7 Idiots who think it is OK to Target Americans

John Hawkins, at TOWNHALL says.... One of the most disturbing things about the IRS targeting Obama's political enemies for persecution is that many liberals seem to be perfectly fine with illegitimately using the power of government to hurt their political enemies.

1) I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the tea party. Here are a group of people who are admittedly racist. Who are overtly political, who’ve tried as best they can to harm President Obama in every way. -- NAACP President Emeritus Julian Bond

2) Lost in the latest political scandal is a simple fact: The Internal Revenue Service was acting in the public interest when it opted to train its auditing power on the Tea Party and affiliated Peter Goodman, Executive Business Editor, The Huffington Post
groups. In castigating government as the root of all evil while portraying taxation as a form of tyranny, the Tea Party is no less than a mass celebration of the evasion of the basic responsibilities of American citizenship. Common sense alone tells you that people drawn to its ranks may feel extra temptation to find ways to limit what they surrender to the rogue federal bureaucrats who have supposedly seized the nation. -- 

3) The IRS audits based on "red flags" that get their attention. If u carry big sign saying NO TO TAXES!! yea, u might get audited. -- Elayne Boosler

4) Democrats can’t say it; Barack Obama can’t say it; and the IRS certainly can’t say it, so here goes: The only real sin the IRS committed in its ostensible targeting of conservatives is the sin of political incorrectness—that is, of not pretending it needed to vet all the new groups that wanted tax-exempt status, even though it mostly just needed to vet right-wing groups.

… The crime here had nothing to do with “targeting” conservatives. The targeting was effectively done by the conservative groups themselves, when they filed their gratuitous applications. The crime, such as it is, was twofold. First, in the course of legitimately vetting questionable applications, the IRS appears to have been more intrusive than justified, asking for information about donors whose privacy it should have respected. This is unfortunate and intolerable, but not quite a threat to democracy.

Second, the IRS was tone deaf to how its scrutiny would look to the people being scrutinized, given that they all subscribed to the same worldview, and that they were already nursing a healthy persecution complex. -- Noam Scheiber, The New Republic

5) Is it unreasonable to target an anti-tax group? This is after all a group that named itself after a tax revolt that wants to abolish the IRS. It's like when a cop gets shot, the cops kind of take that personally. -- Bill Maher

6) The IRS overtaxing The Tea Party? I never thought I'd say this to the IRS - THANK YOU! THANK YOU FOR DENYING 501C-4 to any group who hates! -- Bette Midler

7) I believe that the IRS agents in this case did nothing wrong. --MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell