Jim McDermott Brings Knowledge To IRS Hearings, Guaranteeing He Will Be Ignored

Yr Wonkette has gotten pretty goddamned sick and tired of this whole IRS shitfuffle. We are tired of lecherous poop gibbon George Will comparing the scandal to Watergate simply because the letters I, R, and S are involved. We are tired of Peggy Noonan’s overblown Friday tirades on the subject (and Pegs, what it means when “literally half the country” thinks the IRS sees them as targets and will shoot at them if they raise their heads is that literally half the country is a bunch of loons with a persecution complex -- or as we call them, Republicans.) We are tired of conservatives screaming out whatever numbers come up in the investigation -- 157 visits! 88 IRS agents! 18 interview transcripts! -- without any context or examination whatsoever, like some sort of evil wingnut numerology. We are certainly sick of beady-eyed mole rat Darrell Issa spouting off about shady orders from the White House with no proof whatsoever.

So tired.

Which is why this speech yesterday by Representative Jim McDermott (D-Washington) is as close as we’re getting to Wednesday Nice Time. McDermott made his comments during a Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS scandal, and he was so darn logical and reasoned we almost kissed our computer screen:

I’d like to remind everyone what we are talking about here. None of your organizations were kept from organizing or silenced.  We are talking about whether or not the American taxpayers would subsidize your work. We are talking about a tax break…I get the feeling that many of you and my Republican colleagues don’t just believe you should be free from political targeting, but that you should be free from scrutiny of any kind.

Yes yes, a thousand thumbs up! This is what pundits have been pointing out for weeks. The IRS is supposed to be making sure you assholes are not gaming the system. So many of you have tried to register your chagrin that the Kenyan Muslim Socialist Fascist Usurper wants to mau mau your freedom to buy environmentally dangerous light bulbs or install toilets that waste enough water to hydrate Africa for a year that someone, somewhere, had to impose some kind of check to bring order to all the chaos. That someone was the IRS. If all of you had decided to be reasonable about Obama’s election and work with the guy instead of screaming like a bunch of emotionally disturbed howler monkeys -- and for that matter, if you had recognized that the Citizens United decision did not actually remove all restrictions on campaign finances -- the IRS would not have been in this position in the first place.

If there was an organization promoting taxpayer funding for abortions, wouldn’t you want to be sure they weren’t using their tax-free money to campaign for a candidate? What about a group that wanted to promote voting without I.D.’s?  What if, in the midst of an increase of Communist candidates, new Communist clubs wanted tax-free status? Wouldn’t you want to be sure that the self-declared tax-free classifications of those groups were correct?

Yes, because those groups would clearly be composed of members of an un-American fifth column infiltrating our political system and subverting our democracy by making sure women and non-whites and poors get to exercise their constitutional rights. Can’t have that!

Our job is to make sure this never happens again. Anything else, like the circus happening at the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, is political theatre.

Of course the fact he called it political theatre wounded Paul Ryan right in his delicate fee-fees, but fuck that guy because who cares what he thinks.

Thank you, Rep. Jim McDermott who represents most of Seattle! Remind us to invite you to our next drinky thing! 

[ The Big Slice ]