The Patriot Post - Alexander's Essay 5-16-2013

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The Patriot Post - Alexander's Essay 5-16-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
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Obama's 'Enemies List' -- Tyranny in Action
The Patriot Post -- IRS Target of Opportunity

By Mark Alexander

May 16, 2013

"Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." --Alexander Hamilton (1787)

As the first conservative digest of news, policy and opinion on the Internet, our startup team knew that if we were effective at advocating for Liberty and Rule of Law1, we would someday be targeted, organizationally and individually, by those wanting to silence us.

We must be fulfilling our mission, because over the years we have received all manner of threats. So vivid have some of those threats been that we screen incoming mail and packages. Apparently, some NeoComs2 are not so "tolerant" of diverse viewpoints.

If you asked me whether I thought card-carrying members of the Socialist Democratic Party3 would, by way of their bureaucratic surrogates, use the IRS and other government agencies to target groups with the name "Patriot," I would have said, "Of course." If you asked me whether I thought they would get caught at it, I would have said "No," because they're smart enough to use "cutouts" between their office and the bureaucrats committing the offense.

Cutouts are bureaucratic managers who act as surrogates to do the political bidding of elected officials. They are blamed and sacrificed for the "good of the cause," in order to protect (read: "provide plausible deniability for") elected officials who feign outrage and indignation at the violation of law in support of their political agenda. When the president of the United States is the elected official behind a culture of corruption and abuse of power, the layers of cutouts make it nearly impossible to find impeachable evidence of executive collusion.

Needless to say, Barack Obama and his black-bag dirty tricks team learned well from their Democrat predecessors, FDR, JFK and Clinton, how to use the Internal Revenue Service to harass their opponents. But they also learned a few things from Richard Nixon about the importance of using cutouts. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment after being caught on tape discussing the Watergate burglary with key staffers, where today those staffers would never directly discuss such abuse of power with a sitting president.

When I was young, a legislative aid to our senator took my father and me to hear the testimony of one of those staffers, H.R. Haldeman, former chief of staff to Nixon. I was too young to fully grasp Watergate, but I sensed that this hearing had significant implications for the president.

I'm older and a little wiser now, and I assume that, unlike Nixon, Obama is probably clever enough to ensure his fingerprints are not on anything directly related to the most significant scandal of his administration -- the politically-motivated adulteration of the Benghazi talking points4 ahead of his 2012 re-election campaign.

Likewise, don't expect Obama to be convicted for "guilt by association" with those in his administration who have apparently been using the IRS to target his political opponents since at least 2010. As his former chief dirty trickster, David Axelrod, said this week, "Part of being president is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government's so vast." Yes, many, many layers.

Indeed, it has been confirmed this week that senior IRS administrators in Washington did have knowledge that the agency targeted conservative groups for harassment. A legal and tax advisor to The Patriot Post informed us that the Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, our education fund advocating constitutional integrity, clearly "met the corrupt criterion for the IRS inquisition," but for a couple of reasons (which we can't disclose publicly) we were passed over for review.

However, almost 500 other groups with "Patriot" or "Tea Party" in their name were not so fortunate.

Obama's political handlers certainly recall Article II, Section 1 of the 1974 House impeachment against Nixon, which could be a template for a case against Obama today if not for all the cutouts: "He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to ... cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

Undoubtedly, the current regime's dirty tricksters have learned their history and covered all the bases to protect their radical socialist leader5.

As for his knowledge of the IRS case, Obama claims, "I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday. And this is pretty straightforward." Apparently he's invoking the administration's now-familiar Sergeant Schultz defense6: "I know nothing, I see nothing, I was not here, I did not even get up this morning."

However, it's difficult to reconcile Obama's claim with the 54-page report7 issued by the Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury regarding the targeting of his political opponents.

That report concludes:

1. For 18-months, all tax exempt applicants with the words "Patriot" or "Tea Party" in their names were selected for review, and later that order expanded to include "groups focused on government spending, government debt, taxes, and education on ways to 'make America a better place to live'." Then came groups with educational missions focused on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

2. IRS section chief Lois Lerner knew about the targeting in June 2011, but in March 2012, IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman testified before Congress "that the agency was not targeting conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status as 'social welfare' groups." (By the way, not in the IG's report is the fact that Lerner was given $42,531 in bonuses during the time period when she was overseeing the IRS agents who were targeting conservative groups.)