Home > posts > Just a Coincidence, We’re Sure
January 23rd, 2014 8:34 pm
Just a Coincidence, We’re Sure
Posted by Print

You’d think the Obama Administration would have been sufficiently chastened by the IRS scandal not to push their luck. You’d have thought wrong. From the New York Times:

LOS ANGELES — In a famously left-leaning Hollywood, where Democratic fund-raisers fill the social calendar, Friends of Abe stands out as a conservative group that bucks the prevailing political winds.

A collection of perhaps 1,500 right-leaning players in the entertainment industry, Friends of Abe keeps a low profile and fiercely protects its membership list, to avoid what it presumes would result in a sort of 21st-century blacklist, albeit on the other side of the partisan spectrum.

Now the Internal Revenue Service is reviewing the group’s activities in connection with its application for tax-exempt status. Last week, federal tax authorities presented the group with a 10-point request for detailed information about its meetings with politicians like Paul D. Ryan, Thaddeus McCotter and Herman Cain, among other matters, according to people briefed on the inquiry.

Here’s the Administration’s problem: One of the reasons they were able to get away with targeting Tea Party groups for so long was because most of the victimized organizations were grassroots affairs without megaphones. But go after Hollywood? The tinseltown conservatives may have spent the past decade content to keep their opinions to themselves—but politically-motivated audits have a way of upsetting that equilibrium (how do you think the story got to the Times, after all?).

The old saying is “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Ink may be going by the wayside these days, but it’s still ill-advised to throw a haymaker at people with this kind of clout. I suspect the White House will learn that sooner rather than later.

Comments are closed.