IRS Losing Liberal Allies

The Obama Administration may have the IRS's back right now, but what the federal agency will do when it loses the Administration's protection is a satisfying thought experiment, especially when reading John Dickerson's Slate.com piece, Paul Ryan Just Hammered the IRS: Almost Everyone Thinks the Agency Deserves It.

Anyone who has ever kicked a trash can across a room after trying to get the Internal Revenue Service to explain a tax rule, or been through one of its exfoliating audits, gained a champion in Rep. Paul Ryan on Friday...

If you are audited, the IRS wants you to move fast. Not only do you have to keep your records for years, as Ryan says, but the IRS wants you to move quick like a bunny. And the entire process has one subliminal message to it: “I don’t believe you.”

That is exactly what Ryan said to the IRS commissioner, who took umbrage. Now he knows how it feels.

Others are expressing skepticism:

• Newark [NJ] Morning-Ledger editorial:  "Hyperpolitical rhetoric has taken the IRS investigation to a place where only a special prosecutor may be able to restore faith in a truthful outcome."
• The Economist: The IRS Scandal: A Dog Ate My Emails
• Dallas Morning News editorial: Last Straw for IRS Should Lead to Special Counsel
• Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial: "IRS Excuses for Obstruction Suggest Cover Up"

The radical left isn't giving up yet, but one has to wonder what the conversation around the Kool-Aid cooler is today in the face of the IRS commissioner's conflicting testimony and this interesting revelation: that the IRS's contract for email archiving, begun in 2009, was conveniently ended about the same time the computers of Lois Lerner and six other IRS officials linked to the scandal crashed.