“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

Report abuse

If you spend every hour of your working life inventing new ways to attack Barack Obama or the government (or both), this is a very good week for you — or at least it should be. After trudging through the deserts of Benghazi and Fast and Furious for four years, trying to extract any tiny drop of scandal from stone, now suddenly comes manna from heaven, courtesy of the IRS and its misguided attempt to prevent political groups from taking advantage of the non-profit tax code. Then, even before you could digest the first course, the Department of Justice snoops on reporters. Glory be to Ronald Reagan’s ghost! The Promised Land of Impeachment can’t be far off.

---

In an interview with WorldNetDaily — so we already know it’s going to be good — Bachmann said she thought the Obama administration intentionally released embarrassing news about the IRS targeting the Tea Party in some kind of elaborate Wag the Dog-style plot to distract from Benghazi:

Bachmann said the IRS announcement of misbehavior was intended to provoke conservatives and draw their anger and attention.

“I was in that Benghazi hearing,” she told WND. “I think the Obama administration is desperate to spin Benghazi, and they can’t. I think they saved this story up for a day like today so that conservatives would focus on this admission.”

It won’t work, she insisted.

“Conservatives can handle two shocking stories at the same time,” she said. “Both are equally unconstitutional and call into question the very president.”

This makes no sense, even for Bachmann. Why would the White House want to trade a 70 percent bogus scandal for a 70 percent real one? And if they did want to distract from Benghazi, there has to be a better way than manufacturing negative information about yourself. This is a bit like a child intentionally peeing himself to “distract” his classmates from the fact that his pants just fell down.

---

Roger Aronoff, the editor of the conservative media watchdog group Accuracy in the Media worried that the IRS Scandal “threatens to overshadow Benghazi.” Rush Limbaugh laid out a related “theorem” on Monday, adding a splash of Obamacare. The idea is that media, at the behest of the White House, is being overly aggressive on the IRS scandal because it wants to get it over with so that the IRS then can be left to implement Obamacare.“The media is never on our side,” Limbaugh said of the negative coverage of Obama.

He also downplayed the AP snooping, predicting that the media is so sycophantic that “in two weeks, this will be forgotten, they will have made up over this and it’s not going to be that big of a deal.” He added that he hopes he’s wrong, but doesn’t expect to be.

---

Why would Bachmann, Limbaugh, and Jones, who have never met an Obama conspiracy theory they didn’t like, pass up this one? Because the truth is way less sexy than fiction. When you’ve been claiming for years that Obama is willing to manipulate hurricane forecasts for political gain, or use Census records to round up political opponents, or deploy drones to kill journalists and political enemies, then asking a few dozen Tea Party groups from some extra paperwork is small potatoes.

And there’s little room to add value here — the dots are already connected, the mainstream media is on board, and the administration is taking action. The system seems to be working and you certainly don’t want to highlight that if your livelihood depends on convincing people the system is always rigged against them. What’s more, actual attention-grabbing scandals covered by the mainstream press may not be ideal, from a business perspective, for professional skeptics; if viewers can get coverage about them from regular news outlets, there’s less incentive for them to go to the conspiracists. Hence, it may be better for the Joneses and Limbaughs to publicly doubt the scandals’ veracity or relevance.

There’s also an intellectual poison pill that comes with the IRS and AP scandals. With Benghazi and Fast and Furious, conservatives insisted the media ignoring the controversies to protect Obama. But the media is all over these two newer scandals. “Why is the media hammering away at the IRS scandal?” Glenn Beck’s The Blaze asks, noting journalists were reluctant to make hay of out Benghazi at first.

Finally, it could also show that the media is doing its job by downplaying the mostly bogus Benghazi scandal and focusing on the mostly real IRS scandal, and that it’s willing to attack Obama when deserved. But it seems, ironically, they’d rather have the media ignore the scandals than pay attention to them, because at least that way it confirms their media bias narrative.

Report abuse