House GOP investigators argue IRS targeting influenced by Obama

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Fox News:

House Republicans seeking a direct link between President Obama and the IRS targeting of conservative groups -- a connection Democrats say is essential for a legitimate White House scandal -- have released a report detailing dozens of examples that they say prove the president and fellow Democrats pressured the agency to act.

 

The influence campaign unofficially started during Obama’s January 2010 State of the Union Address in which he “delivered a stunning rebuke” of the Supreme Court decision in favor of the group Citizens United, among the IRS’s first and biggest targets, according to the 77-page report released Monday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

 

The decision in part allowed campaign donors to remain anonymous.

 

“The Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests,” Obama said in the address. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse by foreign entities. ... And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.”

 

The report attempts to show that Obama combined his master oratory skills with the “indisputably powerful” presidential bully pulpit to sound a clarion call that was heard by news outlets shaping the national agenda and that led IRS official Lois Learner to start targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups that applied for tax-exempt status.

 

“IRS employees read and acted upon the news reports,” the committee report concludes. “Put simply, as the president’s political rhetoric drove the national dialogue and shaped public opinion, the IRS received and responded to the political stimuli.”

________

 

Official orchestration?

[Draggingtree]

Barack’s Bully Pulpit

Rick Wilson July 24, 2014

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post wrote a piece this week about the inability of modern Presidents to be successful, identifying three factors that made it nearly impossible for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama to live up to their promise or their desires as President.

 

I think he’s off-target, particularly regarding Obama.

 

It wasn’t Obama’s lack of a bully pulpit, or its declining effectiveness, that doomed his presidency. It was the delta between what Americans were promised and what he could deliver. On the campaign trail, he was an incandescent celebrity and read beautiful, focus-grouped text from the teleprompter. They were sold on Obama as a peerless intellect possessed of vast technocratic competence, unlimited compassion coupled with fiscal probity, and transcendent moral purity. Voters saw an online dating profile, not a real vision of the man.

 

Instead, Americans are greeted with a catalog of policy disasters, foreign and domestic, that grows longer, more sordid,

http://ricochet.com/baracks-bully-pulpit/