How the media shapes the discussion...by omitting relevant facts to suit the regime

IRS scandal creeps closer to White House

I have to admit, I’m stumped. Either something fairly important happened yesterday in Washington, or as readers ofThe Dallas Morning News might say, “I have no idea what you mean.”

News reports, mostly from the right-of-center media, would indicate a 50-year IRS employee, recently retired as a tax specialist, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Carter Hull, we’re told, said the inappropriate screening of tea party-related applications reached at least the office of the IRS chief counsel, one of two political appointees in the building.

You remember the IRS scandal, right?

If Hull did testify, and I have no reason to think he didn’t, isn’t that news? (Note the photographic evidence above.) Hasn’t one of the big questions of the improper, if not illegal, IRS scrutiny been whether this program was designed and directed from someplace other than the much-maligned Cincinnati office?

Peggy Noonan, in her weekly Wall Street Journal column, says that, yes, this is a big deal:

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office — that had been established — but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell — such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn’t say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

But a countervailing view can be found in your local newspaper today. We had a story on the hearing that included not a single mention of Carter Hull or William Wilkins, the IRS chief counsel appointed by that guy in the White House. (Honestly, I can’t even find our print story on our website, but it was a slightly shorter version of this Associated Press dispatch.)

Like I said, I’m stumped. It’s as if our story (the AP version) exists in a parallel universe from what would seem to be the bigger news.

Perhaps this will sort itself out over the weekend. Or maybe this whole IRS thing never happened.