Posted on 05/22/2013 8:42:45 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
Imagine you're an overworked IRS employee, charged with finding, in your massive stack of 501(c)(4) applications, the groups most likely to make electioneering their main focus. Wouldn't it make a little sense to focus on self-proclaimed Tea Party groups? Sure it would. And there's a word for that shortcut, Farhad Manjoo at Slate observes: profiling. By making decisions based on surface details like a group's name, "the IRS was acting like the TSA agent who pulls aside the guy in the turban."
Which is ironic, because the right has long advocated racial profiling, and they've found the moral argument against it "pretty hilarious." But Manjoo thinks the IRS scandal illustrates why profiling is wrong: it's unfair, and ineffective. Many of the Tea Party groups profiled turned out to be aboveboard, and some groups that weren't investigated proved not to be. "This is the Richard Reid scenario: Sometimes, a white guy tries to blow up a plane." Click for the full column.
There are big differences though.
This reminds me of the black woman that called in to Hannity last week that was glad that conservatives/”republicans” (she meant “white people”) were being targeted by the IRS,
because it was “payback”.
The insanity of the left has no boundaries.......
This isn’t “profiling”.
I guess the genius is also for the TSA’s treatment of the children and elderly.
>> There are big differences though.
No kidding.
The guys in the turbans earned their profiling by blowing people up. Over and over and over again. For decades!
Tea party, on the other hand, has no “track record” of electioneering, tax evasion, or such.
Exactly, and it quietly if not overtly supports the abusive actions.
Unfair profiling similar to what the IRS is doing to conservative groups would be picking someone like Fathead Mangy and taking him down to the police station for questioning because he had a Muslim-sounding name. Nobody supports doing that. This idiot can’t get his argument straight. But he’s not interested in fairness...he would like to conservative groups punished.
Profiling is a preventative act that uses a set statistical data points showing a tendency toward criminal activities.
This is unconstitutional on several points.
precedent has been set.
when the libs are out and conservatives are in... it’ll be interesting for libs when the health care system denies them services due to having an abortion, doing drugs, or participating in occupy hippie circles.
good times ahead
The difference, Mr. Manjoo, is that nobody in the Tea Party is coming after you with a gun. At least so far.
The profiling of passengers would be for the intention of stopping planes from exploding mid-flight, including any plane in which you are a passenger, Mr. Spak. The profiling of conservative groups is intended to punish political adversaries and effectively inhibit free speech. Do you really think these are the same?
Only in the fevered imagination of an idiot leftist.
...have the TSA detain this moron up for 3 years while they demand all of his personal information, names of associates, and the content of his prayers - before allowing him to board an airplane - then we can talk.
“Payback” rather than profiling, as you say, is at work here. Revenge and retribution are other words that come to mind. I’d likely agree with theIRS if they went after groups similar to ones that had abused the law in the past.
As far as I know, the Tea Party has been very observant of laws and regulations. Just might be because conservatives believe in the rule of law. A constitutional republic rather than the socialist tyranny we are slipping into is the conservative end.
my thoughts exactly.
Most people who hate the Tea Party have no idea what it is or what its members do, nor do they make any attempt to find out. They target the Tea Party as representative of “the enemy” and lump it together with the KKK. I saw an article the other day that said the Tea Party, by definition, is racist. Huh? Anyone can join their local TP.
>> Profiling is a preventative act that uses a set statistical data points showing a tendency toward criminal activities.
Yeah, that’s the educated, articulate way of putting it.
But I like my emotional way better. :-)
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