About that 'horrible customer service'

Charles Krauthammer:

“Horrible customer service.” That’s what the newly fired IRS commissioner averred was the agency’s only sin in singling out conservative political groups for discriminatory treatment.

In such grim proceedings one should be grateful for unintended humor. Horrible customer service is when every patron in a restaurant finds a fly in his soup. But when the maitre d’ screens patrons for their politics and only conservatives find flies paddlewheeling through their consomme, the problem is not poor service. It is harassment and invidious discrimination.

And yet two IRS chiefs (Steven Miller and Douglas Shulman) insisted that the singling-out of groups according to politics was in no way politically motivated. More hilarity. It’s definitional: If you discriminate according to politics, your discrimination is political. It’s a tautology, for God’s sake.

The IRS responds that this classification was for efficiency, to cut down on overwork. Ridiculous. How does demanding answers to endless intrusive and irrelevant questions, creating mountains of unnecessary paperwork for both applicant and IRS, reduce workload?

We are further asked to believe that a cadre of Cincinnati GS-11s is a hotbed of radical-left activism in America. Is anyone stupid enough to believe that?

That’s why the IRS scandal has legs....

... 

There is much more.

At this point none of the explanations proffered are credible.   When these events are taken at the same time that donors of the Romney campaign are targeted for audits, there is reason to believe that the IRS has been politicized and is putting its thumb on the scales of a national election.  When other agents of the federal government are sent out to investigate people associated with the Tea Party there is reason to believe someone in the administration is pulling those strings.