I spent last
evening watching on C-Span the House Oversight Committee eviscerate the former
commissioner of the IRS, Douglas Shulman.
Both Republicans
and Democrats took turns sanctimoniously judging Shulman and trying with all
the drama of a courtroom trial of some grotesque murderer to humiliate and
destroy the man.
The Republicans
of course love this kind of stuff. Their
questioning bordered on hysteria and orgasmic delight. Most of it was complete buffoonery; as
usual. And the Democrats, who never miss
a chance to hold hands with Republican fanatics and support them in their
derangement, joined right in. They
always do this if they think doing so will impress someone out there in the
voting public who thinks Democrats are passive sissies. But of course no one is ever impressed by
this display of phony outrage.
Having a brain
and being an intelligent, rational presence seems lost on all of those on this
committee. With the exception of
Congressman Gerry Connolly of Virginia, who suggested that this whole mess
started because of the Supreme Court’s horribly flawed Citizens United decision
which allows corporations and other groups to financially support political
candidates of their choice without limits to fundraising or spending. Connolly noted that once that happened the
IRS offices were all inundated with endless groups wanting tax exemption status
in order to raise funds for candidates. Although
there were progressive groups included most of the new groups represented
conservative voters. No extra staff was provided
to assist IRS agents and there was no training offered to help them navigate
the murkiness of a process highly complicated by Citizens United. As a
result, some mistakes may have been made.
Frankly, though,
I don’t see a problem here. I think the
IRS people in the Cincinnati office were doing their job the best way they
could. The “list” of groups that has
everyone so stirred up has not in any way been proven to be some kind of
conspiracy list to deny Tea Party or other radical groups from getting tax free
status. The agents were simply making
sure there was justification for such a status.
That is their job. And all of us
should be glad they were doing it.
This is nothing
but politics. Sheer, unadulterated,
lousy, dysfunctional politics.
If the IRS office in Cincinnati is somehow at
fault here and if the department and agency managers were negligent in some way
by not providing more training or direction, then okay; let’s try to find ways
to fix those problems. But why turn this
into some kind of cataclysmic horror and criminal offense as if the IRS is
secretly and systematically out to destroy some right wing group? There is no proof of that at all. And as Douglas Shulman said, every single one
of those groups whose tax exemption status was delayed was still able to exist,
function, raise money, spend money and support whatever candidate they wanted
while waiting to hear from the IRS.
There may have been delays but no group was denied anything.
If some segment
of our government is at risk of mismanagement or unfair treatment of citizens,
then it is time for good judgment by Congress and other officials, not hasty
panic and immediate efforts to smear an entire agency as corrupt and
villainous.
Tagore, the
Indian mystic and poet, once said that we often read the world in the wrong way
and then say we have been deceived by it.
Our deception is our own making.
We see things we want to see and believe things we want to believe and
stick to that without seriously searching for truth.
There is an
addiction to wrongness in other people in this country and it exists in its
worst form in Washington, D.C. Many of
us copy their disturbing pathology and the whole nation suffers as a
result.
When we cling to
beliefs we have no interest in questioning or examining, it leaves us
unavailable to hear anything new. The
consequences of that are entrenched battles of flawed ideology and mostly
nonsense.
There are these
lines from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” – “The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs;
the deep moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
If only we
would climb out of this dark abyss of mistrust and hate and do that instead.
© 2013 Timothy
Moody
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