So the Patriot Act is biting the Tea Baggers on the ass. Awww.

[ljm2002]

9. Unfortunately...

...our side has already started apologizing. Our President has already assumed that it was a search for right-leaning organizations and has pre-expressed his outrage, "should that turn out to be the case".

So any mileage we might have gotten out of it is gone, poof! and instead our President is left looking like his administration was doing something shady.

Those searches were reasonable. We had organizations engaging in political activities, trying to get tax-exempt status. More of said organizations were from the right than were from the left. So searching for political keywords turned up more conservative organizations. Who'da thunk?

Obama pre-emptively apologized on this, so he could turn around and be a little more aggressive (but not much) in his reaction to the Bhengazi BS.

Too bad. It could have been a great moment to orate on the perils of giving tax-exempt status to overtly political organizations. Instead we got "Hey, well next time it could be a Republican administration doing it, and we don't want that now do we?" But it always IS Republican administrations who do the enemies lists, etc.; who staff Federal departments with their ideologues, etc. The IRS this time was engaging in a reasonable activity but the rightist ideologues were not happy with the results and so they started a hue and cry, and predictably, our side caved before even doing a proper look into it.

What a load of crap.