Category Archives: morality

Some Later Thoughts on Obama’s Counterterrorism Speech

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President Barack Obama had this to say, also, in that…speech:

We unequivocally banned torture, affirmed our commitment to civilian courts, worked to align our policies with the rule of law, and expanded our consultations with Congress.

Let’s see how he did that:

He banned interrogation techniques that produced results, after torture had already been banned for years.

He’s been pushing for five years to try terrorists and other illegal combatants as common criminals and to try Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in New York courts or to release them outright.

He interrupts interrogations in progress in order to read the prisoner his Miranda “rights.”

He had his Attorney General drop a voter intimidation case involving the New Black Panthers and their white voter victims after the particular NBP miscreants had pled out.

He’s done nothing material about his DoJ’s program of running guns to Mexican drug cartels.

He’s had his HHS Secretary “encourage” fund “contributions” to his federal health insurance exchange from the insurance companies she regulates.

He’s doing nothing material about his Treasury Department’s IRS (which he falsely claims is an “Independent Agency”) program of targeting Americans and groups of Americans of whom he disapproves for the special treatments of tax audits, invasion of their donor lists, deliberate and prolonged delays on finalizing their tax exempt status applications.

He’s actively covering up his and his State and Defense failures in the run-up to the Benghazi terrorist attack in which an American ambassador and three men attached to him were murdered, their failures during the attack, and their failures in the aftermath.

He’s doing nothing material about his DoJ’s assault on our free press via secret seizure of phone records, emails, and obtaining search warrants by falsely accusing individual journalists of criminal activity.

He’s played a couple of rounds of gold with the House leadership and invited them to dinner, and then he’s castigated them for not kowtowing to him and giving him everything he wants.

That’s a powerful alignment.

An Outcome of Big Government

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The proper lessons of the unfolding IRS scandal are twofold.  First, any effort to have the IRS police advocacy activities of social-welfare organizations is bound to be clumsy and prone to degenerate into either selective or broad witch hunts.  Second, the remedy is not to further limit political speech by nonprofit entities—which would certainly raise significant constitutional issues—but to encourage such speech by imposing fewer restrictions.

That combines with this:

There are two valid takeaways from the IRS scandal [and the other scandals: AP; Benghazi; Sebelius’ HHS “fund-raising” for Federal government’s health exchanges, just exposed this year].  First, it confirms that big government, whose power Obama is bent on expanding, cannot be trusted to behave properly.  Second, it calls for further investigation to determine how high up the chain the wrongdoing extends and whether the administration acted promptly to stop the targeting once it learned of that activity.

The need for an investigation and the firing of miscreants and subsequent jailing of those miscreants whose behavior was criminal certainly is warranted.  However, the IRS’ unconscionable behavior, and the Obama administration’s behavior vis-à-vis the other…scandals…, aren’t unique to the Obama administration.  These are the inevitable outcomes of Big Government, even when that government acts with the best of intentions.

Our Federal government needs to be drastically shrunk in size and scope, returning it to the small, limited, and so controllable, entity that it was designed to be.

A first step in this, in the present context, would be to do away with the distinction between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations—the legal distinction is wholly artificial and without meaning, anyway.  All entities engaged in otherwise tax exempt activities must be able to engage in some political activity.  That’s at the core of the speech clauses of the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There’s nothing in there about “except for when individual Americans or groups of them peaceably assembled are doing certain government-identified things.”

Subsequently, reform the tax code altogether to a single low, flat tax and thereby eliminate the need for tax exempt status for any organization.

The Morality of the Left, Redux

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Via Peter Baker of The New York Times, comes this…gem.  Baker quotes David Axelrod, long-time senior advisor to President Barack Advisor and heavy-hitting campaign supporter in 2012, as saying this:

[T]he reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.

So, the plain, unvarnished truth isn’t practical, is that it?

The Morality of the Left

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In response to the IRS’ appalling targeting of administration-disfavored groups applying for tax-exempt status, President Barack Obama’s senior advisor David Plouffe tweeted

David Plouffe ‏@davidplouffe 12 May

What IRS did dumb and wrong. Impt to note GOP groups flourished last 2 elections, overwhelming Ds. And they will use this to raise more $.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, all that matters in Plouffe’s moral world is

partisan advantage rather than…apolitical tax enforcement….

It’s clear to me from all of the scandals exploding in DC that this view of “morality” is typical of the Progressives and is not at all unique to Plouffe.

The rightness or wrongness of a thing is wholly unimportant.  What matters is whether any profit can be made from it, and what’s wrong about it is the other side collecting the profit.  So they say.