Quotations from Chairman Barry

From the Chris Matthews kneepad interview at American University last week, President Obama served up this killer quote memorialized by Joseph Curl:

“When we do things right, they don’t get a lot of attention,” the president said, no doubt sending a thrill up the MSNBC host’s leg. “If we do something that is perceived at least initially as a screw-up, it will be on the nightly news for a week.”

Like, say, deploying the nation’s tax watchdog to target political opponents? Just a “screw-up.”

You bet. Manufactured in the media.

“If, on the other hand,” Mr. Obama said, ”you’ve got an office in Cincinnati in the IRS office that, I think for bureaucratic reasons, is trying to streamline what is a difficult law to interpret about whether nonprofit is actually a political organization, deserves a tax exempt agency [sic], and they’ve got a list. Suddenly everyone is outraged.

“And I’ll point out there are some so-called progressives and, you know, perceived to be liberal commentators who during that week just were outraged at the possibility that these folks, you know, had been at the direction of the Democratic Party, in some way discriminated against tea party folks. You know, that is what gets news. That’s what gets attention.”

The proposition that the IRS scandal derives from the IRS Cincinnati office is a pathetic joke. The proposition that it is the creation of unfriendly media is a lie of the highly convoluted variety. The particular lack of perspective that Obama alleges on the part of the “so-called progressives” and “liberal commentators” — that’s la-la land stuff.

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