Political Bullies

A pair of national political stories left me incredulous last week. The first was the Justice Department announcing that there would be no criminal prosecution of Lois Lerner or any other IRS employees for the aggressive targeting of conservative groups applying for 501(C3) statuses. The second was the testimony of Hillary Clinton in front of the House Benghazi Committee. 

In the case of the IRS, agents aligned with the administration used their authority to intimidate and dissuade members of newly formed Tea Party groups from organizing prior to the 2012 presidential election. The active use of the IRS as an enforcement arm of a political party has never been this blatant. The Justice Dept. dismissed the scandal as isolated cases of bad judgement!

The Clinton appearance before the House Committee was equally disconcerting. Why were the Ambassador and staff left with so little protection in such a dangerous place, despite over six hundred pleas for increased security prior to the attack?

Mrs. Clinton’s response was astounding. The requests were not received by her but were handled by State Department professionals. When asked by Rep. Jim Jordan if any of those “professionals” were disciplined for dropping the ball, Mrs. Clinton became morally indignant. How dare he question the integrity of the dedicated government employees? How hateful and callous could Mr. Jordan have been?

Politicians and bureaucracies are convinced that they know what is best for the populace. If one publicly disagrees with a policy, the malcontent will be labeled a hateful person, marginalized or destroyed. It is an intelligently lazy but effective tactic. Most people strive to avoid confrontation and find it more comfortable to relent than to be assertive in the face of such allegations. The rise of the non-politicians in the Republican primary is a grass-roots response to this behavior.

Regardless of whether it is federal, state, county or city government, shutting down opposing ideas by intimidation does a great disservice to the citizenry and should not be accepted.