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The just before Christmas report of Darrell Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is probably a big disappointment to promoters of the IRS scandal narrative.  They won’t admit it and will maintain that the revelation of an IRS employee referring to a Tea Party group as “icky” is shocking, shocking.  Still I look at the whole thing as being like the story of the parents who tried to kill their kids excessive optimism by leaving no presents under the Christmas tree and loading his stocking with horseshit.  They woke up Christmas morning to a gleeful child running around the house looking for the pony that Santa Claus must have left.

The Issa Committee has over 1.3 million pages and 52 transcribed interviews – a veritable dung heap that could provide fertilizer to a modest farm for years.  Still no pony.  The pony would be proof of direct White House involvement in the targeting.  They have shifted to White House rhetoric inflaming the IRS – kind of like Henry II asking his knights why no one will rid him of the troublesome priest.

I feel bad for Issa and his friends, so as a belated Christmas present, I’m going to give them an imaginary pony in the form of a conversation in the West Wing that should have been taped.

President Obama:  Minion.  Come here and attend.  Tell me about these strange people with tricorner hats who call themselves the Tea Party.
Minion: Well excellency they seek to educate the people that the Founding Fathers wished the federal government to be carefully limited in its power.
Obama: Founding Fathers?  You mean the African enslaving slaughterers of indigenous people whom my liberal professors taught me to despise?
Minion: The same excellency.
Obama: I could see that this teaching would be highly dangerous to my master plan to turn America into a cradle to grave welfare state.  How can we best smite these Tea Party people in a subtle and devious manner?
Minion: Our prime minion in the IRS, Lois Lerner, who has taken the oath of silence, can harass them by delaying their exempt status applications
Obama: Make it so.
I recently read that during the Watergate hearings one of the most avid listeners was a young lad from Hawaii on his first trip to the mainland who would grow up to be President of the United States, which makes me think that there won’t be any tapes.