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Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars  line-dancing – breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your  dollars every single day! – I think it would be more useful for the public to  hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue  Service.

At Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking  details about the agency’s abuse of conservative groups.

The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear  under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of  Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer  meetings.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. – who was ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court to  pay more than $1 million to John Boehner in 2008 for the sleazy maneuver of  publishing an illegally taped private conversation – blamed the conservative  groups themselves. “Each of your groups was highly political,” he lectured them,  noting that they wouldn’t have been asked any questions if they hadn’t requested  tax-exempt status.

Even a fair-minded person – not to be confused with Jim McDermott – might  hear about the IRS’ harassment of groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or  “liberty” in their names and think: “How do we know the IRS wasn’t equally hard  on left-wing groups?”

What might be more helpful than clips of IRS staff line-dancing would be for  reporters, say at Fox News, to mention a few examples of the wildly partisan  left-wing groups the IRS has certified as tax-exempt.

Among the many left-wing groups with tax-exempt status are:

• ACORN (now renamed as other organizations, but all still tax-exempt),  “community organizers” who engage in profanity-laced protests at private homes,  dump garbage in front of public buildings and disrupt bankers’ dinners in order  to get more people on welfare in order to destroy the capitalist system and  incite revolution;

   

• Occupy Wall Street, which – in its first month alone – was responsible for  more than a dozen sexual assaults; at least half a dozen deaths by overdose,  suicide or murder; and millions of dollars in property damage;
• Media Matters for America, a media “watchdog” group that has never noticed  one iota of pro-Obama bias in the media;
• Moveon.org, which ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler under its 501(c)(4) arm; 
• The Center for American Progress, an auxiliary of the Democratic National  Committee funded by George Soros and staffed by former Clinton and Obama aides  to promote the Democratic agenda;
• The Tides Foundation, which funnels money to communist and  terrorist-supporting organizations;
• The Ford Foundation, which has never found a criminal law that isn’t  “racist.”

These groups are regarded by the IRS as nonpartisan community groups, merely  educational, while dozens of patriotic, constitutional, Christian or tea party  groups are still waiting for their tax exemptions.

That’s to say nothing of Planned Parenthood, PBS and innumerable other  Democratic front-groups that not only have tax exemptions, but get direct  funding from the government.

By contrast, the conservative groups being raked over the coals by the IRS  actually were nonpartisan. The tea party forced sitting Republican senators off  the ticket in Alaska and Indiana, and toppled “establishment” Republicans in  Utah, Delaware, Nevada, Florida and Texas. Far from being a secretly  pro-Republican group, the tea party has been a nightmare for Republicans.

Show me one instance where the Center for American Progress was more of a  problem for Democrats than Republicans.

It is obviously in the interest of the left to show us liberal groups also  harassed by the IRS, so it’s striking that they haven’t been able to produce one  yet.

Instead, they hearken back to the Bush years to claim that the IRS once  audited the NAACP, which is treated as ipso facto political harassment.

First of all, the NAACP doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of rectitude  when it comes to organization funds. In the 1990s, the NAACP used tax-exempt  contributions to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of hush money to the  mistress of then-executive director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. – as detailed in  enraged columns by Carl Rowan at the time.

Find a tea party organization that’s done that, and we’ll understand the IRS  conducting a three-year proctology exam on the group.

Second, the Bush-era audit of the NAACP was prompted by a blindingly partisan  speech given by NAACP Chairman Julian Bond at an organization meeting in  Philadelphia in July 2004. Bond attacked a slew of elected Republicans by name,  denouncing the entire party as one whose “idea of equal rights is the American  flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.”

That’s what we call “black-letter law” on improper activity for a tax-exempt  organization. As a 501(c)(3) group, the NAACP is prohibited from supporting or  opposing any candidate for elective office.

The NAACP responded to the IRS’ letter by screaming from the rooftops that it  was political payback. Consequently, Bush’s IRS commissioner requested that  Treasury’s inspector general investigate the IRS’ tax-exempt unit for political  bias. The IG’s report found no politics in the NAACP audit and – to the contrary  – that more “pro-Republican” groups (18) than “pro-Democratic” groups (12) had  been audited.

Nonetheless, the NAACP simply refused to cooperate with the IRS. There was  nothing the Bush administration could do. No Republican was going to allow the  NAACP’s tax-exempt status to be revoked on its watch. Two years later, the IRS  simply issued a letter clearing the group.

Today, the NAACP openly engages in partisan activity, such as a current  weeks-long protest of Republican legislators in North Carolina.

Finally, a tip to the Democrats trying to defend the IRS: As a devoted  true-crime TV viewer, I can tell you that when you’re caught red-handed, it’s  never a good defense to say, “Why would I be so stupid to kill my wife right  after taking out a huge life insurance policy on her?”

You were that stupid, and you got caught.