Grasping at strawmen - Updated

There's no doubt the IRS was ham-handed in its handling of the tax-exempt applications after Citizen United. I've yet to see that they did anything against the law. Which is a problem to be sure. It suggests maybe we should be agitating to change the damn laws. Not that that's going to happen. Instead we have everyone looking to grind their own axe against the sharp edge of this pseudoscandal. That of course includes the "Obama has failed me" crowd of the left. Garance jumps in with this damning bit of evidence. On noes, there was no surge in applications in 2010. Quick fire more people. Heads must roll.

That's fine with me. Fire the whole lot. I seem to be the only one who remembers how George W Bush loaded the bureaucracy with GOP loyalists during his reign. Incompetent loyalists at that. Small wonder they screwed it all up. I've yet to see a high level official here who was hired under Obama.

Furthermore, as Steve M. points out, if the goal here was to suppress Tea Party influence on the election, they did a damn poor job of it. The chart showing the monthly approvals speaks for itself.



Oh and that bureaucrat who was in the tax exempt branch and is now in charge of IRS Obamacare enforcement? Hired under Reagan and promoted by none other than President George W. Bush, who also awarded her a hefty bonus in 2004 for distinguished service.

Our government agencies are riddled with GOP loyalists. Don't recall Obama doing any big purges like President Codpiece did. And let's not forget, the IRS admitted they outed themselves. I don't see any political advantage to Obama in engineering something so blatantly obvious. But looks like a helluva good way to invent a pseudo-scandal to help the GOP.

Update: Here's a list of all applications in that category which were approved in 2012. Just going by the obvious ones, looks like more conservative orgs were approved than liberal ones.