By Stephen Z. Nemo
How do we know President Obama is about to leave
office? His weaponized Internal Revenue Service announced it will begin
processing the tax-exempt application of the Texas Patriots Tea Party, which
has been in a state of limbo for half a decade.
It was just one of many such organizations targeted for
harassment by the IRS.
After the remarkable success grassroots tea party organizations
had in ousting moderate incumbent Republicans in the 2010 primaries – and
liberal Democrats in the general election later that same year – Obama’s
stalwart supporters feared the grassroots movement could prove far more
threatening to the president’s agenda than congressional Republicans.
But as the 2012 presidential campaign was gearing up,
tea party groups noticed what seemed to be a coordinated effort by agencies of
the federal government to access their donor records, subject their founders to
tax audits and crippling legal fees.
A 2013 investigation by the U.S. Treasury’s Inspector
General for Tax Administration found the IRS “used inappropriate criteria to
identify applications from organizations with the words Tea Party in their
names,” which included taking action against groups involved in such nefarious activities
as advocating “limiting government” and educating the public “on the Constitution
and Bill of Rights.”
In a White House interview with the president, Fox News
host Bill O’Reilly attempted to ask a question, “What some people are saying is
that the IRS was used… to go after…”
Obama interrupted, “Absolutely wrong… that’s not what
happened… these kinds of things keep on surfacing, in part, because you and
your T.V. station will promote them… There were some bone-headed [IRS] decisions…”
“But no mass corruption?” asked an incredulous O’Reilly.
“Not even mass corruption,” the president insisted, “not
even a smidgen of corruption.”
But emails subpoenaed by congressional oversight
committees later discovered tea party targeting was coordinated among Obama-appointed
officials at the IRS, Federal Election Commission and Justice Department.
Friday, the Washington Times reported that attorneys
for one tea party group received notice from the Justice Department’s Joseph
Sergi:
“The IRS has
decided that it will process the applications of plaintiffs whose applications
remain outstanding, including the application for We the People of Texas (Texas
Patriots Tea Party). We will be in further contact regarding the application
process once we have heard from the IRS.”
Consider
this Obama’s revenge.
Although
the media have linked the so-called “birther movement" – that insists Obama is
not a native-born American – to the tea party, its tentacles reach back to the failed
2008 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
A
2007 memo from Clinton’s chief political strategist Mark Penn noted that among Obama’s
weaknesses was his “lack of American roots” and that his “boyhood in Indonesia
and his life in Hawaii… exposes a very strong weakness for him – his roots to
basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America
electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center
fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values… Every speech [you
make] should contain the line you were born in the middle of America to the
middle class in the middle of the last century… Let’s explicitly own ‘America.’”
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