From the inimitable Mark Steyn, writing at National Review and discussing the IRS' appetite for doing things that decent, honorable, moral government servants ought to know they shouldn't:
If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real problem.
So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have raised objections. [emphasis mine] If any of them understood that what they were doing was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike. When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically. This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.
I use a phrase in my office, with my employees, and at home, with my children, that applies here, in spades: "When in doubt, do the right thing." As Mr. Steyn rightly points out, it's striking that it took three years for the harassment policies to come to light, that nobody stepped forward sooner. "When in doubt, do the right thing." I rarely expect and less-rarely see such character from politicians. But the government employees of the IRS do not work for politicians, they work, or rather they should work, for all of the American people. All of 'em. And when politicians, for whom re-election and ideological victory are all-consuming, direct you to do things you know are wrong, shouldn't one of these individuals have had the ... well ... the balls to stand up and put a stop to it? Just one stand-up guy, one Gary Cooper? Anyone?
