Run Hard With This Campaign, Democrats

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Fanfare for the common man, 21st century style, as Democrats weep for the hardworking salt-of-the-earth chap who cheerfully runs the IRS while it upends the lives of millions of Americans and routinely “loses” its own documents. The above clip was apparently assembled by the Grabien video aggregation Website; as James Lileks joked to “Generalissimo” Duane Patterson during his weekly visit to Friday’s Hugh Hewitt “Aftershow,” “We give the RNSC some trouble, but that’s really the best ad that they’ve put out in a long time. Because here you have it: the Democrats set themselves up as the defenders of the IRS”:

Duane: Please, please run on that, Democrats. Please!

Lileks: Absolutely! Make that point clear to all. It’s almost as if their sympathy extends to this because [the IRS is] doing the Lord’s work – if there was such a thing – in that they are the ones who make it possible to take money from people, and give it to other people. And if a little shakes out for Congress in the meantime, just great. They are a force for good, because they are a force for spreadin’ the wealth around, they are a force for redistribution. And boy, they’ve lost aid, their budget has been cut, and they’ve lost employees – to which a lot of people have got to sit up straight and say, holy cow!

Duane: The sad part in this is that you’re just not funded enough.

Lileks: How are we going to run this country! How will we pay for everyone’s healthcare, if we don’t have sufficient IRS agents? Madness, this kind of sequestering! But at least we did learn one thing: If Lois Lerner is resigned to her computer being gone, I think we all can move on. if she’s made her piece with it, I think the rest of us can, too.

As Mary Katharine Ham adds at Hot Air, “Through every second of this montage, please remind yourself that these people fancy themselves anti-establishment. They are the fighters of the Man, the afflicters of the comfortable. Pathetic.”

Actually, I’m pretty sure that the left dropped that particular modified limited hangout right around January of 2009. These days, they’re simply in the business of the naked acquisition of as much power as possible, and don’t really care who knows it, as the above clip helpfully demonstrates. It also answers the observation on the IRS scandal raised by Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View, who writes, “I am inherently suspicious of any suggestion of a conspiracy, particularly one involving civil-service employees”:

Not because I think especially highly of civil servants, but because conspiracies are hard to get together, and hard to keep together — someone is likely to blab. Civil servants have a lot to lose by helping political appointees pursue their partisan agendas and no particular reason to be helpful. If it turns out that the IRS engaged in wrongful conduct, I will be inclined to credit complex sociology-of-organizations explanations (where everyone at the IRS shares an unspoken and perhaps unrecognized belief that people who campaign against taxation are clearly political ideologues, while people who campaign for more environmental spending are just swell, public-spirited folks trying to save the planet).

That culture, endemic in Washington and the pundit class that defends it, is vividly on display in the above clip, which will hopefully go into wide circulation in the coming weeks. C’mon E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post — spread the news, far and wide!

Update: “On the IRS Emails, the Plot Thickens.”