IRS scandal story's legs get sturdier
Liberals have been desperate to stamp a giant "case closed" on the IRS scandal. But, inconveniently for them, facts keep emerging that demand the case stay very much opened, and the trail followed as far as it goes.

Thursday, IRS employees who had direct contact with applications for tax-exempt status by tea parties and other conservative groups testified before Congress that interest in the applications, and control over how they were handled, went at least as high as the office of the chief counsel of the IRS. Now, as Democrats have been at pains to explain ever since this scandal erupted a couple of months ago, the IRS is not an agency loaded with political appointees. The chief counsel is one of only two IRS leaders -- the head of the agency is the other -- chosen by the president....

...Liberals famously are self-proclaimed experts at detecting conservative "dog whistles" -- statements meant to elude the ears of all but the intended recipients, who are then supposed to act on the top-secret messages while everyone else remains oblivious. The ridiculousness of this theory is usually apparent in the fact that liberals, who in this line of thinking should be the ones unable to hear the conservative "dog whistles," nevertheless always manage to detect the messages.

But in the IRS case, it's possible we have an instance of a real "dog whistle," one which really worked in real life.

Obama spent months after the Supreme Court's January 2010 Citizens United decision bashing right-wing advocacy groups -- a good timeline of his remarks can be found here -- and by the final weeks before that year's midterm elections the president was calling these groups engaing in "unsupervised spending" both "a problem for our democracy" and a "threat to our democracy." The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Democrat Max Baucus, wrote a letter demanding the IRS investigate conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status. All this happened in the months when, according to evidence already gathered in the House's IRS investigation, we know the agency was well into the process of setting aside tea-party applications and scrutinizing them. And, let's not forget, this was also during the time tea-party groups were complaining about the extra scrutiny and long delays, while IRS officials told Congress they knew about nothing of the sort.

And yet, it would seem Obama, Baucus and other Democrats got exactly what they wanted -- but no one started to connect the dots until the IRS's ham-fisted revelation of the targeting. Isn't that exactly what the left calls a "dog whistle" in its frequent complains about the right? Do liberals ever care in those instances whether the whistler also placed a phone call or sent an email? Nope....