How bad is the IRS scandal?

This story hasn’t gained the traction I expected.  That’s an understatement – I thought this sort of abuse of power would unite left and right in self-righteous indignation.

Lurking leftist commenters, I summon thee.  Uncloak.

Maybe I’m naïve.  There are a half dozen scandals that have left the Obama administration unscathed, each of which I would have guessed would bring it down – or at least bring down its poll numbers.

But this weaponization of the IRS…it’s different.

If you’ve never been in the IRS’s crosshairs, you might not realize the power that they hold.  They can come into your house with armed men and take your belongings, and you have to prove that you deserve them back.  They can shutter your business and imprison you, and you’re presumed guilty.  The onus of proof rests on you, the accused.  In many ways the IRS is all-powerful and beyond appeal.

And now they are corrupt.

Where they might have made honest mistakes in the past, now they go after defenseless citizens purposefully, because those citizens took a political stand that those bureaucrats (and their union, and their masters) oppose.

I honestly expected some of our leftist brothers and sisters in the commentariat to stand up and cross party lines on this issue, to push back against this oppression.  They didn’t.  They rallied behind Team Blue, and bleated that all 501Cs should be taxed, that Boosh did it too, and so on.  And beneath their denial, I think, was the attitude:  Chill out, greedy wingers, it’s only money.

It’s only money.  That’s a great disconnect between right and left.  The left’s “it’s only money” sneer is common among those for whom money is easily obtained:  The spoiled children of privilege whose resentment of their parents forms their entire philosophy and springs from their own shame; and spoiled children of entitlements, who replace contempt for their parents with contempt of wealth generators.  True liberalism is dead; in its place is contrarianism born of teen angst.

Conservatives realize:  We all earn money by trading pieces of our life for it.  I’d rather be at home playing catch with my daughter, but instead I’ll trade the next several hours for a few bucks.  If time is money, and the seconds of our lives finite, then when you rob a man of his money, you’re taking years of life from him.  The will to hold on to one’s own money isn’t greed – it’s self-preservation.

Now, I don’t want to come across as some sort of victimized beta-male or overwrought ninny.  They’re not rounding us up into killing fields.  That’s never going to happen here.  (Not because we’re somehow morally superior or more courageous than Cambodians – but because we, as individuals, are better armed.)  This isn’t a holocaust.  But it’s about as close to a death camp as they could get:  They’re oppressing dissent by using the full power of the state to subjugate ordinary citizens, in order to maintain a system that takes years of life (money) from their opponents at the point of a gun, so that they can give that money, those years, to their allies, skimming a little off the top for themselves.

So how bad is this, compared to, say, Watergate?  Watergate was nothing.  Watergate was aggressive campaign research.  The victims of Watergate were themselves professional politicians.  The victims of this IRS abuse are ordinary citizens.

And how high does this go?  Apparently all the way to the top.

Tell me something that any administration has done, that’s been worse, short of The Trail of Tears.  (Note that this too was a policy of a Democrat, by the way.)