Democrat by imposing wage and price controls, ended the “gold standard” where dollars could be converted into gold, inflated the currency, caused food shortages, created the Environmental Protection Agency, federalized Medicaid, and devoted himself to many other causes that could be fairly characterized as the lite version of his predecessor in office President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. To pay for greater domestic spending, he ratcheted down NASA’s space program. He canceled NASA’s plans to establish a base on the Moon and to send astronauts to Mars.
President Nixon may have been an anti-communist who hounded communist darling Alger Hiss, but he was a liberal at heart. Like liberals, he cared only about winning and doing whatever it took to win. His operatives’ third-rate burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Complex in order to wiretap the phones was really a play from the liberal handbook. Liberals who are caught with their hands in the cookie jar do not feel remorse for cheating. Rather, they are sorry that they were caught in flagrante delicto. The same is true of President Nixon.
President Obama would never appoint an independent prosecutor like Archibald Cox or even Leon Jaworski. If President Obama were caught in the act, he would never admit wrongdoing, but would, instead, borrow a page from former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and blame “the vast right-wing conspiracy” except that he would term it “the vast racist right-wing conspiracy”. He would deny, deny, and deny once again. Many Americans would be inclined to believe him regardless of any amount of evidence that was assembled against him, simply because he is the first African-American President of the United States and could not possibly do any wrong.
Ultimately, there is no one in the Democratic Party who would go to President Obama to ask him to resign from his office for the good of the country and of the party, unlike Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater who went to President Nixon on the night of August 7, 1974 to tell him that even Republicans would vote to impeach and remove him. None of the Senate Democrats would ever vote to remove a sitting President of their own party no matter what constitutional offenses were committed by him, what the grounds were for impeaching him or how strong the evidence was against him. Because Democrats are completely result-oriented, they would fight a rearguard action, run out the clock as much as they can, but they would never willingly give up the reins of power.
As libertarians, we admire the single-minded commitment of liberals to doing whatever it takes to win and retain power. We, however, do not approve of, but most strongly condemn, the insane lengths to which they will resort to acquire and maintain power to accomplish their utilitarian utopian society, including jettisoning truth, individuality, freedom of conscience, justice, honor, honesty, individual liberties, and countless innocent lives. Every results-oriented tyrant in history, including Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and the list goes on, proclaimed that his supposed noble objectives justified any and all means used to achieve them and blithely rationalized away more than 100 million skulls and skeletons of their own people as the unavoidable price of victory. To this we say, any victory that must be purchased with these exorbitant sacrifices is not worth winning.
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IRS Watchdog Reveals Lois Lerner Missing Emails Now Subject of Criminal Probe
The IRS’s inspector general confirmed Thursday it is conducting a criminal investigation into how Lois G. Lerner’s emails disappeared, saying it took only two weeks for investigators to find hundreds of tapes the agency’s chief had told Congress were irretrievably destroyed.
Investigators have already scoured 744 backup tapes and gleaned 32,774 unique emails, but just two weeks ago they found an additional 424 tapes that could contain even more Lerner emails, Deputy Inspector General Timothy P. Camus told the House Oversight Committee in a rare late-night hearing meant to look into the status of the investigation.
“There is potential criminal activity,” Mr. Camus said.
He said they have also discovered the hard drives from the IRS’s email servers, but said because the drives are out of synch it’s not clear whether they will be able to recover anything from them.
“To date we have found 32,744 unique emails that were backed up from Lois Lerner’s email box. We are in the process of comparing these emails to what the IRS has already produced to Congress to determine if we did in fact recover any new emails,” Mr. Camus said.
Democrats questioned the independence of Inspector General J. Russell George, who is overseeing the investigation, saying he’s injected politics into his work.
Rep. Gerald Connolly, Virginia Democrat, said Mr. George is refusing to turn documents over to him, prompting a heated reply.
“You’re not entitled to certain documents,” Mr. George said.
“Oh really? We’ll see about that, won’t we,” Mr. Connolly replied, saying that he questioned whether Mr. George could be trusted if he’s refusing to provide documents, yet is in charge of an investigation into whether the IRS stonewalled document requests.
The hearing was the latest chapter in the complex investigation into the IRS’s targeting of tea party groups for special scrutiny.
Several congressional committees are still probing the matter, and both the inspector general and the Justice Department are conducting criminal investigations.
In a 2013 report, the inspector general said the IRS had improperly targeted conservative and tea party groups’ applications for nonprofit status, asking repeated intrusive questions and delaying their applications well beyond a reasonable time. Some of those groups are still waiting, with their applications now pending for years.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and Oversight Committee chairman, said the ongoing investigations undercut President Obama’s assertion last year that there was no evidence of corruption in the IRS’s targeting.
“I have no idea how the president came to such a definitive conclusion without all the facts,” he said.
The IRS belatedly told Congress it may have lost some of Ms. Lerner’s emails after her computer crashed, and asserted that the backup tapes didn’t exist.
But under questioning from Mr. Chaffetz, Mr. Camus said it took him only two weeks to track down the backup tapes, and when he asked the IRS depository for them, the workers there said they’d never been contacted by the agency itself.
Republicans said that was stunning because IRS Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress the emails were irretrievably lost.
“I think they have misled or lied to the committee,” said Rep. John L. Mica, Florida Republican.
Mr. Camus said they were clued in to the 424 new tapes they just found a couple of weeks ago after realizing the IRS hadn’t given over a key document. They demanded that document, and realized it showed hundreds of other tapes existed.
Democrats said the investigation has dragged on too long and been too expensive, pointing to the IRS’s estimate that it has spent $20 million on staff and equipment to try to comply with the committee’s request.
Ms. Lerner, who oversaw the unit of the IRS that scrutinized nonprofit groups’ applications, is a central figure in the investigations.
After belatedly discovering that some of her emails weren’t being recovered, the IRS did try to reconstitute them by asking other employees to dig through their emails to see if they were the recipients of any messages that involved her. That did produce some of the missing emails.
Democrats said the GOP seemed to be insinuating Ms. Lerner had purposely crashed her hard drive to hide emails — though she herself pushed to try to get messages recovered.
Democrats also questioned why the hearing was happening now, given that Mr. Camus and Mr. George both stressed that their findings are preliminary and could change as they learn more.
“It seems that the best course of action would be to have the inspector general come back when his report is complete,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the panel.