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RUSH: Did you hear how David Axelrod attempted to defend Obama on the IRS scandal? I think he was on MSNBC today. David Axelrod said (paraphrasing), “Well, you know, the government’s too big. The government’s simply too vast for Obama to control it.” Bingo! Exactly! That’s the whole reason the Tea Party exists. The government is too big. Not only is the government too big, it’s growing. It’s growing to the point that it is unmanageable, although that is a big, I think, diversion in and of itself.

They managed all of this. They were able to direct all of these scandals, folks. And yet the theme of the day in the Drive-By Media, guess what it is? Now all of a sudden Obama is just too disengaged. He’s too passive. He’s too disinterested. He couldn’t possibly have had a direct role in any of this ’cause he doesn’t care enough. He’s not engaged enough. Dana Milbank actually has a name for him in his Washington Post column. The headline of Milbank’s piece: “Obama, the Uninterested President.” And he refers to him as “President Passerby.”

Folks, I am telling you, the media is now being split up. That may not be the accurate way to say this, but some elements of the media are loaded for bear now, or appear to be at least on the IRS scandal. Some of them are still circling the wagons around Obama, and one of them is Dana Milbank. But there is in certain sectors of the State-Controlled Media, the theme today is that Obama couldn’t have been involved directly in any of this stuff. Obama couldn’t be. He’s too passive. He’s too disinterested. He’s focused on other things. His job has never really been all that challenging to Obama. I mean, it’s so beneath his skill set.

This guy is really capable and qualified of so much more and so much of this bores Obama, because he can’t get as much done as he wants to get done. There’s all this gridlock because of Limbaugh and the Republicans, and so he’s just frustrated. The poor guy, it’s almost to the point where he’s just thrown up his hands and said, “Well, to hell with it. Everything moves so slow I can’t get anything done,” and that’s why he goes out and plays golf ’cause he really doesn’t care that much. This is what they are constructing, folks, as a way of insulating Obama from any of these scandals, about which there are now four.


There is an EPA scandal that is developing and it involves treating conservative organizations much the same way the IRS did. But, boy, I tell you, Axelrod: the government is just too big, it’s just too vast for Obama to control. Exactly. Exactly. You know, folks, it’s kind of funny. It seems like only a few days ago Barack Obama was telling the graduates at the Ohio State University commencement exercise about the joys of big government. He was mocking right-wingers who distrust big government for their paranoid suspicions about tyranny. He was warning them about all the voices, and he meant one; I’m now convinced it was me, since I do live rent free in his head.

By the way, I have not heard back from the White House regarding my invitation yesterday to meet with the president whenever he wants to discuss the gridlock, for which he blames me. I’m willing to meet with him and get off the dime on this to try to move the country forward and, if need be, advise him on how to do this. I doubt that he will accept the invitation since the theme of the day is that he’s too disinterested and not involved and not engaged because it’s such a mundane job. There’s so much minutia in the job, it’s so beneath Obama’s powerful intellect. But nevertheless my invitation stands. I’m willing to meet with the president to discuss this.

But, seriously, he’s at Ohio State University, the commencement speech, he’s telling all these graduates, “Be very wary of tyranny.” The same thing our Founding Fathers said, by the way — John Adams, George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson. The entire construct of this government is because of their fear of tyranny. The entire united constitution is based upon a fear of government tyranny. The US Constitution limiting the role of government in the life of the individual. And there’s Obama at the Ohio State University commencement talking about the joys of big government, now so big he can’t control it, mocking right-wingers for paranoid suspicions about tyranny.

You know, folks, all these Obama scandals, keep them in mind the next time that you hear Barack and Michelle Obama lecturing audiences about how important it is for people to get involved in grassroots politics. Don’t they do that a lot? They do. Michelle’s constantly out urging people to get involved. Grassroots level. That’s where it happens. That’s what makes it happen. That’s where people have to do the hard work, getting involved at the precinct level, getting involved at your local community, getting involved. Grassroots politics. And that’s all these Tea Party groups are trying to do. That’s all they wanted to do was make their voices heard.

The Tea Party groups are trying to get involved in the process. The Obama administration did everything in their power to shut ’em out. The Obama administration is using the massive power, the intimidating power, the real power of the Internal Revenue Service to shut people out of the grassroots area of politics, to intimidate people on the right into not even getting involved. The Obama administration did everything it could using the powers, not just of the IRS, but also the EPA, to literally intimidate conservatives from getting involved in politics at the grassroots level.

I have this Stack of Stuff here today that is just of the IRS, and I could probably do the entire three hours on it. It is massive, folks. The information that has come to light, that continues to come to light, that continues to surface, is almost incomprehensible. This scandal — and it is that — is so massive and has been going on for so long that it is laughable to listen to the media. Obama’s too passive, too disengaged, couldn’t possibly have had a direct role in any of this. Dana Milbank calling him “President Passerby.” The Politico has a piece today: “DC Turns on Obama.” It’s by Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei. “The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for the White House.”

What is the town? It means the media. “Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with –” What? Establishment Democrats never big fans of the president? What did I miss these last five years? Establishment Democrats, never big fans of Obama to begin with? Well, that’s what it says, and it says that they are “starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.

“Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a good old-fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and public scolding to pile up. Vernon Jordan, a close adviser to President Bill Clinton through his darkest days, told us: ‘It’s never all right if youÂ’re the president. There is no smooth sailing. So now he has the turbulence, and this is the ultimate test of his leadership.’ Jordan says Obama needs to do something dramatic on the IRS, and quick: ‘He needs to fire somebody. He needs action, not conversation.'” You know, folks, this notion — and they’re trying with this theme today — that Obama, President Passerby, is too disengaged, too disinterested?

“The job is too boring. He’s so, so capable of so, so much more. He couldn’t possibly have been directly involved!” Everybody in positions of power in his bureaucracy has been put there because he wants them there. He doesn’t have to have direct fingerprints on everything. All he’s had to do is put like-minded, fellow-traveler activists in these positions, and he can be guaranteed that they’re going to do exactly what he would do if he were there. That’s all he has to do.

I could give you the names of the famous members of the administration that you know. Van Jones. He’s a well-known, proud communist, who had to be tossed out because of things that were learned. Remember when that happened, people asked, “How could Obama have appointed this guy? How could this guy have gotten through Obama’s vetting process?” He didn’t have to get through being vetted. Obama wanted exactly a guy like Van Jones!

Everybody in these positions is doing exactly what Obama would do if he were in that position himself, in those jobs. That’s why they’re there! These are people who want to populate government for the purposes of using it to wage war on their political enemies. That’s why they want to go to government. That’s why they want to work in government. That’s why they want positions in government. Government, to them, is a battle station. The IRS is one front in the battle, in the overall war.

The EPA is another.

The Department of Treasury is another.

The Department of Justice is another.

The Department of Defense, too.

Every Obama appointee and every Obama career person in these positions is from the same mold as Obama. They are there to wage war against their enemies — and I’m not talking about Al-Qaeda, and I’m not talking about Saddam Hussein. I’m not talking about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I’m talking about you and me. We are having a war waged against us. That is what is coming to the surface now. All of what’s happening now, all of what’s coming to the surface now, has been going on since day one of the Obama administration.

This is why, this kind of thing is why I said even two weeks before he was immaculated, “I hope he fails.” The IRS, that’s a plum spot to engage in partisan political warfare against the enemies of whatever you want to call it. The Democrat Party, the socialists, the left, whatever. We are the enemy. We have to be diminished. We have to disempowered. We have to be rendered impotent. We have to be basically dispatched. That’s what all of this is.

All you’ve gotta do is keep that one truth in mind as you watch, read, or listen to every new detail coming up out of the IRS story. There wasn’t one incident in this IRS story that’s accidental. There wasn’t one occurrence here that was a mistake. All of it was on purpose. We ended the program yesterday with a sound bite from Harry Reid, and he pretty much admitted what we had learned in the last hour of the program yesterday involving, essentially, information laundering.

You’ve heard of money laundering.

Well, the left engages in information laundering.

So you have the IRS, and they are hassling Tea Party groups and other conservative groups who are applying for tax-exempt status to do fundraising, to do issue advancement, to do causal work, whatever it is. The IRS is going way beyond the bounds of propriety in asking for information about donors, individuals, virtually anything that they can get their hands on about people involved in whatever organization is applying for the status.

That information was then turned over to a group called ProPublica, which is a group just like Media Matters. ProPublica then feeds the information to sympathetic journalists who then write stories about what a creep Mitt Romney is or what a bunch of racist-bigot thugs that Tea Party group is, or what a bunch of religious zealots that Tea Party group is. That stuff ends up in the mainstream media, and it ends up in local newspapers, on local television newscasts — and it all came from the IRS.

The information was laundered through ProPublica, and then finally sent on to what appeared to be mainstream journalists, who (according to what most people think) just happened to find the news by doing their jobs, when in fact it was funneled to them directly from the Obama administration, right from the IRS. It’s information laundering. Harry Reid said yesterday (summarized), “This is perfectly fine, because these Tea Party groups are so damaging, and they are such a bunch of liars.

“They’re not interested in what they say they’re interested in! They’re not trying to help the country. They’re not doing anything but trying to undermine what the Democrats want to do.” So Harry Reid said, “Well, maybe the IRS shouldn’t have done it. But because there’s nobody else that could do it, we have to say it’s okay.” I have illustrations of all of this with audio sound bites and news stories from the Stack of Stuff. Make no mistake about it.

None of this from the EPA, none of this from the attorney general’s office and Department of Justice, none of it involving the AP, none of it involving the IRS, none of it involving the EPA, none of it involving the jackbooted treatment of conservative groups by the government — none of it — is coincidental. None of it’s accidental. None of it just happened. It is because the people who populate these bureaucracies are using their positions to wage political war against you, your candidates, your party, your values, your beliefs, your cultural preferences.

That’s what you are in the middle of here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me say it again to be clear, folks. The meme of the day: “Obama couldn’t have been involved! He couldn’t have been directly involved. He’s too disengaged. He’s President Passerby. He’s too bored. He’s not engaged daily. The job’s not that interesting to him,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you something: He doesn’t have to be. All he has to do is what he did: Put like-minded people in these positions. Do you know there was one person — one — in the Cincinnati office assigned to every Tea Party application for tax-exempt status?

One person.

Now, aside from the fact that that would take a long time — one person having to go through all of those myriad applications, that alone would slow down the approval process if it were being done fairly. One person. I guarantee you: That person, whoever he or she is, was doing exactly what Obama would do if he were there. That is why that one person is there, and that is why that one person was chosen to handle the approval process of all these applications by Tea Party groups. It may as well have been Obama. Eric Holder is Obama. Kathleen Sebelius is Obama. They’re all the same people.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: At the very at least — at the very least — the IRS suppressed the Tea Party movement for 27 months, from March of 2010 to June of 2012, across two election cycles. That’s at the very least. The IRS suppressed the Tea Party movement. The IRS. In this case, a branch of the Obama administration. So you have one person in the Cincinnati office assigned to all the Tea Party tax-exempt applications, one person in the approval process.

And that one person — acting not as an IRS employee, and not as someone making judgments based on the law, but rather someone implementing the power of his political preferences under the guise of fairness and objectivity at the IRS — was waging war on the Tea Party, preventing the Tea Party from participating in the political process. Preventing. Who is the Tea Party, by the way? They’re just citizens who, for the first time in their lives in many cases, got involved in politics and started going to town hall meetings.

They were so outraged over what they saw the first two years of the Obama administration, from the spending, to the debt, to what that meant to the future for their children and grandchildren. They were outraged, and for the first time in their lives, in many cases, they got involved in politics. For the first time. They learned what they had to do. They organized at the grassroots level. They learned about 527s and 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s. They sought to duplicate what the Democrat Party has: A number of special interest groups organizing legally and raising money legally to promote the things they care about.

And one person — who may as well have been Barack Obama at the IRS — was waging war against them, demanding information not legally demandable — essentially bottling up the approval process, denying many of them — while at the same time leaking the information on their applications to another left-wing special interest group disguised as a bunch of journalists (ProPublica), laundering the information, and then giving it to so-called mainstream reporters.

Reporters who then wrote stories that apparently came from pure boot-leather reporting about what a bunch of racists winning bigots, sexists, and homophobes the Tea Party is. “The Tea Party is the modern equivalent of the KKK,” went one story. “The Tea Party is full of racist bigots and gun nuts!” You remember all the stories. The information for those stories came from the IRS Washington office, the Cincinnati office.

So at the very least the IRS is suppressing the Tea Party movement for 27 months, but that’s at the least. What was really happening was they were having war waged against them, and they didn’t know it. They might have suspected it. They were being denied the right to participate in the American political process because this administration sought to use its power to oppose these people simply because they disagree and don’t like and are threatened by their ideas.

I want you to hear this Harry Reid sound bite again. This is from yesterday afternoon in Washington, during a press conference. Harry Reid was basically excusing and encouraging this activity by the IRS.

REID: There are these shadowy political groups masquerading as social welfare organizations in order solicit anonymous donations from we don’t know who, big corporations and also wealthy people. That needs to stop. Preventing overtly political groups, like the ones run by Karl Rove, from masquerading as social welfare organizations is really a critically important task, whether these groups are on the left or on the right. But the IRS may not be the right organization to perform the task. But perhaps what we haven’t done, leaves that organization as the only one we have to look to.

RUSH: So it’s fine. We’ve kind of screwed this up. The IRS might not be the right group to look at it, but maybe they’re the only ones that can. So it’s okay. Now, we will allow Harvey Weinstein and Ron Burkle and — well, you take your pick, any Hollywood producer (What’s her name?) Anna Wintour. All these people, they can go out and they can form any social welfare group they want. They’re filthy rich.

They’re really wealthy people, and they’re doing all of these organizations.

They’re creating all these organizations, and they’re raising money, and they’re raising money for Obama, and they’re charging $32,000 a couple to show up. That’s perfectly fine! But the Tea Party — made up of average, ordinary, everyday men and women — were seen as the enemy by this administration. Now there are calls for somebody at the IRS to be fired. Seriously? What did anybody at the IRS do that Obama and the Democrats weren’t demanding that they do? Whoever was doing this at the IRS, if the left wants to be intellectual honest, should get an award.

If you’re gonna fire anybody it’s for stupidly getting caught, but whoever was doing this at the IRS was doing exactly what Obama wanted, exactly what Joe Biden wanted, exactly what Harry Reid wanted, exactly what Nancy Pelosi wanted, exactly what Barbara Boxer wanted, exactly what Dianne Feinstein wanted. Take any Democrat. The IRS was doing exactly what they wanted ’em to do. So on what grounds does somebody there get fired?

They were simply following orders — and if no direct orders were given, they didn’t have to be given. The people who were hired are already motivated, are already activated to behave in this manner. That’s why they’re hired! They’re hired because they don’t need to be told. They’re hired because they already qualify. They don’t need instruction in hating conservatism. They don’t need to be told how to thwart 527s and 501(c)(3)s and (4)s. They don’t have to be told how to harass. They don’t have to be told how to bully.

They don’t have to be told how to stonewall. They don’t have to be told how to deny applications. They’re perfectly capable of it on their own. That’s why they’re in their positions in the first place.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I think it’s worth remembering how the Tea Party came to be. The Tea Party was given birth by an over-expanding, overreaching, overtaxing bureaucracy. When average citizens, who had never been involved in politics before, saw what was happening the first two years of the Obama administration — all the spending and all the debt that was being racked up and the future plans the Obama administration had (Obamacare, the increased taxes) — these people got scared.

They got scared for their country.

They were scared for their children.

They became scared for their grandkids.

They worried the country was being transformed into something unlike its founding, and they worried what kind of country their kids and grandkids would grow up in. So they got involved to try to stop what they saw was happening — and the minute they became officially organized and started trying to raise money, the federal government tried to put the big kibosh on them. If this were a Star Wars saga or part of it, this would be The Bureaucracy Strikes Back.

It’s a bunch of upstarts — a bunch of average, ordinary Americans — who decided to get involved in politics, decided to get directly involved at the grassroots level in the politics of their country for the very first time. What they got was beaten up on at town hall meetings by union thugs. They were intimidated. They were called racist, sexist, bigots, homophobes, all of that. They were compared to the KKK and other nefarious groups from America’s past.

Now we know that the IRS was being used by the Obama administration to deny them their legal right to participate in the political process by way of forming tax-exempt foundations and organizations designed to raise money to promote the ideas they believed in. It’s this group that created that massive midterm electoral defeat for the Democrat Party. The 2010 midterms. That combined with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which essentially allowed corporations to also enter the political process, threw the Democrat Party from Obama on down for loops.

It discombobulated them, it angered them, it irritated them, and they — at that point — made it official. They began using every bureaucracy in the government as a means of waging war against their political enemies. The IRS was targeting a group that had, among its agenda items, tax cuts. The IRS was targeting millions of average, ordinary citizens. By no means were they political professionals. In essence, you know, the Tea Party is essentially what this country’s all about.

It’s average, ordinary citizens. It’s Politics 101, Civics 101. It’s “getting involved,” as this president and his wife are constantly urging people to do, by the way. “Get involved. You can make a difference.” Not if you’re the Tea Party. That was too political. Organizing for Action is not political, even though Organizing for Action is Obama’s campaign. Organizing for Action is Obama’s existing, current campaign. From The Daily Caller. This is Neil Munro. He’s the reporter that dared ask Obama a question at a Rose Garden ceremony.

When he asked the question, other members of media began chasing him to the Washington Monument, ’cause he’d committed a no-no. He had asked the Dear Leader a question. “IRS managers delayed approval of tea party requests for routine tax exemptions by assigning all of them to a single employee in Cincinnati for special review, according to footnote 14 of the blockbuster Inspector General report. The single employee was the only person working on the reviews for at least 18 months.”

Every Tea Party application was reviewed by one person.

This is why I said in the last hour: Folks, it doesn’t matter whether Obama gave the order or not. He didn’t have to. This one person was essentially Barack Obama. That’s why this one person was there. You probably will not find instructions. You won’t find a conversation where this IRS employee was told what to do. He didn’t have to be told. He was put there precisely because he was already qualified. He was put there because they knew that he was one of them.

So the IRS has been used by this administration to wage war against its political enemies. That’s mean, folks. I mean, that is just really, really mean. Not only that, it’s unfair — and America is built on fairness. America’s built on everybody have an equal shot. In fact, doesn’t Obama talk about that, too? Yeah. When he makes his economic speeches, he talks about how America’s gotta be fair. Everybody has to have a fair shot, an equal shot.

That’s why we gotta penalize the rich!

Uh, uh, uh! No, that’s why we gotta penalize Tea Party.

We’re not gonna make it fair for them. We’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna be mean to the Tea Party. Why? ‘Cause they’re a bunch of racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe conservatives. That’s why! No, it wouldn’t be interesting to know the political affiliation of this one IRS individual. We know what it is. We know why he was selected. Yeah, I think it’s pretty safe to say he’s a Democrat. He’s an Obamaite.

This is a footnote, by the way, this little bit of information that just one employee of the IRS was involved in approving every Tea Party tax-exempt request or application. Just one employee. This is a “footnote 14 of the blockbuster Inspector General report.” Apparently, “From early 2010, ‘the [review] team consisted of one specialist, but it was expanded to several specialists in December 2011…'”

That helps explain the report from USA Today that said it was 27 months after March of 2010 before another conservative 501(c)(4) was approved, 27 months between approvals of one group 501(c) to another. Here’s another. This is Larry Nordvig. He was on Fox last night with Greta Van Susteren. She said, “What kind of questions did they ask you?”

NORDVIG: They wanted to know information about our members, who they associate with. What really alarms me the most, I think, is they wanted to know our donors’ names, personal information about them. They wanted to know whether they were going to run for office or have ever run for office. The whole point behind getting a 501(c)(4) tax exempt is so that donors are donate anonymously. There are a lot of people that don’t want their names attached to a political organization when they give money, and one impact this had on the Richmond Tea Party was, people were afraid to give money, and that directly impacts our operation.

RUSH: People were afraid to donate, so we had no way to raise money because people didn’t want their identities known, and they legally are allowed to keep themselves secret. But the IRS was demanding that they be known. You know why? Because then the IRS was gonna send that information about the donors, not just to this group, but all the others, to ProPublica. Those names would be investigated by journalists. And if they found one speck of damaging information about them it could be written about and these donors could be embarrassed and humiliated and intimidated into not giving any more, which was the objective. This is really hideous stuff.

But, folks, let me tell you something. All of this, this IRS stuff, yes, it’s bad, and it’s easily explained, and it’s easily understood. It wasn’t fair. It’s mean. But at least so far we don’t know that anybody was killed. In Benghazi, four Americans are dead, and there still is not a legitimate explanation for why. Benghazi remains huge. Benghazi is perhaps bigger than the IRS scandal. I don’t want to put the Tea Party people on a lower rung of the ladder. That’s not what I’m doing here. But in terms of this IRS scandal, this is typical, this is Democrat Party power, unfair, cheating politics using an agency of the government to wage war on domestic enemies. But Benghazi, that is sheer, utter incompetence resulting in the four dead Americans.

At the worst, Benghazi is incompetence. It could be even much worse than that. And so far the explanations for Benghazi are as unacceptable and lame as the explanations for the IRS. “Well, Obama’s too disengaged.” In fact, they’re saying that about every one of these scandals. “Well, you know, Benghazi, he turned it over to other people. Really, he’s President Passerby.” This is the Washington theme in the media today. “The government’s too big for him to control.” That’s Axelrod. Exactly. That’s why the Tea Party exists. The government’s too big for Obama to control and so things are gonna happen he can’t possibly know about, is the thinking.

They’re excusing our president, folks, by essentially saying it’s too big, it’s impossible for him to know everything going on. It’s impossible to control everything going on, which means it’s impossible for him to be responsible for anything. It’s just too big. There are too many rogue players. There are too many people acting on their own. There are too many people acting outside of orders. It’s not Obama’s fault. He’s not even that engaged in it. He’s not even that interested. This job is so beneath his intellectual capabilities, he’s not even really engaged. Nobody even knows where he was the night of Benghazi. You can’t blame it on him because it’s so big, and he’s so distant.

I’m not kidding you. That’s the effort being made today by the Washington press corps to excuse Obama.

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