Mark Steyn: What's the difference between the "President of the United States" and a "Government of the United States,"

There is a "President of the United States" and a "Government of the United States," but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the "Pimp With A Limp" show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line and leaks your confidential tax records. But they're two completely separate sinister entities. So it's preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn't have given Nixon the time of day.

And this:

Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

"Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

"Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. ... The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you) the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money."

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by El Presidente. More to the point, he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America's biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The "separate, sinister entity" of the Government of the United States went ahead, anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won't quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too – as they did to Miss Strassel's sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journal and various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.

Read the whole thing.