Day: 2/18/2014

CONSPIRACY: Republicans Want The IRS To Go After The Tea Party

Posted by on February 18, 2014 at 3:43 pm. 3 Comments :

It’s hard to know how to present the discussion that took place this weekend on Fox News. During their recurring segment on Political Insiders, Fox contributor Pat Caddell floated his theory that it is Republicans who are responsible for the alleged targeting of Tea Party groups by the IRS (video below).

False Flag

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Caddell: The establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after the Tea Party. Got it? They want to go after the Tea Party. Because the Tea Parties are an outside threat to their power hold. And, I’m telling you, the lobbying, consulting class of the Republican party, the Republican leadership, who have been attacking the Tea Parties and alienating them, they want the IRS doing this.

If that’s true, then Caddell has uncovered a clandestine plot by the GOP to sabotage their strongest conservative allies and most reliable Republican activists and voters. Did the Republicans infiltrate the IRS and orchestrate a strategy to deny Tea Partiers tax-exempt status? Did they conduct sham hearings in the House, led by the crusading committee chair (and recidivist criminal) Darrel Issa, all the while maneuvering secretly to oppress Tea Party organizations and cast the blame on Democrats? It’s not unlike a scenario I mockingly offered last year that accused the GOP of a False Flag Operation.

It’s kind of a brilliant plan that would stifle intra-party rivals while putting Democratic foes in a negative light. And there are elements of the story that could be corroboration for such a plot. For instance, it turns out that the IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, and Lois Lerner, the head of the agency’s Tax-Exempt Organizations division, were Republicans hired by George W. Bush. So it never made sense that they would be engaged in a conspiracy to help Democrats silence the Tea Party.

On the other hand, Caddell could be in the throes of severe dementia resulting in his imagining a wild conspiracy wherein the GOP is just another enemy of the patriots waving tea bags around. If his musings hold weight, should we expect Issa to convene new hearings indicting Republicans for their complicity in the alleged scandal? For that matter, can we expect apologies from Issa, and dozens of other Republican politicians and pundits, who falsely accused the Democrats of conspiring against the Tea Party?

So which is it? Is Caddell breaking news or smoking crack? It’s often hard to tell with many of the ludicrous theories that waft from the halls of Fox News.

Tastes Like Watergate: An Illustrated Guide To A Fox News Obsession

Posted by on February 18, 2014 at 1:30 pm. 6 Comments :

If there is one thing you can credit Fox News with, it is their tenacious determination to stand by even the most ludicrous figments of its overactive and politically twisted imagination. Once they sink their teeth into a story, nothing – and certainly not exculpatory facts – will dampen their resolve to peddle their delusions to their dimwitted viewers.

The string of pseudo-scandals that Fox has nurtured for most of the past six years has not produced a single shred of evidence of any wrongdoing by President Obama or his administration. Even with the aid of a bitterly partisan and hostile Republican majority in the House of Representatives conducting dozens of hearings, issuing subpenas, calling witnesses, compiling thousands of pages of documents, and staging theatrical press events, they have still failed to make a case against the President or any of their other targets.

What they have done is to compile an impressive record of psychotic obsession with prosecuting the White House for whatever they thought might stick if rubbed in hard enough. And in an effort to make the slander even stickier, they stirred in a generous heap of Watergate analogies. For instance…

Fox News Watergate Obsession

Never mind that none of these alleged scandals were ever proven in any way, despite hundreds of hours of congressional hearings and investigations by the right-wing press. It’s interesting that Fox is fixated on aligning Obama with disgraced former president Richard Nixon. The only thing they are succeeding at is reminding people that it is Republicans who are responsible for this sort of criminality. But that won’t stop the folks at Fox. Look for them to dig up some new affair that they will equate with Watergate. Maybe he has been covering up his actual golf score, or perhaps the scandalous revelation that he has been dying his hair gray to garner sympathy (oh wait, that one has already been done).