Richard Fernandez: The Poisoned Chalice

What do you do when a man lies to your face, daring you to call him a liar.  It's a question that Conservatives are going to have to face.  Fernandez: 

Like a man in a saloon card game who’s caught someone cheating at cards either they call him out and take what comes or pretend the game is still honest. It’s either ignore the cheating or get ready to clear leather.

We may be faced with the possibility that Team Obama feels it no longer has to dissemble.

What the scandals have done to Washington is taken the former process of horse-trading perilously close to a zero-sum game. Each new revelation bolsters the belief that the administration has already done precisely what the Republicans don’t want to do: gone for for big brass ring. Gone for world domination. There are a lot of suggestive indicators. They’ve politicized the IRS, Treasury, Justice — maybe even the defense department. Maybe they’ve already opted for the zero sum game — with themselves as the winners.

The sheer apocalyptic implication of that possibility gives stories which offer an excuse for inaction a curious attractiveness: “We made mistakes, but without malice”. How one hopes that’s true. These stories allow everyone to hope, permit everyone to delay the irreparable breach. It permits one to plausibly think it is all a misunderstanding, like the man finding someone in bed with his wife or discovering a murder in progress. Because if it is real then all ways run ill.

If the scandals, and make no mistake these are serious scandals, can be placed at Obama's door we may actually be better off than if there is another explanation: that the Federal bureaucracy itself is under the control of rogue political operatives. James Taranto says it well in the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web:

Suppose the IRS's abuses were not ordered or explicitly encouraged by the White House. That would mean, as Commentary's Jonathan Tobin puts it, that the agency "has so thoroughly absorbed the views of its political masters that it doesn't even recognize when it has crossed the line into illegal activity."

In other words, if this is the case, the left's hateful and slanderous campaign against its political foes, especially the Tea Party--the demagoguery of Obama, his fellow Democrats and their supporters in the media, led by the New York Times editorial page--was sufficient to prompt the IRS agents to cast aside their professional obligations and embark on a campaign of political abuse whose effect was to ease Obama's re-election.

In his testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee--whose hearings opened 40 years ago today--John Dean famously called that scandal "a cancer on the presidency." If Obama, his campaign or his White House aides are directly implicated in the IRS's abuses, this will be another cancer on the presidency, remediable by resignation or impeachment.

But if the IRS acted without direction from above--if it "went rogue" against the Constitution and in support of the party in power--then we are dealing with a cancer on the federal government. That, it seems to us, is a far direr diagnosis, one whose treatment is likely to be radical and risky.

I am not naturally a pessimist, but for the first time I am beginning to wonder if this government is out of control and if anything can be done about it.  Serious poeple are asking this question in a serious vein.