Which government agency should you hate? The one that secretly spies on you and threatens to apply criminal penalties to those who expose its, um, crimes, or the one that operates openly and investigates and exposes its own failures to apply the law fairly?
You guessed it, the latter. Right-wing windbags Mary Matalin and Bill Kristol are afraid that all the healthy outrage over the failure of the IRS to even-handedly review applications for non-profit status might spill over to the National Security Agency, for, well, for secretly monitoring our phone records. Politico’s Jonathan Topaz fills us in:
Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, said “conservatives and Republicans are making a huge mistake” by speaking out against the agency monitoring, saying the NSA issue is “totally different” from the IRS scandal. While the IRS targeted ordinary Americans without probable cause and according to political beliefs, the NSA is “targeting foreign terrorists” with proper oversight, Kristol said.
Matalin, a Republican strategist, said the Obama administration has a legacy of “intrusiveness” and unconstitutional policies, which is why Americans might be linking the IRS scandal and policies like the Affordable Care Act with the NSA monitoring.
The fact that only a handful of individuals were affected by the IRS’s bungling, which the IRS itself exposed, while the NSA has been studiously violating the privacy of millions on an ongoing basis—well, that’s all irrelevant to Bill and Mary. NSA good, IRS bad! That’s all you need to know, folks! That’s all you need to know!
What schmucks these mortals be.
