Obama’s Tax Thugs

Recently Mortimer Caplin announced his retirement at the age of 96. Caplin may have been the only IRS chief to appear on the cover of Time Magazine back when he was targeting JFK’s political enemies with audits as part of Kennedy’s “Ideological Organizations Project.”

“I remember that the president made a speech and I got a call from the White House again,” Caplin would later write. “The right-wing organizations were believed to be overstepping their tax-exemption bounds.”

There are always plenty of Caplins and Lois Lerners around to do the dirty work of the men on top, but what truly matters is the abuse of power by the chief executives who give them their marching orders.

Obama’s IRS scandal is not the first abuse of the system. But it should be the last one. Like JFK’s IRS scandal, it comes down to a White House worried about the impact of “right wing organizations” on its political agenda and lists being drawn up in order to intimidate and sabotage conservative organizations.

Like the Kennedy team, Obama’s people were more interested in the political allegiances of the bureaucracy under their control than its competence and in an administration where even the National Park Service has been politicized, the use of the IRS as a political weapon of terror was inescapable.

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