We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don’t look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like “Tea Party” and “Patriot” in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook FB +0.46%posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal’s Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who’d donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government’s attention. He told ABC News: “It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare.”

Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they’re afraid of saying they were audited.

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved.

Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of “frontline people” in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party’s foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn’t understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn’t know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein‘s cellphone number.

And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn’t know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he’s being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.

We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government’s life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.

But that bias does not fit these circumstances.

What happened at the IRS is the government’s essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position’s powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.

And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It’s not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.

A version of this article appeared May 18, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: This Is No Ordinary Scandal.

Forbes

The GOP has relapsed into a potentially fatal business-as-usual complacency.  The recommendations contained in its high-profile but anodyne “autopsy” represent, at best, a band-aid for a Party hemorrhaging from a much more fundamental wound:  being out of touch with the needs, values, and dignity of the American people.

The GOP high command today resembles nothing so much as our Generals who botched the Vietnam War, betraying our troops, humiliating America, and handing the Soviet Union a victory in the Cold War.  The GOP “forensic audit,” like those reports of the Army’s whitewashing its losses in Vietnam, declares “there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”  It is a false light indeed.

The Vietnam Army brass bitterly clung to a fundamentally losing doctrine long after its futility had been demonstrated by defeat after defeat.   While our troops fought valiantly they were led to perdition by the thoroughly falsified doctrine of “victory through firepower.” Long afterwards, the visionary, courageous, and stubbornly brilliant General David Petraeus transformed the Army back into a winning force.

The GOP super-consultants similarly rationalize the ongoing political humiliations made inevitable by faulty doctrine.  Until the GOP learns the lessons that Petraeus taught the Army the Grand Old Party will be operating under a heavy, and quite likely politically fatal, handicap.  These are lessons that the left fully has internalized.

What are these lessons?

The first rule of the new style of war, as of the new politics (wars being, as Clausewitz observed, politics by other means) is “You’ve got to have the people on your side … if you want to win….”   This was voiced by the character Pierre Raspeguy in a novel about the loss of French Indochina, The Centurians by Jean Lartéguy.  That novel, in the hands of David Petraeus (and many other counterinsurgency military theorists), helped redefine modern American military doctrine.  It holds the key lesson.

That lesson — You’ve got to have the people on your side … if you want to win — applies with equal force to politics.  The national GOP is losing by old fashioned bad policy and bad politics: failure to champion a practical recipe for equitable prosperity for working people, failure to champion civil liberties, and failure to stand for (small r) republican principles.  The GOP thereby lost, and continues to lose, the hearts and minds of the people.  Instead of confronting this fact, the Republican Party elites now are focusing on … weaponizing bytes.

A recent cover essay by Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books reviewing a spate of books on David Petraeus lays out what went wrong in Vietnam.   It implicitly shows exactly what’s wrong with the GOP’s national politicos today.

General Westmoreland notoriously lost the Vietnam War by a fatal reliance on “search and destroy,” identical to the new GOP’s obsession with better software.  Powers:

Asked at a press conference what it took to defeat an insurgency, Westmoreland answered with a single word: “Firepower.” Big-unit war backed by firepower was Westmoreland’s strategy for beating the Vietcong, and nothing ever altered his view.

…

The root error behind Westmoreland’s failure was the general’s belief that the enemy’s main force units were the problem, and that he could hammer out a win with a strategy he called “search and destroy.” The idea was General William DePuy’s, who had noted a ten-to-one kill ratio that favored Americans in early battles of the war. “We are going to stomp them to death,” DePuy told a reporter. …

… Nick Turse …  reminds us again of what Americans mainly prefer to forget. … orders issued by Captain Ernest Medina before an attack in March 1968 on a Vietnamese village variously known to history as Pinkville, Son My, and My Lai.

“Are we supposed to kill women and children?” one of his men asked.

“Kill everything that moves,” the captain replied.

Indiscriminately napalming Democrats with negative TV advertising is wrong.  It is a recipe for repeated political disaster.  It will bring (vast) casualties … but not victories.  Political napalm does not bring the people to your side.  Scapegoating the troops — like the Tea Party and the social conservative activists  — is just wrong and a recipe for continued failure.

The Republican political elites, in their “forensic audit,” engaged in a successful effort to pacify their donor base. The process resembles how the U.S. Army brass strung along its appropriators, the Congress, and the American people, all the way to the last helicopter taking off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Unquestioning donor allegiance, irrespective of results, is the key to the “superconsultants’” personal power and preeminence.  Karl Rove, for instance, is fighting, perhaps successfully, for his political life by weaving a counter-narrative that exculpates himself and blames the Tea Party and conservative activists.

Rove’s rap sounds like Westmoreland’s post-defeat rationalizations. Powers:

“Westmoreland had been relieved of duty, kicked upstairs for a final tour as Chief of Staff of the Army, and retired to civilian life during which he gave hundreds of speeches insisting that he had not backed a losing strategy, had not lost the war, and was not to blame for the demoralized and confused United States Army….”

While the GOP rationalizes its defeats, 21^st century insurgency strategists like Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, the founders of MoveOn.org, have built a new model for the Democrats.  These two brilliant strategists are playing the role of the General Giap of 21^st century politics.  MoveOn, CREDO, and OFA, among others, are the political equivalent of the Vietcong.  And are winning, repeatedly.

This columnist considers the left wrongheaded in its policy doctrines. (There may be less to this than meets the eye.   The Vietcong nominally were communists.   Vietnam, after expelling America, famously turned “hypercapitalist.”)  But its political doctrine is impeccable. Boyd, Blades, CREDO’s Bond, and others have recruited and are leading an authentic “people’s liberation army.”

Meanwhile, the GOP’s entrenched operatives are dismissing and even insulting the GOP’s own popular base — Tea Partiers, libertarians, conservative activists, and Christians.  They are emulating Westmoreland’s repeatedly failed, and frankly horrific, lust for  overwhelming force.

Overwhelming force does not get the people on your side.  Respect for people does.

The RNC, in its “forensic audit,” and notwithstanding a token nod to “outreach” (a euphemism for lame propaganda, rather than engagement), demonstrates complete cluelessness about this fundamental fact.  The GOP was created by Lincoln to be the party of human dignity.  The national GOP has fallen far short of its rhetorical commitment to human dignity and to equality of opportunity.

Will the GOP donor base continue to fund the 800-pound gorillas to the exclusion of the guerrillas?  That way lies ignominious defeat.  We Tea Partiers and movement conservatives certainly have our flaws.  Yet the Tea Party, conservative activists, libertarians, Catholics, and Evangelicals possess a dignity, and populist legitimacy, that contains the seeds of potential political, and governance, victory.

Victory does not lie in weaponized bytes.  It will derive from championing people’s values and needs.  Tea Party and conservative political guerrilla leaders were not materially consulted in the RNC’s “autopsy.”  Consequently, the RNC report did not reflect the views of the base.  A real forensic audit would have been based on a real, not “microtargeting,” bottom up strategy.  Such introspection is nowhere in evidence.

Giving authentic authority to the rank-and-file; standing for proven policies designed to create an economic climate of opportunity and equitable prosperity, and defending the civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution are what is required. Unflinching moral courage in standing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were, in the beginning, and remain, now, the only way to get the people on your side.   Nothing less will do.

The Republican political elites have shown, to a candid world, that they will not reform themselves into a victorious leadership.  Transformation arises from other sources. On the policy side, the GOP begins to align with popular interests by getting behind programs like Joint Economic Committee Chairman Kevin Brady’s sophisticated assault on the “Growth Gap.”  On the values side, authentic populist conservatives such as Rep. Jim Jordan begin to attract a wide following.

Presidentially, Republican Party reform will come from a new generation of populist conservative political leaders — perhaps a Rand Paul or Marco Rubio – who may yet drag the GOP kicking and screaming into the 21^st century. If so, they will do so based on one simple axiom.

You’ve got to have the people on your side … if you want to win.  All else follows from this

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How to rescue the GOP from the grave Karl Rove is digging

Source:  DailyMail

The president omitted mention of Operation Fast and Furious, his Department of Justice’s program that ‘walked’ thousands of guns across the border.

President Obama used a speech at Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropología – the National Anthropology Museum – to claim that ‘most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.’

‘I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms,’ Obama said. ‘And as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right, and I always will.’

‘But at the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to pass common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people.’

‘That can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States,’ Obama added. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’

‘So we’ll keep increasing the pressure on gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico. We’ll keep putting these criminals where they belong: behind bars.’

Senate testimony in 2011 from a top Department of Justice official indicates that Obama may be correct in saying that the U.S. is the source of ‘most’ guns used to commit violence in Mexico.

Lanny Breuer, then the Assistant Attorney General, referred a Senate Judiciary subcommittee to statistics showing that 94,000 weapons had been recovered from Mexican drug cartels in the previous five years, including 64,000 – a 70 per cent ratio – that could be traced back to the United States.

Promises: He pledged to forge an equal partnership between the two neighbours as they battle powerful drug cartels

But there are no statistics widely available to show what percentage of Mexico’s violent crime is tied to the illegal drug trade.

While Mexican citizens have their own constitutional right to bear arms, Mexico City has only a single licensed gun shop and the nation’s military controls it, according to a 2009 National Public Radio broadcast.

In part because they lack legal avenues to purchase the weapons they are entitled to own, Mexicans have turned to a black market – including guns purchased in the U.S. and smuggled to the south.

Changes in the Mexican army, including a slow-down in Central American armed conflicts, have brought record numbers of military desertions, dumping countless guns into the private market. According to some news reports, at least 150,000 desertions were recorded between 2003 and 2009.

Bond building: The president was visiting Mexico to discuss drug policy and immigration with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto

Obama also did not mention the more than 2,000 firearms that his Department of Justice ‘walked’ across the Mexican border as part of Operation Fast and Furious, a federal law enforcement project that aimed to track weapons to drug traffickers.

Those guns have been connected to the deaths of at least 300 Mexican citizens. And U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died in December 2010 when a so-called ‘Fast and Furious gun’ was recovered at the scene of his murder during a routine patrol in Arizona.

An ensuing Congressional investigation led to the first-ever citation of a sitting cabinet member – Attorney General Eric Holder – for contempt of Congress. Holder declined to provide most of the more than 140,000 documents subpoenaed by a House committee, although the Department of Justice did selectively turn over thousands of others.

The blueprint for how Americans would be disarmed during a declared civil emergency is contained in an Army manual that outlines a plan to confiscate firearms to prevent them falling into the hands of rioters or dissidents.

From Colorado Peak Politics

It appears even Democrats are tired of House Speaker Mark Ferrandino’s sh*tty calendar management skills.

4/30 UPDATE: The Denver Post‘s Kurtis Lee picked up on the photo:

Photos of lawmakers sleeping at their desks — no matter the late night hour — are never a good look.

And in an era where everyone has a camera, either on their smart phone or tablet, photos can easily be taken — just look at Democratic Reps. Rhonda Fields of Aurora and Jeanne Labuda of Denver.

An image snapped of the two on Friday night as lawmakers debated bills into Saturday morning shows them slumped in their chairs on the House floor with their eyes closed.

4/30 UPDATE 2:  Colorado Peak Politics

Sleeping, or some cases appearing to sleep, on the House floor can come back to bite politicians. The Wayback Machine brings us this gem from the Rocky Mountain News in 2006:

…A Democratic “527″ organization…[has] been running TV commercials and sending out fliers which include a picture of [Republican State Senator Lew] Entz leaning back in his chair in the Senate, feet on his desk and his eyes closed. He’s asleep on the job, the ads suggest.

“I’ve done that for 20 years when I’m not doing anything,” Entz said. “I lean back and relax. I never went to sleep in my life.”

The picture was printed in The Denver Post in 2005. Amber O’Connor, Entz’s campaign manager, said the Post has asked the 527 to stop using the copyright picture. But it was still appearing in ads as late as Monday.

The Democrats control the Senate 18-17 and they’re focusing on Entz’s district since they fear losing a seat elsewhere.

DENVER – Simmering tensions between the Adams 12 School District and the local teachers union are heating up, with the union rejecting the district’s offer of open and public negotiations.

In rejecting the offer, which must be agreed to by both parties according to the current collective bargaining agreement, the District Twelve Educators Association (DTEA) claimed that the offer was nothing more than the “school board intentionally polarizing the open negotiations.”

Collective bargaining agreements between unions and public school districts regulate virtually every aspect of school operations and have far-reaching fiscal consequences.

In a letter to employees, the Board explained that, “much of the desire for open negotiations stems from the rumors and misinformation that circulated during the course of closed negotiations for 2012-2013…[closed negotiations] does not serve our employees well nor does it respect their right to know what both parties are talking about and their position on the issues.”

As of April 25th, the DTEA has still not agreed to open them. “[A]t this time, we do not wish to entertain the District’s suggestion for this year’s negotiations,” wrote the union’s president Dorian De Long in a letter sent to union members April 11th.

Since last year, the union leadership has complained that the district has taken advantage of the union, and accused the district of poor financial management.

A parent in the Adams 12 district, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution against their children, said, “this whole time the union has been accusing the district of not being transparent, and now, they are the ones who refuse to open up negotiations. As a parent, I want to go and sit and listen and hear what they’re talking about and see if everyone’s getting a fair deal.”

An Adams 12 teacher, who is also a member of the DTEA, said she too believed open negotiations should take place.

“For a year they’ve been saying they want everything to be transparent, but now they don’t want to come up with their end of the bargain. To me it seems pretty obvious, if you want transparency you need to provide transparency. I don’t know what they would have to hide, or what good comes from having closed negotiations,” said the teacher.

The dustup between the district and the union stems from a recent disagreement over pension funding.

In 2012, the Adams 12 Board of Education asked teachers to contribute more to their own retirement in an effort to help address budget shortfalls. That included a requirement that teachers pay an additional 1.5 percent of their own salaries to their pensions through the Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA), the state pension system that covers all Colorado teachers.

Commentator Mike Rosen went one step further, suggesting in a recent Denver Post column that the union is also taking aim at the district because the board has publicized large, taxpayer-funded retirement bonuses paid to teachers in the past.