“GOP do you love me?”, asked the Tea Party

“GOP do you love me?”, asked the Tea Party.
SO WHY DIDN’T ROMNEY, OR THE GOP, PUSH THESE SCANDALS HARDER BEFORE THE ELECTION? A variety of explanations are offered, and I find this one troublingly plausible: “Obama’s prime target was the Tea Party (which had crushed him in the 2010 midterms), and the establishment Republicans were at odds with the Tea Party movement. I’m not saying I believe this, but sober reflection tells us we need to redraw the line between paranoia and vigilance. The theory is that establishment Republicans appreciated the suppression of the Tea Party.”
Plus, from the comments: “The IRS chilling hampered some of the exact groups who might have brought this stuff to light.”

IT JUST GETS WORSE: IRS tax exemption/Obamacare exec got $103,390 in bonuses.
Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harrassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.
More recently, Ingram was promoted to serve as director of the tax agency’s Obamacare program office, a position that put her in charge of the vast expansion of the IRS’ regulatory power and staffing in connection with federal health care, ABC reported earlier today.
Great. So the woman who oversaw the targeting of Tea Partiers is now in charge of healthcare regulation? You may be paranoid. But are you paranoid enough?

PEGGY NOONAN: This Is No Ordinary Scandal: Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government. “Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.”

Peggy’s right, but I was saying the same thing — right there in the Wall Street Journal — way back in 2009, when she was still going on about Obama’s transformational energy. So welcome to the party. Wish you’d gotten here before the re-election. . . .
Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

MOE LANE ON THE IRS SCANDALS: Remember, this is not a failure of the system. This is the system.