IRS head colluded with the Kenyan, right there in the White House, just forevah! And that’s why we’re doomed.

The latest meme in Perpetual Outrage Land has former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman practically living in the Oval Office. It’s a scandal ya’ see – and a perfect example of how to gin up outrage over the thinnest bit of information.

Bill O’Reilly:  “You must explain under oath what you were doing at the White House on 157 separate occasions.”

The Daily Caller: “IRS’s Shulman had more public White House visits than any Cabinet member.”

Brit Hume tweeeted: “Sooner or later this will have to be answered. What was the ex-IRS chief doing at the White House all those times?” (Ahem, answered by whom Brit? Does FOX News not have any reporters?)

Did. Not. Happen. An actual reporter went and actually reported the charge and it turned out that it Did. Not. Happen.

First, she explains how visitors logs work, what they mean and how they very often only mean that a name is ‘precleared’ for a meeting or event, even if the person never attended. And, she informs us, ‘White House’ usually means either the Eisenhower Executive Office Building or the New Executive Office Building (17 blocks away). And then, doing the ‘reporting’ thing, she look things up and gets into the weeds.

Here’s a taste. This is just 2010 (the other years are at the link); this is the year of the bi-weekly health reform deputies meetings, i.e. regularly scheduled working meetings.

2010

Eisenhower Executive Office Building, recorded as Old Executive Office Building

• Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the Office for Health Reform
• Sarah Fenn, staff assistant, working with DeParle
• Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget
• Robert Nabors, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget
• Jeffrey Zients, deputy director for Management at the Office of Management and Budget
• Margaret Weiss, again
• Ezekiel Emanuel, special  adviser to the director of the White House Office of Management and  Budget for health policy, detailed from his post at the National  Institutes of Health
• Michael Hash, again
• Ariel Levin, special assistant at the Office of Management and Budget. One of her recurring meetings gets the description “THIS IS FOR THE BI-WEEKLY HEALTH REFORM DEPUTIES MEETING.”
• Alex  Hornbrook

New Executive Office Building

• Terri Payne, Office of Management and Budget

(actual) White House (but not Oval Office)

• Jason Furman, again
• Chelsea Kammerer, White House special assistant to the director of intergovernmental affairs. Shulman signed in to attend a July 22 West Wing bill signing for the “Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act” in the State Room of the White House along with White House staff and at least 81 people from outside the building. You can watch Obama deliver remarks on it in this video; the law created “measures that hold government accountable for responsible use of taxpayer dollars and cut down on waste, fraud and abuse.”
• Nancy-Ann DeParle, again

I’m not seeing much this morning – perhaps someone inside the right-wing noise machine (so named by Eric Alterman?) read her story and send out a memo to find a new narrative for this week.

Wherein Rush ushers irony to the door . . . yet again

Everyone  is having their say about the IRS’ Lois Lerner who took the Fifth yesterday before a Congressional committee (just like that conservative icon Oliver North did). Here’s Fat Boy:

You have to be very careful in making judgments about people based on physical appearance, although I’ve gotten really good at it.

I guess we all see what we want to see when we look in the mirror. Anyway, I hear you Rush and I am being careful. I do think it through before I call anyone Fat Boy or “the morbidly-obese, four times married” . . . .  and after thinking it through, I feel I am morally entitled to toss schoolyard insults at you, because that’s what you do for a living. Good for the goose, good for the . . .

Not a terrorist; terrorized perhaps

This is really quite sad. The Austin pilot who crashed his plane into an IRS office seems to have done it as a protest. He also sounds as if he hopes – and maybe expects – others to follow his lead until government and business take notice.

In his manifesto, he rails against many things, but at the heart of it is a man who views the world from the bottom looking up and sees ‘up there’ only the vicious and greedy in the persona of government and big business. He feels utterly abused and used. And he’s tired of fighting back.

Anyone who takes his beef this far has lost touch.  But even as he draws an exaggerated picture full of stereotypes, he is not all wrong. A good deal of what he sees is there. He isn’t imagining all of it; what he is imagining, is that that is all there is.

He ends his ‘manifesto on a bitter-sweet note, offering himself up:

“I am finally ready to stop this insanity.  Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”