Full Dimensions of IRS Scandal Emerge
By Dick Morris
RealClearPolitics.com
The revelation that acting IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House at least 157 times during the period in which conservative groups were being targeted with tax audits gives us the first real indication of the extent to which this scandal reaches into the White House.
The incredible frequency of the visits -- essentially weekly -- indicate that President Obama must have been deeply involved with the inner workings of the audits and harassment of conservative groups. If Schulman was in the White House every week, what was he there to talk about?
Not Obamacare. Not without having Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in attendance, you wouldn't. About Treasury issues? Deficit reduction? Not without Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
The obvious reason is that Obama was following the IRS audits with an obsessive, personal involvement.
Apparently, the Citizens United scandal so galvanized him into action and tapped so deeply into his psyche that he was determined personally to supervise the castration of the wealthy people and groups whose access to the political system was opened wide by the Court.
To see a man who held a subordinate, non-policy making position 157 times, you have to be a president on a mission.
It transforms one's sense of the scandal from a rogue agency to a rogue president using the agency as his personal instrument. An instrument of vengeance, self-defense and political influence.
Richard Nixon was doomed when we all realized that the paranoia of the man had infected his entire administration.
When Chuck Colson led the plumbers unit to investigate leaks and to use the IRS to terrify and intimidate his enemies, we realized that he was operating as Nixon's man doing Nixon's bidding based on the needs of Nixon's psyche.
No we realize that the IRS audits and the harassment of conservative groups went very deep in Obama's priority system. This scandal will destroy him.
Or, as the Greeks said in ancient times, "Those who the gods would destroy they first make mad with power."