By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Government is now so huge, powerful and callous that
citizens risk becoming proverbial serfs without the freedoms guaranteed by the
Founders.
Is that perennial fear an exaggeration? Survey the
current news.
We have just learned that the Internal Revenue Service
before the 2012 election predicated its tax-exempt policies on politics. It
inordinately denied tax exemption to groups considered either conservative or
possibly antagonistic to the president's agenda.
If the supposedly nonpartisan IRS is perceived as scoring
our taxes based on our politics, then the entire system of trust in
self-reporting is rendered null and void. Worse still, the bureaucratic
overseer at the center of the controversy, Sarah Hall Ingram, now runs the IRS
division charged with enforcing compliance with the new Obamacare requirements.
Recently, some reporters at the Associated Press had
their private and work phone records monitored by the government, supposedly
because of fear about national-security leaks. The Justice Department gave the
AP no chance, as usually happens, first to question its own journalists. The AP
ran a story in May 2012 about the success of a Yemeni double agent before the
administration itself could brag about it.
In fact, the Obama White House itself has been accused of
leaking classified information deemed favorable to the administration --
top-secret details concerning the Stuxnet computer virus used against Iran, the
specifics of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, and the decision-making
behind the drone program -- often to favored journalists. The message is clear:
A reporter may have his most intimate work and private correspondence turned
over to government -- a Fox News journalist had his email account tapped into
-- on the mere allegation that he might have tried to do what his own
government had in fact already done.
Now, the civil rights divisions of the Department of
Education and the Department of Justice have issued new speech codes for
campuses, focusing on supposed gender insensitivities. The result is that
federal bureaucrats can restrict the constitutionally protected rights of free
speech for millions of American college students -- including during routine
classroom discussions -- in ways they feel are proper and correct.
Eight months after the Benghazi mess, Americans only now
are discovering that the government, for political reasons, failed to beef up
security at our Libyan consulate or send it help when under attack. It also
lied in blaming the violence on a spontaneous demonstration prompted by an
Internet video. That pre-election narrative was known to be untrue when the
president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney all pedaled it.
The problem with an all-powerful, rogue government is not
just that it becomes quite adept at doing what it should not. Increasingly, it
also cannot even do what it should.
Philadelphia abortionist Dr. Kermit Gosnell may well turn
out to be the most lethal serial murder in U.S. history. His recent murder
conviction gave only a glimpse of his carnage at the end of a career that
spanned more than three decades. Yet Gosnell operated with impunity right under
the noses of Pennsylvania health and legal authorities for years, without
routine government health code and licensing oversight.
In the case of Boston terrorist bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev,
his loud jihadist activity earned him a visit from the FBI, and the attention
of both the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. But all that
government monitoring was for naught. Tsarnaev was not detained, but allowed to
visit Dagestan and Chechnya -- both located in the supposedly dangerous region
that prompted his family's flight to the U.S. in the first place.
In all of these abuses and laxities there is one common
theme. Bureaucrats, political appointees, regulators, intelligence officials
and law enforcement personnel wanted to fall in line with the perceived correct
agenda of the day. Right now, that party line seems to be protecting the
progressive interests of the Obama administration, going after its critics,
turning a blind eye toward illegal abortions, in politically correct fashion
ignoring warnings about radical Islam, and restricting some rights of free
speech to curtail language declared potentially hurtful.
Conspiracists, left and right, are sometimes
understandably derided as paranoids for alleging that Big Government steadily
absorbs the private sector, taps private communications, targets tax filers it
doesn't like, and lies to the people about what it is up to. The only missing
theme of such classic paranoia is the perennial worry over the right to bear
arms.
I went to several sporting goods stores recently to buy
commonplace rifle shells. For the first time in my life, there were none to be
found. Can widespread shortages of ammunition be attributed to panic buying or
production shortfalls caused by inexplicably massive purchases by the
Department of Homeland Security at a time of acrimonious debate over the Second
Amendment?
Who knows, but yesterday's wacky conspiracist is becoming
today's Nostradamus.
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