Hi there!

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your mind it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away.

If the threat is accurately assessed, can it be considered paranoia?

Bookworm has a solid rant about how the IRS Scandal is the worst Scandal in US Political history. The argument is thus:

Because you, the People, became the targets of a comprehensive federal government effort to stifle dissent, one made using the government’s overwhelming and disproportionate policing and taxing powers.

All of the other scandals, going back to Andrew Johnson’s post-Civil War scandals, Warren G. Harding’s 1920s Teapot Dome scandal, Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s Iran-Contra, and Clinton’s Oval Office sexcapades have actually been narrowly focused acts of cronyism, garden-variety political chicanery, or personal failings. It’s been insider stuff.

The IRS scandal, by contrast, is a direct attack on the American people.

And that’s why the left’s spin is functionally irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if this is just a few rogue agents in Ohio (which it isn’t); it doesn’t matter if Obama personally gave the order or not (although I’d still like to know). Regardless, it means that hostile, tyrannical elements exist within what is arguably the most powerful agency in the federal government. Or, as James Taranto puts it:

As we wrote Friday, this will be a scandal like Watergate if it turns out that the IRS was acting under orders from Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett. If the White House’s conduct turns out to be unimpeachable, then it is something far worse: a sign that the government itself has become a threat to the Constitution.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a moment, for once not so that we can point out the hypocrisy of the Left (because, duh). Let’s imagine the IRS, at the behest of a Republican Administration, singling out progressive groups for extra scrutiny, denying their applications, demanding to pick through their activities with a fine-toothed comb. Is this a plus for democracy? Is this what the common citizen, left or right, wants to see happen?

Of course not. This is not democracy as anyone in this country understands it. This is a depraved, decadent political class, having long ago convinced itself that winning justified everything, reasonably concluding that its current dominance justifies itself. Democracy will be whatever our masters in Washington tell us it is, and when they offer us a jug-eared, self-besotted  nincompoop and say “Behold the Superman!” we damn well better clamor him most clamoringly.

Or else.