Standing for the national anthem is political speech.

The NFL is not, in any way, required to play the national anthem prior to games. So why do they? Here’s a TIME article that gives some of the history of it. The short answer is they did it due to trying to express solidarity as a country during times of war, and it’s become a tradition few people have ever thought to criticize.

This, though, is an act of political speech. And this is a point I think that is lost on most people because it has become so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that it is unquestioned and taken as the normal, de facto part of American life. Americans have been taught to stand for the anthem. That’s just what you’re supposed to do. Nothing political about it.

In reality, it’s a very political decision to stand for the anthem. To do so that means that you support this country, and to some degree, depending on how religiously devoted to the military you are, that you support American troops overseas and at home. And both of those things, supporting the country and supporting the troops, are actual political speech. They are statements of support of American policies and military actions.

So who’s being political here? The players when they kneel? Or the NFL when they decide to play the anthem? Both. They’re both bringing politics into football, but one of them is only reacting to the other.

Showing support for America, or even wanting to show solidarity against foreign influence, is a political stance. Playing the anthem is a political decision. And I want to make this clear:

Standing for the anthem is a political choice. Not standing for the anthem is a political choice. Kneeling for the anthem is a political choice. There’s not a non-political choice here. You have to endorse a position. So what do we do if we don’t want players being political at games?

Stop playing the anthem before the game.

Then we’re done. All politics removed.

That should be the solution we can all agree to if choosing to kneel for the anthem is anathema to some people.

But that’s never been what this is about, so that wouldn’t mollify the people who are complaining about it the loudest. This has always been about two things:

1. Making sure that black players do not have a chance to express their feelings because nothing pisses off some people more than when a black person has an opinion.
2. Forcing people to take a political stance because they endorse that political position.

This is all about forced “patriotism” and forced “respect.” The people complaining about kneeling during the flag want the NFL, a private company, to force their employees to give up their freedom of speech. Once again, choosing to stand for the anthem is a political choice. And punishing people who don’t is punishing them for refusing to endorse a position with which they disagree.

So we’re down to two options for people aggrieved by other people who kneel during songs:

1. You either agree that the anthem shouldn’t be played at the games.
2. You agree that private organizations can compel people to endorse political positions they do not support.

And if you agree to #2, you’re saying that your boss can ask you to wear a Hillary Clinton shirt tomorrow, and if you refuse, she can fire you. For that reason.

Personally, I think option #2 is fucking stupid. If my job is to make sandwiches, as long as I’m making sandwiches, you should leave me the fuck alone. If you want to force me to start endorsing political positions, like supporting abortion or standing for the flag, while I make those sandwiches, that’s just bizarre and fascist. It’s totalitarian. And I would argue: un-American.

And if the NFL punishes a player for their political speech when they kneel or sit, then they’re effectively saying: “We get to be political by playing the anthem, but you don’t get to be political by kneeling.” To which I reply: get fuckethed, NFL.

I don’t care if the anthem is played at games. I’ve always found it bizarre and useless, but whatever. Play it, don’t play it; it makes no difference to me. But forcing people to stand for it? Go fuck yourself. Get over yourself. Other people are allowed to do things you don’t like providing they’re not hurting anyone else. And kneeling down or sitting hurts precisely no one. Unless your feelings are hurt. Then grow the fuck up.

Why It’s Different

Someone refusing service to Sarah H. Sanders is not the same as someone refusing service to a gay person.

Do places of business have a right to deny service to a person? Absolutely. However, since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you can’t refuse service if the reason you’re doing it is to discriminate against a protected class of citizens. You can’t refuse a service to someone based on their gender, their color, their race, or a whole host of other things you can read in the linked document.

The reason for this is that, historically, certain classes of citizens had been denied access to services in entire states or counties because there were enough bigots in the area to effectively render services unreachable. The government saw this, and under nationwide pressure from minorities and their non-minority allies, was forced to change the federal laws regarding discrimination. So now, if you want to refuse service to someone because she is a woman? You can’t do that. Refuse service to someone from India? Not allowed. Refuse service to someone with dark skin, irrespective of national origin? Nope. You can’t do that either. Those groups of people are now protected under federal law.

This requires us to look at two things? 1. Well, which kind of people CAN you refuse service to? 2. Are homosexuals protected under the Civil Rights Act?

The short answer to question 1 is pretty much anyone, provided you’re not doing it based on those protected classes. Walk into a store without a shirt? They can kick you out. Walk into a store and curse up a storm? They can kick you out. Walk into a store with a shirt the owner finds offensive? They can tell you to go kick rocks. Walk into a store and just be brown? No. They can’t kick you out for that.

The answer to question 2 is that under federal law, no, homosexuals are not protected. Many states have protected homosexuals from discrimination, but not all of them have. In the recent SCOTUS decision on a bakery in Colorado who refused service to a gay couple, SCOTUS didn’t really decide the issue. The Court punted that case into the sun, completely refusing to deal with whether or not homosexuals were a federally protected class. Not only that, Colorado is a state where homosexuals are protected from discrimination, and that didn’t save the homosexual couple who merely wanted a cake for their wedding.

So really, with question 2, we’re in a sort of legal gray area. SCOTUS decided that homosexuals had a right to marry, but they refused to decide if they had a right to protected status on buying cakes for the wedding. It’s a disgrace, really.

That being said, we’re left with two more questions. A. Should homosexuals be a protected class? B. What should be happening in places where homosexuals aren’t protected and they are denied services?

A. Of course you fucking dummy, and I don’t give a shit about your religion. Homosexuals have been discriminated against in this country since before it was even a country, and the fact that we still have to ask questions about this because someone’s religion teaches them to hate homosexuality is something future American citizens will look back upon with horror.

B. This should be irrelevant because see previous question. The rest I leave to lawyers.

Okay, now back to Sarah H. Sanders. Why was she refused service? Was it because she was a woman? No. White? No. Her age? No. Was it because she was a Republican? No. Conservative? No.

Well what was the reason?

The reason was that she’s a fucking asshole.

Sanders has spent the last 13 and a half months lying to the American people in an attempt to defend a man who is trying to tear this country apart, erase the rule of law, promote unbridled racism, and seize authoritarian power from a democratic republic. I mean, if you need me to explain to you why Donald Trump is a fucking asshole, then you’re a fucking asshole. Here’s a good twitter thread about it if you want, but Jesus. Trump is an indefensible shitbag who very likely worked with a hostile foreign power to get himself elected*, broke campaign finance laws in his bid for the presidency, denigrates American veterans who have been captured or killed, strips children from the arms of their parents and puts them in cages, targeted an entire religion to stop its presence in this country, chose to start a confrontation with the NFL because its players are black and he can use their pain to further his political agenda… and this only scratches the surface of why he’s such a contemptible piss-drinking** dickhead.

*pending the outcome of the Mueller investigation, which has already led to at least a dozen indictments and guilty pleas.

**allegedly

So Trump is a fucking asshole. And Sanders is his mouthpiece. Therefore, she’s a fucking asshole, too.

Sanders is not in a protected class of individuals who have been historically discriminated against in this country. Comparing the refusal of service to her with the refusal of service to homosexuals, who have been historically discriminated against in this country, is fucking stupid.

Here’s an example for you to flesh it out completely. Let’s say you own a store and someone comes in looking for a pair of scissors. You sell scissors. They go up to the counter, put the scissors down, and take out their wallet. You ring them up, and as you watch them fumble with their wallet, you notice that they have a rainbow flag on their wallet. You ask if they’re gay. They say, “Yes.” Then you slam the register shut and tell them to get the fuck out because you don’t sell to gays.

That would be fucked up, right? One second, you were totally willing to help them, and the next, you weren’t because you wanted to discriminate against them, a member of a group of people who have been targeted for discrimination for centuries.

Is that what happened to Sanders? No. Not even close. So what’s her analogy?

Imagine you’re a store owner, and there’s a guy in your neighborhood known for all kinds of shitty behavior. He taunts local residents by saying racist shit. He spreads lies about you and your friends. He beats his wife. He lies about his family. In other words, he’s an asshole.

This asshole walks into your store and asks you for some scissors. You tell him to go fuck himself. You can do that! And it’s not even fucked up!

That’s what happened to Sarah H. Sanders. It’s not the same as what happens to gay folks. It’s not even close to the same.

And let’s say, as many stupid people have said, that she was targeted because she’s a Republican or a conservative. This isn’t true, and it’s very important to point that out. But let’s say it was. Well, conservatives and Republicans are not protected classes of citizens. They haven’t been subject to hundreds of years of discrimination, and because of this, there are no laws, and should be no laws, protecting them. Same as Democrats and liberals.

Now, do I think it’s a good idea to refuse service to someone because they’re a conservative or Republican? No. That would be stupid. It would be legal, but it would be stupid, and I think the free market will figure out a way to make that stay true.

So, if you’re a person who was previously confused as to why liberals were okay with kicking Sanders to the curb but not okay with denying homosexuals services, it should be clear by this point why there’s a difference. That isn’t to say it was right to kick Sanders out. You can disagree on that point. But comparing the two separate issues is fucking stupid. Don’t be stupid.

A full account of how bad Sean Spicer is at his job.

So what’s the point of me writing this, at this length, about Sean Spicer’s performance today? Is what he said the end of the world and a signal that the Trump administration is a catastrophic failure? No. What happened today was a guy who speaks for the most powerful man in the world sucking at his job. This is important for myriad reasons, not the least of which is that American citizens and the American media need to be able to trust that the people who are in charge are good at their jobs. They need to trust the president’s judgment in the people he hires, and they need to trust the people he hires to be capable of doing their jobs effectively.

Sean Spicer’s job is to relay the thoughts and feelings of the president to the American people and media.

Today, Sean Spicer was very bad at his job.

Spicer said today that Russia should rethink its support for Assad because Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, and even Hitler never used chemical weapons during WWII. This was jaw-droppingly stupid. And factually incorrect. And an absolute shit show of a comparison. It was bizarre in that it was so devastatingly wrong on the points of factual merit, in addition to being a very strange point of comparison.

So let’s ignore facts for a second and figure out what Spicer’s point is. Is Assad worse than Hitler in some respect because of this? More objectionable? That’s what it means when you say “even [blank] didn’t do it.” Even this really bad guy didn’t do it, so this is worse. That’s how people use the English language. So, Assad is worse than Hitler?

Best case scenario… absolutely best case scenario you can make is that Assad is at least comparable to Hitler. Because even if you don’t want to say “worse than,” you’ve got to at the very least own that Assad is now comparable to Hitler.

So there’s that. He either meant to say that Assad is worse than Hitler, or he meant to say that Assad is comparable to Hitler, and that for one of these two reasons, Russia should not support Assad. Either way, we’ve pinned down what his point was.

Now we can deal with how Spicer ignored the fact that Hitler used chemical weapons to kill literally millions of people. I know the term “millions of people” can be used as hyperbole, but this is not hyperbole. Hitler used chemical weapons to kill MILLIONS of people. And it’s honestly even worse than that. He used chemical weapons with the stated desire to commit genocide against a religious group he deemed to be subhuman.

What Assad did is worse than Hitler? Assad is comparable to Hitler because Hitler never used chemical weapons and Assad did? Even though Hitler used chemical weapons in an attempted genocide?

What? This is not smart. This is not a smart thing to do.

So he was asked to clarify his remarks, and he did. Well, he tried to.

Here’s an honest to goodness attempt to transcribe what he said, “When you come to sarin gas, [Hitler] was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Ashad (sic) is doing… Clearly, [Hitler] brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. In the way that Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent—into the middle of towns. It was brought. So, the use of it. I appreciate the clarification.”

I’m going to try to parse this and say that Spicer is saying that Assad’s actions are comparable to or worse than Hitler’s because Assad dropped chemical weapons onto his “his own” “innocent” people “in the middle of towns” whereas Hitler brought them to “Holocaust centers.”

Three problems here:

First, Holocaust centers? You mean concentration camps? What’s a Holocaust center?

The second is the use of the words “own people” and “innocent.” Hitler did it to his own people, and they were innocent in every bit the same way Assad’s victims are innocent. Using that as a point of contrast makes it seem like the Jews of the Holocaust were not Hitler’s people (many of them were German, making them Hitler’s people) and that they were not innocent. Is that what Spicer said? Not directly, but when you’re using points of contrast, and you say that Assad is different from Hitler because Assad is doing it to his own, innocent people, then your point of contrast directly implies that Hitler did NOT do it to his own, innocent people. Which he did. This is how points of contrast work. A person who speaks publicly for the President of the United States should understand this.

And the third: How is dropping chemical weapons into the middle of towns worse than or comparable to setting up a nationwide infrastructure that facilitated slave labor and genocide? Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that it’s not big deal to drop chemical bombs onto civilian populations. That is beyond wrong, and one could argue that it is so wrong that it merits a military intervention by US forces. It’s a world evil that should not be tolerated let alone supported by the Russians.

But comparable to Hitler? The guy who enslaved millions of Jews, forced them to make weapons for his army, and then murdered them or watched as they became living skeletons? The guy who made it a point of pride to exterminate a religious group he considered to be vermin?

Yes, Assad is a very bad man who is doing very bad things. But you just compared him to Hitler and totally forgot to mention the millions of Jews he killed the first time, and the second time, you made it seem like Jews were not innocent or Germans. That’s just beyond terrible. From a Press Secretary? It’s obscenely bad.

Realizing this, Spicer put out a third clarification of his remarks.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s this word innocent again! Were the Jews not innocent? And please explain to everyone how dropping chemical weapons onto people is worse than or comparable to using chemical weapons to kill millions in a prolonged and dedicated attempt at genocide?

Someone must have realized again that what the Press Secretary said was unacceptable, so he sent out a fourth clarification.

 

 

 

 

 

He finally wised up and got rid of the word innocent, using “population centers” as a replacement.

But the other objections remain.

And it took him four tries to even get to this! The man is paid to communicate, and it took him four tries to put out a statement that still doesn’t make sense.

So, yes. Hitler never dropped chemical weapons from airplanes on “population centers.” This is true, and it is a difference between Assad and Hitler. Instead, Hitler created new population centers. Let’s call them “Holocaust centers,” if you will. He then moved millions of people to these Holocaust centers where he proceeded to kill millions of them with chemical weapons in a methodical attempt at genocide.

“But at least Hitler didn’t drop the chemical weapons from planes, right?” – Sean Spicer.

Helluva point, Spicey. Good work.

Donald Trump only hires the best people.

 

This Was Not a Win for Liberals

These people deserve zero “credit” for Trump’s failure.

Trump’s Attempt to Ban Muslims.

Just give him a chance!

Let’s be clear about what Trump just did.

1. He banned anyone from seven Muslim countries from entering the US.

**2. He and his supporters will say that this is not a Muslim ban because it’s a country-wide ban. But, if you’re not a Muslim in those seven countries, you’re not banned from entering the US. Minority religions are exempted. Only Muslims are absolutely banned.

So how do you ban Muslims without banning them? Ban a Muslim country, and not Muslims, but allow minority religions to be exempt. Clever!

https://twitter.com/lburks226/status/825384915923501056

3. This includes people who have legal residency in the US. So, if you live here legally, but you’re visiting family in your country of origin, the country you’re living in has told you you’re not welcome back until it can review your case individually.
4. He chose seven countries to ban, but none of those countries have actually sent terrorists here.
5. The countries that have produced terrorists in America (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Lebanon)? They’re not blocked.
6. Five Muslim countries Trump decided did not need to be blocked from immigration have business ties to Trump (Azerbaijan, Turkey, UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia).
7. Some of the people who are now banned from the US were helping our military for years and were told they could come here for safety. Now? Visas are cancelled.
8. If you have dual citizenship in the UK and Iraq? You’re banned from entering the US.

Breaking: State Department says dual citizens with those seven countries ARE banned from the US. https://t.co/P6Iqd5ZChv

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 28, 2017

9. We’re learning about this whole thing piecemeal because the Executive Order was unclear, and the Trump admin never took questions to explain it.

But give him a chance!

Did you just ask for someone to show respect to Donald Trump?

Hi,

You must have recently asked for someone to be respectful to Donald Trump. Go fuck yourself and eat shit.

Why?

Trump is a thing which mocked a disabled person in front of a massive crowd to get applause.

Trump is a thing which suggested an American judge could not do his job because he had Mexican heritage.

Trump is a thing which has been calling women fat pigs in public for around a decade.

Trump is a thing which insulted his political opponents by calling them names.

Trump is a thing which threatened to jail his political opponents.

Trump is a thing which insulted the family of a dead soldier for political gain.

Trump is a thing which bragged about hitting on married women and grabbing other women by the pussy.

Trump is a thing which bragged about being able to walk in on beauty pageant contestants as they undressed because he owned the pageant.

Trump is a thing which insulted a civil rights hero who marched for equality as a man who was “all talk” and “no action.”

Trump is a thing which insulted an American war hero and said he wasn’t a war hero because he got captured.

——–

Anyone with half an hour and an internet connection could compile a list of hundreds of instances of Trump being disrespectful to other people, many of whom he doesn’t even know.

And you want this guy to be shown respect? Have you been asleep for the last two decades? Are you for real?

Get fucked and eat shit.

Thanks for your time.

Hamilton, and not Wanting to Listen

I made my first blog post in years today, and I tried to keep it concise. I didn’t succeed like I’d wanted, so I’d like to try again, but this time with an object lesson. (The other one is here.)

Here it goes:

Trump won because white people don’t want to hear what people of color have to say. Like at all. And they voted for the guy who they thought would tell any complaining brown person to shut the fuck up. And they got the right guy.

Trump voters have been expecting silence from minority communities over the last several years. And they haven’t gotten it. Now that they have their man, they’re demanding it. And they’re doing so rather transparently.

This is best exemplified by the reaction of many Trump supporters to what the cast of Hamilton decided to say to Mike Pence. Before we get to just how unhinged and deranged the reaction is, let’s examine the text of the statement:

Vice-president elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us at Hamilton: An American Musical. We really do.

We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir.

But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf all of us. All of us.

We truly thank you for sharing this show—this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds, and orientations.

It should be noted that just before this statement was read, the person reading it quieted the crowd and stopped them from booing Pence. The person was genuinely reaching out to Pence. Then, after reading it, I can come to no other conclusion other than that this statement is the most respectful statement anyone has made this entire campaign.

Thanks for coming, Mr. Pence!

We’re afraid.

We hope our performance made you less likely to hurt us.

Thanks again for coming!

You cannot more respectfully make a point than that. It is torturously respectful. It goes out of its way to show respect.

And Trump supporters are calling it disrespectful and demanding apologies.

(I’m going to ignore for a moment that people who voted for and support Donald Trump think someone should be respectful to someone else. That is, in a phrase, bat-shit fucking insane, and it should make you question your ability to form opinions. About anything. And I mean anything. Like including your favorite color. Or shape. Or even flavor of ice cream. If you vote for Trump and then complain about a lack of respect, seriously, go fuck yourself with a branding iron.)

A person of color cannot stand on a stage and express fear without being shouted at and told to shut up. That’s what’s happening right now.

Trump supporters: YOU’RE PROVING THE MAN’S POINT FOR HIM.

Why on earth would brown people and minorities feel like Trump won’t protect them? Because a brown person cannot say, “I feel afraid,” without being yelled at and told to shut up.* That’s why they feel like Trump won’t protect them. And that’s why overwhelming numbers of white voters elected him: to send a message of “get fucked” to people who are already feeling under attack.

And if you think Trump is going to heal that? No no. He’s not even interested in healing it. If there’s a problem, it’s not the problems articulated by brown people. Those aren’t problems. The problem is that brown people are articulating their feelings. Still. Even after the election. THAT is what needs to stop, in the mind of a Trump supporter.

It’s going to get worse. A lot worse. This is a beginning of something terrible.

Make sure you’re on the right side of it.

(And if you’re not sure what side you’re on, the right side or the wrong side, the right side is ALWAYS the side defending the powerless against the powerful. Always.)

*What’s interesting to me is how the conversations I’ve been having regarding this have gone. First, it’s “disrespectful.” Then, when confronted with how it is clearly actually respectful, they pivot to some other point about not wanting to hear it for some asinine reason.

The reason they don’t want to hear it is simple: they have no respect for the person who is saying it. This isn’t hard, people. It’s only hard to listen if you don’t fucking want to. And that’s the point. They don’t want to hear it. At all.

Why Trump Won

It’s been a week and a half since Judgment Day, and I have really been on a media diet. No TV, no news articles, no political video watching on Youtube, no facebook—nothing. Usually, I’d be all over that shit. I took over a week off. I needed time to think.

Yesterday and today were sort of my first forays back into the morass that is American politics, and I’ve found it much the way I left it: a disaster.

Without getting into any tangents, let me be clear:

The reason Donald Trump is our next president is because white people in this country could no longer tolerate black people, religious minorities, and women standing up for themselves.

In Black Lives Matter, in the Trayvon Martin shooting, in the Planned Parenthood smear, in the dozens of rape cases where women are denied their humanity, and in the Khan family, white America was shown that black people, women, and Muslims are not afraid to stand and declare themselves equal to the white, male majority. Especially with black voices, social media allowed them to amplify themselves and become a force in the American political realm. Black people, loudly and effectively, aired their grievances for everyone to hear, and no one could escape their voice.

Donald Trump was the response.

Donald Trump is white, male America telling the rest of America to sit down, shut up, and stop complaining about any injustice they feel like they’ve endured. Donald Trump is white, male America fed-up with the idea of “white privilege.” Donald Trump is white, male America telling black people not to be so lazy. Donald Trump is white, male America pointing to violence in black communities as evidence that blacks are inferior to whites. Donald Trump is white, male America telling American Muslims to go fuck themselves because this is a Christian nation. Donald Trump is a middle finger to every single woman who was ever assaulted and demanded justice in return.

(Today’s “Hamilton” storyline is actually pretty pitch perfect for this discussion, so I wrote about it here.)

Donald Trump did not win because of his policies. He doesn’t have any. He didn’t win because of his big ideas. He never actually explained how any of them would actually work.

He won because he represents white America’s dying grasp on political power. He is the echoing, phlegm-soaked cough coming right before the death white America’s political autonomy. And it just gave the biggest “fuck you” to women and minorities in this country since the fight for Civil Rights.

Trumpism is a “correction” on the progress of minorities, especially blacks. Trumpism is the id of white America finally putting black people in their place.

Trumpism is white hate melded with societal power. It is a living force. Our only solace can be that it will one day die.

And until then, there will be no reconciliation. There will be no come together moments. We cannot accept the bigotry that Trump proudly represents. On every issue concerning the rights of minorities and women, it must be opposed. On every single one.

 

 

 

Slate, the online magazine, often sucks.

I just read on article on Slate about Google Autocomplete. In the first paragraph, the writer described its popularity by saying that it was redundant to even have to explain it. The piece then spent like seven fucking paragraphs explaining it while not discussing the headline of the piece at all, which was the only reason I clicked on it. Slate is often just god damn terrible.

Breitbart.com editors either cannot read, or their intentions are clearly to willfully deceive. As with Benghazi, this hurts them terribly.

My cousin shared this article from Breitbart with me. It’s about the IRS scandal and how the IRS targeted Tea Party or other “conservative” groups for extra questioning and “intimidation.” From the way it looks, this could be a legitimate scandal for Obama’s administration, and it’s going to have legs according to Rachel Maddow. I’ve personally noticed over the last week that all of a sudden, many GOP and conservative websites had been doing some really good reporting on this. They cite legitimate sources, they use media reports (without all of a sudden talking about how the media is terrible), and they stick to the facts. Honestly, I really started to believe Obama and his administration could be in some serious trouble. If the right wing media doesn’t have to make stuff up to make you look like a criminal, you probably did something wrong.

This is the IRS I grew up with.

But then I read the Breitbart piece my cousin shared. Now, it claims that the New York Times (iknowritetehgraylady!!!!) basically attacks the Obama administration. According to Breitbart, the NYT “in no uncertain terms and with no hedging…reports that the Obama administration was aware of the fact that the IRS was targeting Tea Party groups as far back as June of 2012.” That’s a pretty heavy claim, and knowing the Times as well as I do (I’ll admit that they’re unquestionably liberal and they soft-pedal anything that hurts liberals or progressives when they can get away with it), I was surprised to hear that the Times would go all in against the administration like that. So, I kept reading. In the Breitbart piece (linked above), they say that the Times reported this:

The Treasury Department’s inspector general told senior Treasury officials in June 2012 he was investigating the Internal Revenue Service’s screening of politically active organizations seeking tax exemptions, disclosing for the first time on Friday that Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

Now, they either misquoted the Times or the Times changed the article (from the looks of my own google searching, the Times may have changed it), but basically, that’s what the Times reported. Basically. Here’s the paragraph they cited and how it reads now.

The inspector general gave Republicans some fodder Friday when he divulged that he informed the Treasury’s general counsel he was auditing the I.R.S.’s screening of politically active groups seeking tax exemptions on June 4, 2012. He told Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly after,” he said. That meant Obama administration officials were aware of the matter during the presidential campaign year.

Two problems here with Breitbart’s reporting. One, the paragraph on nytimes.com as of this writing, and even the paragraph Breitbart provides, does not report that the IRS was targeting Tea Party or conservative groups. It says “politically active groups,” which could be anyone from the Tea Party to Planned Parenthood. Claiming that the NYT declared in “no uncertain terms” that the administration knew about the IRS targeting the Tea Party is factually inaccurate, and I all I had to do was read the paragraph they used as evidence.

The second problem here is, let’s say I grant that the administration WAS aware of an investigation into the IRS’s conduct vis a vis Tea Party groups: what does that mean exactly? So the admin was aware of an investigation. If the administration tried to STOP that investigation, then you have a scandal, and a potentially massive one, I would say. But, if someone tells you, “Hey, we’re investigating this thing,” and your response is, “Okay cool. Let me know how it goes,” that’s about as scandalous as a baby farting in church. From the same NYT article Breitbart cited, “Treasury officials stressed they did not know the results until March 2013, when the inspector presented a draft.” So, until two months ago, no one could have known anything about the RESULTS of the investigation—only that an investigation was taking place.

This is a scandal?

SHOPT

This is precisely why, especially with Benghazi, most Americans aren’t responding to GOP and conservative efforts to attack Obama. Obama’s faithful opposition has been trying to destroy him since 2007 (and you could probably say 2004, after he gave his DNC speech) when he first declared his candidacy for president. Ever since then, they’ve thrown everything they possibly can at the guy: where’s the birth certificate, release your college records, Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, he’s a secret Muslim, he’s an atheist, black liberation theology, he’s un-American. None of that has stuck. Obama weathered through it all, and he was able to do so mostly because all of that is either a. complete bullshit or b. the GOP and conservatives overplayed their hands before they had all the information. The Fast and Furious scandal should be have been way bigger news. But, when there have been impeachment talks since about a month after Obama was elected (Maddow NAILS IT here), any real opposition tends to be lumped into the existing nonsense opposition. The incessant outrage and indignance from Obama’s detractors gets dull. People start tuning out. It loses its force.

It’s the boy who cried wolf.

Just like now. The GOP just got dealt a KILLER hand. This IRS scandal is a real problem. It’s a potential game-changer for them in their never ending quest to destroy Obama. And what do they do with it? Rather than sticking to the clearly reported facts, they start to make shit up. Over the last three or four days, I’ve been following this story, and everything the right wing media was claiming seemed legitimate.  And then I read this article from Breitbart, and my eyes roll back into my skull in horror and disgust at the incompetence or dishonesty of it all.

Plain and simple: the New York Times did not say that the Obama adminstration knew of this “scandal” before the election. They knew of an investigation. Investigations ≠ scandals.

I’m not saying the Obama administration isn’t to blame for this: I’d love to see a full investigation into what happened and who knew what. And if there’s any evidence that this is in any way linked to the Obama administration, or if there’s in any way any evidence which shows that Obama or his administration tried to OBSTRUCT the investigation, then well shit. The GOP finally has themselves a legitimate, undeniable Obama scandal. The GOP and conservatives would do very well by themselves to sit back, shut up, let the facts come out, then attack. This could be what they’ve been waiting for since 2007.

But instead, we get Breitbart’s editors either proving themselves illiterate or revealing themselves as dishonest pageview whores. Keep up the good work, conservatives. Watching you shoot yourselves in the foot, pat each other on the back, and blame Obama for your self-inflicted wounds will continue to be entertaining, even if they’re infuriating at the same time.