The IRS has been making front page news for several days now. The gist is that this arm of the Department of the Treasury has been caught participating in dirty tricks political favoritism by the exercising of their great and terrible power. The intent of their actions seems to be clearly to stifle and/or intimidate people and organizations that have fundamental differences with the Obama administration. The guilt is not really questioned but the running soap opera in the media is about proving what level of authority is involved in this ugly scandal. Most of the media dutifully trotted out a tired old scenario that it was a rouge low level action that completely surprised the upper echelons. But something different began to happen after the news media felt betrayed with another scandal involving phone taps for the otherwise very compliant and supportive Associated Press.

Slowly the covering fog began to lift and bit by bit the storyline changed showing ever higher and higher levels being not only aware of the problem but having been complicit if only by convenient tolerance. Then comes the testimony of Lois Lerner, the director of the suspect IRS section, seen nationally taking the 5th amendment and looking much like some Gambino type mobster or slimy financial scammer.

It takes only a nanosecond of thought to realize the pattern of the Benghazi fiasco had exactly the same pattern of deception. Slightly different is the Department of Justice’s betrayal of their unspoken pact with the media secretly going for phone records that would seemingly have been willingly handed to them for the asking. But so paranoid is this administration that the truth might leak out, they lashed out at some of their staunchest allies. In at least the short run, that has added fuel to the fire.

Now usually I’m writing about some environmental issue and the failure of the agencies to stick with science to make policy instead of the all-too-familiar politically expedient, taxpayer funded, pseudo-science that has become the trademark of EPA. My history has been as both a tax accountant when I first passed the CPA exam back in 1985 but I also had been in the environmental analytical and permitting business since the Dark Ages and have continued being involved in both for a few decades now. Some would think it odd to be working( and teaching at the university) in both fields but there is a connection. The overall process of compliance is very similar for both taxation and environmental permitting:

1.Same general process from the bowels of the Federal Register controlled by the legislative branch and manipulated by the agencies,

2.Both have state and local counterpart agencies.

But there’s a third component and it’s a doozey. It’s WHO was hired. I don’t mean the individual people but the long term trend of hiring, especially since 1992. I have worked with folks from IRS and EPA for decades and I can assure you there are many decent, hardworking, bright, and ethical people in both agencies. However, it has seemed to me that the beginning of the Clinton era saw a preference in hiring, then promoting people who seemed to be tuned to frequency that had shades of Orwell’s Big Brother. Left alone in the ascending ladder of bureaucratic power of management and after a couple of decades, we now have these two agencies( and I would believe many others) who are autonomically functioning to serve the progressive ideology. They do not need instructions, they came built that way and hired because of it. They were not fired because it was a protected government position and they could survive through less liberal administrations. This is not unlike hibernation and estivation techniques used by many organisms to survive the harsh times and re-emerge when the ( political) climate was better.

This is all compounded by a selection of some of the worst ideologs that could be hired to destroy the American culture….Lisa Jackson and Tim Geithner come to mind as a classic examples of destructive incompetence favored by the progressive mid set. People who literally lied for living and survived scrutiny because of a corrupt media. It’s a sad day for freedom but I doubt the general big media will pay much attention and will soon resume cheerleading for the destructive ideology of the left against the individualism and personal responsibility.