Mountain Views News          Saturday, May 25, 2013

B5

LEFT TURN/RIGHT TURN

 Mountain Views News Saturday, May 25, 2013 

BILL Press THE SHOCKING IRS SCANDAL 

 THAT WASN’T

GREG Welborn

HOW MANY WARNINGS 
DO WE NEED?


There’s nothing Washington 
likes better than a 
scandal. So official Washington 
was absolutely orgasmic 
this week while 
dealing with not one, but 
three scandals at the same 
time. Not one of which, 
sadly, was a sex scandal.

 

First, there were accusations 
of a “cover-up” in 
the aftermath of the bombing of our consulate 
in Benghazi, Libya. Then came reports that the 
IRS was conducting a partisan witch-hunt against 
the tea party. Topping it all off was news of the 
Justice Department’s seizing phone records of 
Associated Press reporters. And hovering over all 
three was the perennial Washington parlor game: 
“What did the president know, and when did he 
know it?”

 

Obama haters could hardly contain their glee. 
Mike Huckabee predicted that Benghazi would 
drive President Obama out of office. Sen. James 
Inhofe whispered the “I” word. Soon joined by 
Michele Bachmann. John Boehner demanded 
that unnamed IRS agents be arrested and sent to 
jail, presumably without a trial. And House Republicans 
scheduled multiple hearings on each 
controversy.

 

How disappointing for them when the week ended 
and two out of three scandals had all but disappeared. 
Only one was left: the Justice Department’s 
heavy-handed invasion of AP. As part of a 
criminal investigation into who leaked information 
about a successful intelligence operation to 
thwart the blowing up of an airliner headed from 
Yemen to the United States, DOJ subpoenaed the 
records of 20 phone lines at the AP, used by more 
than 100 reporters and editors, for April and May 
2012.

 

The Justice Department’s raid of AP phone records 
is nothing less than a totally unjustified, 
wholesale trashing of the First Amendment. DOJ 
violated its own guidelines by failing to notify 
the AP of its action or narrowing the scope of its 
subpoena. It has also offered no explanation how, 
by reporting this story, which the administration 
itself was poised to released, the AP in any way 
jeopardized our national security. This is the one 
real scandal, which demands more attention and 
answers. Not so with Benghazi or the IRS.

 

As I wrote last week, the flap over Benghazi is 
nothing but a poorly disguised effort by panicked 
Republicans to prevent Hillary Clinton from running 
for president in 2016. John Boehner may be 
obsessed with Benghazi, but this car has run out 
of gas.

 

The scandal that received the most attention, the 
IRS and the tea party, is a lot more complicated 
than it first appears. True, there is no defending 
the IRS targeting members of either party. But 
there is also no defending the fact that far too 
many political groups today enjoy tax-exempt 
status simply because they disguise themselves as 
“social welfare” organizations.

 

Republicans try to paint the latest IRS flap as 
a new, Obama-inspired, Nixonian conspiracy 
aimed at conservatives. Nonsense. In fact, this 
problem dates back to 1959, when Congress 
passed a law defining 501(c)(4), or tax-exempt, 
organizations as those which operate “exclusively 
for purposes beneficial to the community 
as a whole.” That same year, however, the IRS adopted 
regulations awarding tax-exempt status to 
organizations only “primarily” engaged in social 
welfare. Ever since, using that loose definition 
— primary, not exclusive — they have granted 
tax-exempt status to groups that spend up to 49 
percent of their funds on political activities. And 
refused to rescind tax privileges for those that 
spend far more.

 

For example, the watchdog group Citizens for 
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington complained 
to the IRS about the American Action 
Network, a 501(c)(4), headed by former Republican 
Senator Norm Coleman, which spent 
66.8 percent of its total spending from July 
2009 through June 2011 on politics. The IRS did 
nothing.

 

So it’s important to understand. The issue of appropriate 
tax-exempt status goes way back. It 
was made worse by the Supreme Court’s Citizens 
United decision, which spawned a new wave of 
political organizations: the overwhelming majority, 
tea party chapters, of which more than 300 
filed for tax-exempt status. IRS staffers decided to 
focus exclusively on them. Even though none of 
the tea party applications was denied, that concentration 
on the right was wrong. But it’s a case 
of bureaucratic bungling, not some vast left-wing 
conspiracy.

 

A new head of the IRS is a good start. Congress 
should next establish tough new standards for the 
IRS to follow in granting tax-exempt status. Then 
maybe Congress can get to work on a real scandal: 
gun violence in America.

I had planned to write on a Memorial Day theme 
to pay homage to those among us who willingly 
stood in the breach and paid the ultimate price so 
that we may continue to enjoy our freedoms and 
blessings. So let us all take a moment to salute 
them and say a prayer for those families that 
have lost a loved one in our defense. But events 
in London, I think, are of such significance that 
they need to be addressed, lest the important 
lessons be swept under the rug. In a sense, I 
suppose, this is a fitting topic for a Memorial Day 
article. Members of our armed forces are fighting 
in many ways with a hand tied behind their back 
because of how we are handling terrorism here 
on the home front.

Everyone by now must know that a British 
soldier was hacked to death in broad daylight 
by two terrorists, who were trying to behead 
him and who then stayed around asking to be 
filmed so that their message would be broadcast 
around the world. Barbarous doesn’t even begin 
to describe the murder, nor does evil adequately 
capture the nature of the perpetrators.

But what I find equally disturbing, and the subject 
of today’s article, is the attitude we in the west 
continue to take toward these attacks. When two 
men commit this type of attack, yelling “Allahu 
adkbar” (God is great) and stick around to give 
interviews, we have a serious problem that goes 
beyond the terrorist event itself. We have a global 
war in which the other side shows absolutely no 
sign of stopping. We need to get serious.

The first step in getting serious is to seriously 
consider what’s going on and to stop accepting 
the demonstrably false premise with which our 
enemies are trying to co-opt our determination 
and nurture our complacency. The London 
terrorists babbled on about our presence in their 
lands, our killing of Muslims, the assaults on 
their women, among other ramblings. I don’t 
take their words seriously for one moment, but 
I do take seriously our president’s because they 
are perpetuating a dangerous naïveté and feeding 
a complacency which may yet be our Waterloo.

As quoted on Martin Bashir’s MSNBC show, 
President Obama lamented, “when does the war 
on terror end? We can’t allow any group of thugs 
that calls themselves al Qaida to beat us into 
an endless war.” The mainstream press echoes 
theses sentiments by describing the terrorists’ 
statements innocuously as a “message about 
religion and politics”. One mainstreamer went so 
far as to agree that there 
is a connection between 
such acts and our “killing 
Muslims on international 
television”. 

Let us be perfectly clear 
about our recent history 
in Muslim lands. We 
have spilled more of our 
own blood than any other country to protect 
Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, free Kuwait 
from Saddam Hussein, liberate Afghanistan 
from the grip of the Taliban, and allow Iraq 
a shot at a peaceful democratic existence. If 
results matter, then Muslims ought to be angry 
at Muslim leaders, not the United States. More 
Muslims have been tortured and killed horribly 
by Muslim rulers than have been harmed by 
western soldiers. More Muslim women have 
been denied education, kept in servitude, raped 
and mutilated by other Muslims than have 
ever been mistreated by westerners. If such ill 
treatment was the real motivation of terrorism, 
then the attacks wouldn’t be in London, Boston, 
or other western cities.

We are not the bad guys. But there are bad guys, 
and they are waging war against us. We cannot 
ignore that. There are 120 billion Muslims in the 
world, and at least 10% of them (110 million) 
subscribe to the waging of an active Holy War 
against us. That statistic comes from a Pew 
survey in Muslim lands. It’s what they’re saying 
about themselves. It’s not what we’re falsely 
accusing them of saying.

To ignore this would be the same as having 
ignored Hitler’s threat. After all, why should 
we have allowed some group of thugs who call 
themselves Nazis to force us into an endless war? 
The reason, of course, is that no war is endless. 
Wars end when someone wins and someone 
loses. Common sense, not to mention the most 
basic sense of morality, demands that we win this 
war. We must fight as if it is a war. It is. We must 
win it or the results will be unspeakable. So on 
this Memorial Day, as we honor those who died 
to protect our freedom around the world, let us 
hope our leaders wake up and become worthy of 
the cause into which fate has thrown them.

About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is a freelance writer 
and has spoken to several civic and religious organizations 
on cultural and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles area 
with his wife and 3 children and is active in the community. 
He can be reached gregwelborn2@gmail.com