Peggy Noonan's New Column Comes Wrapped In Authentic Sense Of Wingnut Victimhood Plus An American Flag, Probably

Greetings Wonkette, and welcome to what has become our semi-regular Bataan Death March through Peggy Noonan’s latest column. In the past week Nooners has gotten her teeth into the IRS story like an aristocratic pit bull with lockjaw chomping down on a bone and oh Lord one can almost hear the saliva dripping off her fangs onto the parquet floor of her sitting room. Let us gaze upon her mighty works and despair together.

"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."

These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable.

A thought experiment: replace the words “Internal Revenue Service” with the words “Reagan Administration” and see if those two paragraphs wouldn’t be right at home in a Jack Anderson column circa 1987. Not that Pegs would admit it but as Bill Clinton might say, it takes some brass to come down on the IRS with those quotes when you have spent twenty-five years telling everyone that your sainted boss Reagan’s biggest scandal was a simple “mistake” for which the president bore no responsibility. Really Peggy, you lost all moral credibility to snark about another administration’s fuck-ups when you sold your soul a long time ago for a pint of absinthe and an invite to sneer in George Stephanopoulos’ face every Sunday morning from now until the trumpets sound. Would you like to shut up now? No? Fine, we can do this all day.

They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.

Weirdly Peggy did not write that sentence about any W administration officials during the run-up to the 2004 election. Also let us please remember that the IRS investigated some of these Tea Party groups because the groupscame to them to apply for tax-exempt status.You could perhaps make an argument that as of now it appears that the IRS might have been overzealous with its due diligence on confirming that status. You could also note that being granted 501(c)(3) status just because your group thinks it deserves it is not a constitutional right. At least not yet. But that argument might require Pegs to engage in intellectual honesty, which is tough to do from the confines of the haze of Vicodin and ancient resentments within which she apparently writes all her columns.

She said the targeting was the work of rogue agents in the Cincinnati office. But the Washington Post spoke to an IRS worker there, who said: "Everything comes from the top."

Pegs fails to note that “the top” told those rogue agents to knock off the targeting, which they did, briefly, before starting up again, because that sort of undercuts her argument. But sure, let’s take the context-free word of an anonymous bureaucrat who spoke to the Washington Post. Have another Vicodin, Pegs.

And we know Jay Leno , grown interestingly fearless, said of the new IRS commissioner, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."

Pardon us, but Jay Leno? The “interestingly fearless” Jay Motherfucking Leno? Yeah, we think we read that “joke” in Leno’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Jay Leno is Martin Luther King times a billion, basically. He’s Lenny Bruce without the profanity or the methadone. Does Jay fear that this Democratic president is going to send the IRS after him in retaliation for still fearlessly cracking Monica Lewinsky jokes a decade after Clinton’s impeachment? Jesus Christ, a late-night TV host mines the headlines for a joke and Peggy Noonan immediately starts mixing him up with a Nixon-era Bob Woodward. If that’s her standard for fearlessness, she should be asking the pope to canonize Jon Stewart for his work during the Bush years.

First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by the IRS. Liberal or progressive groups were not targeted.

 Ahem. Pegs, if you’re going to put stock in the WaPo when it supports your bullshit, perhaps you could also point out when it doesn’t, even when it is just quoting Bloomberg. Or would that require some more of that intellectual honesty that has no place in this hodgepodge of whining and claims of victimization, as exemplified by this statement:

IRS officials have complained that the law is murky, it's difficult to define what the tax exemption law really means. But they don't have any problem defining it. They defined it with a vengeance.

Vengance! Tyranny! The Kenyan Usurper has not granted the brave patriots of the Tea Party the tax-exempt status that is their birthright as brave resisters of the encroaching liberalism taking away their freedoms! But it doesn’t matter, because we’ve been to the mountaintop, people. And there we found Peggy Noonan and Jay Leno, sharing a joint while furiously masturbating over the latest John McNaughton painting. Godspeed, you brave warriors.

[ WSJ ]