Saturday, June 8, 2013

Steyn On Our Orwellian Nation

This from Mark Steyn today:

When the state has the power to know everything about everyone, the integrity of the civil service is the only bulwark against men like Holder. Instead, the ruling party and the non-partisan bureaucracy seem to be converging. In August 2010, President Obama began railing publicly against “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity” (August 9th, a speech in Texas) and “shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names” (August 21st, radio address). And whaddayaknow, that self-same month the IRS obligingly issued its first BOLO (Be On the Look-Out) for groups with harmless-sounding names, like “tea party,” “patriot,” and “constitution.”

It may be that the strange synchronicity between the president and the permanent bureaucracy is mere happenstance and not, as it might sound to the casual ear, the sinister merging of party and state. Either way, they need to be pried apart. When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won’t end well.

And to put this in historical context:

So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.







2 comments:

Ex-Dissident said...

Who's going to disarm them? In my state a "republican" got a bill passed that criminalized criticism of the police. GW, I am certain that both of us have a nasty file that is kept in some government office. We don't need to have done anything illegal, it just has to be something the current administration considers wrong and they will use this file to torture us if we take a visible stand against this administration. Hell, they can even make up crap like they did with Romney.

Who is going to stand up to them? It is unlikely to be anyone with a family to care for. When I first returned from a TEA party event in NY, I felt invigorated. I was surrounded by people just like me who went to a protest to support their children. I thought there is no way to stop parents who are on a mission to help their children. It seems these fascists found a way: instead of a distant threat to the welfare of our descendants, they can make the treat imminent.

GW said...

Your points are all valid. But I also think that the IRS scandals are going to do immense damage to the left in the long run. As to the Tea Party, they did cause a wave election in 2010 - don't underestimate those grass roots organizations. And don't underestimate the impact all of this has for 2014.