In the history of mankind, many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state. TR

Wh3

White House Dossier

New York Times Applauded IRS for Probe of Conservatives

In March 2012, as conservative Groups complained of harassment by the IRS, the New York Times was ready with a judgment of the agency and its activity: “Taxpayers should be encouraged.”

Under the headline, “The IRS Does Its Job,” the editorial board of what is supposedly the nation’s most important practitioner of journalism – and by extension a leading symbol of free speech – decided to tell everyone to move along, that there was nothing to see here, and that the IRS “properly contends that it must ensure that these groups are ‘primarily’ engaged in social welfare, not political campaigning, to merit tax exemption under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code.”

It has now emerged, of course, that the IRS was not properly doing its job, and that conservatives, as they claimed at the time, were indeed being targeted. Even the White House is not offering a defense.

The New York Times is correct that the IRS must ensure that rules are being followed. But the outrage here is that the newspaper chose to completely ignore something far more important than whether someone is complying with 501(c)(4) regulations: that is, whether the government is targeting private individuals because of their political views.

Sure, the Times in its editorial was careful to add that all groups – including those backing Obama – should be scrutinized by the IRS. But what the paper cooly ignored was that the GOP-leaning groups were far more numerous, well funded and consequential than those that favored the Democrats, and the organizations complaining of IRS heavy-handedness were viewed as perhaps the most important Republican counterweight to the Obama campaign’s fundraising behemoth.

Questions about whether such groups deserve the tax exempt status they maintain are legitimate. But to ignore a potentially Nixonian abuse of power in which the tax man is choosing to come down on those with a particular point of view is a supreme dereliction of duty by the Grey Lady.

And, it turns out, a Nixonian abuse of power appears to be exactly what occurred. We’ll see how high up the chain of command the abuse went.

H/T to James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal.

26 thoughts on “New York Times Applauded IRS for Probe of Conservatives”

    1. cincycinco

      “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result,” he wrote. “It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.” – Joseph Goebbels

  2. Scottso

    The Press’ job is to report the news.
    If the news does not present itself, the Press’ job is to be skeptical of power (gov’t and otherwise) in order to report the news.

    What was the thing the NY Times investigated with vigor? Valerie Plame?

  3. Pingback: Must Know Headlines — ExposeTheMedia.com

    1. Geoff Caldwell

      And let’s not forget the untold millions collected by the Obama campaign from unverifiable on line credit card donations.

      I wrote a defining column in October, 2008 that when it all boiled down to it, the main reason I would not be voting for Obama, despiste all his oration and promises, was quite simply: “I just don’t trust this guy”. Never been so sad to have been right in my entire life.

      How this country survives another 3 1/2 years of these thugs is beyond me.

      1. Darkangel

        Perhaps it won’t have to. If both this and Benghazi really wake the sheeple up, Obeyme may have to resign. And ff the outrage gets serious enough, there may be just enough Democratic senators who’d vote to keep their careers by throwing Sir Golfsalot under the bus.

        Finally…there’s some hope for a change.

  6. Geoff Caldwell

    This IS the same NYT editorial board that penned just this past Thursday that the Benghazi hearings were still nothing but a Republican “obsession” is it not?

    Everything to them and their readers is “justified” in the “moral relativism” of the “greater good”.

    Bernstein was on Morning Joe this morning and actually said with a straight face that his Watergate reporting was not political and that from what we/he knows of Obama there is no reason to believe that he did anything wrong in the Benghazi/IRS (or anything else for that matter) debacles and the investigations now “are” political. Disgusting.

    1. Julie Brueckheimer

      Obsession (obsessed) is the operative word now. It must have been decided at the secret WH press meeting to obsess on obsession. It was used by Dem pols on the Sunday talk shows.

  7. cincycinco

    “Sure, the Times in its editorial was careful to add that all groups – including those backing Obama – should be scrutinized by the IRS.” – Keith Koffler

    Well then, would the Times audits against THESE tax -exempt organizations for possible political violations?

    “Consider the facts. The Pew Research Center released its findings on this subject last week: “Black Protestants are twice as likely as churchgoers to be hearing about the candidates at church.” Moreover, “Nearly half (45%) of black Protestant churchgoers say the messages they hear at church favor a candidate, and every one of those says the message favors Obama.”
    http://www.catholicleague.org/pulpit-politics-4/

    “One organization, the faith-based PICO National Network, staged a “Let My People Vote Sunday” in September in which about 300 churches around the country held voter registration drives during services and recruited churchgoers to go out and register even more people. The goal was to sign up around 75,000 people, PICO policy director Gordon Whitman said.

    “People are stopping in the middle of worship to have people pull out the registration forms and fill them out. It’s about the church saying,`We are going to participate in this process,’” Whitman said.

    In many states with early voting, the Sunday before Election Day in 2008 was a church-based political event in which minority congregations went en masse to polling places and cast their ballots. That year in Florida, 33.2 percent of all African-American voters and 23.6 percent of Latino voters cast ballots on that final Sunday, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.”
    http://newsone.com/2051968/black-churches-voting/

    C’mon Times, let’s see some hard-hitting “journalism” on THIS!

    We’re waiting…

  8. srdem65

    Excuse me while I finish securing my tin foil hat with another round of duct tape.
    OK.
    The WhiteHouse, the State Department, and the CIA are now directing our attention to the squirrel (the IRS) that someone set on fire.

    Is there any agency in this administration that isn’t skirting or violating existing laws, any at all? The DOJ chooses not to enforce certain laws, Homeland Security ignores illegal aliens, the DEA ignores it’s mandate to create it’s own laws, the HHS is extorting funds from health insurers, and on and on until our laws mean absolutely nothing to those in power.
    We’re not going to hold our breath waiting for the DOJ or the WhiteHouse to denounce egregious abuses of taxing powers exposed at the IRS, nor are we likely to be shown the truth about the DOJ sending firearms to Mexico.
    So, the NYT thinks organizations that aren’t this side of communism should be harassed, or worse, by the IRS or any agency of the government isn’t much of a suprise. Their leftist, liberal bent is not news. What would be news is the NYT announcing that they are changing their mission to a non-partisan approach to their reporting.

    1. Star

      Agreed–and the acolytes were out in force. That Jemhu Green, always good for an Obama attaboy on Fox, was comparing Benghazi to …wait for it…Iraq. There. she said, thousands died for a lie. Debatable, but worse yet, the two are not conflatable. Those four did not die for a lie–the lie came later. Can anyone here think!?

  9. Shofar

    Given the fact that the WH held deep background meetings with some of the major press organizations just last week, and now this disclosure by the IRS that they had been targeting conservative groups, why would anyone even remotely trust what the NYT has to say, then or now.

    This administration is so entangled with the press as to be laughable. I’m to the point where I don’t know if the WH runs the media, or the media runs the WH.

    Cases in point:

    Jay Carney is married to Clarie Shipman – reporter for ABC
    Tom Nides from the State Department is married to Virginia Moseley – President of CNN
    Ben Rhodes from the WH is the brother of David Rhodes – President of CBS News
    Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall from the WH is the sister of Ben Sherwood – President of ABC News

    With this many high placed staffers and advisers to the President and the SoS during the past 4 years, all of which have a relationship to the media, it leaves one asking a lot of questions.

    I would guess that if anyone took the time to review all of the staff and advisers to the WH and other departments within this administration, you could probably find other connections to the media.

    This is becoming more and more a wag the dog administration, and America does not deserve it.

    2. Susan

      Looks like Washington, D.C. has become nothing more than one big incestuous cabal of crooks. I remember hearing all the hoopla from the press when John Kennedy appointed his brother Bobby as the Attorney General. The JFK administration didn’t have anything on this regime.

  10. Susan

    Obama could behead a 3-year-old child on the White House lawn in front of the press corpse and The New York Times would probably report that it was the child’s fault for running in front of his sword.

    Makes not one whit of difference that the IRS was targeting groups of fellow Americans Obama identified as his enemies. Appears he was going after conservative Jewish groups as well. Ironic how it was called an enemies list when Nixon’s impeachment papers were drafted, but it’s the IRS ‘doing their job’ when a Democrat is in charge. Of course, state-run media share the same ideology as the petulant dictator and they will do everything they can to protect him.

    In my opinion, this is another shiny object to take our attention off the Benghazi terrorist attack. We can’t let them distract us from getting to the bottom of how and why four Americans died in the Benghazi terrorist attack, who issued the stand down orders (two of them according to Gregory Hicks’ testimony), and where their commander in chief was during the 7-hour siege.

  11. Julie Brueckheimer

    The Republicans had better be able to multitask on Benghazi and the IRS. Are there others coming up? Let’s slip in the 900 page immigration bill which no one has read yet, say the Democats. There are certainly old issues which the Democrats hope will slip by too if they can only get the public to focus on one issue like the IRS. Obamacare for one. We know the American public, herded by the media, is not up to multitasking.

    1. Darkangel

      At this point, I’m starting to hope that the House GOP grows a collective pair and starts saying, “Hell, no!” with a lot more frequency. The amnesty bill needs to die a swift and painless death, and with all this going on, I suspect the odds of that are improving.

      1. Susan

        Our radio waves are being bombarded with patriotic sounding Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan commercials asking us to call our legislators and demand their reportedly “conservative immigration reform”. They really do think we’re stupid.

Comments are closed.