Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

May 27, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:05

2391 Obama's Watergate - Stefan Molyneux on The Peter Schiff Show

Stefan Molyneux joins The Peter Schiff Show to discuss the recent scandals which have been plaguing the Obama administration.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Joining the program now is somebody who is very familiar with listeners to The Peter Schiff Show because he's guest-hosted on several occasions during my absence.
	Welcome, Stefan Molyneux.
	How are you today, sir?
	I'm great, Peter.
	How are you doing, man?
	Good, good.
	Thanks for coming by.
	So talk to me about the IRS scandal.
	And is this kind of like just something that you would expect from the Obama administration if you look at You know, I remember back in the day when a lot of companies were raising their prices and they were sending out memos that the reason they were doing this was because of regulations,
	in particular Obamacare, and so they were passing on these costs to their customers in form of higher prices, and then what would happen a day or two later, they would apologize for those statements and say that no, no, no, no, no, we were wrong, that Regulation had nothing to do with our decision to raise prices.
	And to me, it seemed like the administration was doing some arm twisting.
	And it seems like, you know, this is how they abuse their power.
	Well, that's the purpose of the IRS. I mean, as you well know, the purpose of the IRS is to harass.
	I mean, if they wanted to get money from citizens, they could have a flat tax, they could have a sales tax, they could have some other kind of consumption tax.
	But the Byzantine multi...
	Volume regulations means that everybody can always be nailed for something.
	The length and brutality of the audit process is designed to be threatening to people.
	And this is nothing new.
	FDR did it in the Second World War.
	Nixon did it, of course.
	Clinton did it, targeted people.
	And now this is just occurring again.
	And the thing that drives me nuts is the nonsense that we're supposed to swallow.
	About these situations, right?
	So they say, oh, it was some low-level employees.
	They just decided on their own to go target some people who were politically unfavorable to the current administration.
	I mean, what nonsense are we supposed to believe?
	You try lying to the government about anything minor, and you're going to look at jail time on massive fines and legal harassment, but they lie to you, and it's just natural business in the cycle for them.
	Well, that's the hypocrisy, right?
	The laws don't apply to the government.
	They only apply to us trivial minions, the public.
	But they used to say that the income tax created more liars than golf.
	And because of the income tax...
	So many Americans live in fear because, you know, the taxes are so high.
	So many Americans really have no choice but to, quote, unquote, cut corners.
	And so they probably take deductions that they're technically not entitled to or maybe there's income that's not reported.
	And so everybody is in fear of their government.
	And, you know, when the public fears the government, that's not freedom.
	It's the other way around.
	We want the government to fear the public.
	I forget who said that.
	When the people fear the government, it's tyranny, but when the government fears the people, it's liberty.
	I'm sure it was one of the founding fathers.
	But we have a nation of sheep now because of the Internal Revenue Code.
	Well, but I think what's valuable about this, Peter, this whole process, is that at least people are beginning to see That we are run not by terrible gods, but tiny weasels.
	Because it's all these little lies that occur, right?
	They say, oh, first of all, they said it wasn't happening.
	Even when they went to Congress and they were accused of targeting conservative groups, they said it didn't happen.
	It's an out-and-out lie about some very important stuff during an election year when this could have made a big difference.
	And then they say, oh, no, no, okay, it did happen.
	They planted a reporter to ask a question.
	It was a plant.
	To just sort of try and bypass it, then they said it's a local Cincinnati office, and now it's turned up all the way to the Washington office, and you've got at least anonymous IRS people saying, no, no, no, this stuff all comes from the top.
	We don't sit there and start to target people on our own face.
	What insane person would do that?
	And so depending on how high this goes, this could be a significant event in the public's trust of government, which remains far too high despite almost all evidence of the contrary.
	Well, I played the sound, too, from Miller, the outgoing commissioner of the IRS, who basically said that he doesn't think any of that is illegal.
	He thinks that we shouldn't do it.
	We shouldn't target conservative individuals or groups specifically for their ideology.
	He says he doesn't think it should be done, but he says there's no reason that it can't be done, that there's no law.
	That would prohibit it.
	What do you think?
	Does that seem like it would be against the law for the IRS to profile organizations and groups based on a political ideology?
	Oh, without a doubt, at least according to the legal opinions that I've read—I'm no lawyer, of course—but according to the legal opinions that I've read, it is absolutely against the law.
	You cannot target people for taxes or tax breaks based upon ideology.
	That is—it's absolutely—it seems to be entirely unconstitutional.
	I mean, that's sort of a freedom of speech issue.
	Yeah, it certainly means it would be violative of the First Amendment to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, because if the government can punish you for expressing a certain opinion, then they're basically stifling your ability to do that.
	If you know, hey, if you speak up against the government, well, you're going to get audited, well, then people aren't going to want to speak up.
	If you think that the government can target—this is what they do in communist countries where they have the political dissidents— Where if you speak up against the government, they put you in jail.
	Well, if you speak up against the government and then they select you for an audit or something, and now they're going to find something on everybody.
	And if you know that, gee, I better keep quiet.
	I better keep my opinions to myself.
	I better not express my outrage at the government, or they're just going to audit me.
	Well, did you hear one of those questions that they asked was, what is the content of your members' prayers?
	I mean, in what conceivable universe could that have anything to do with the tax code?
	What are your members praying for?
	I mean, that's violating God, sinner confidentiality.
	I mean, it's completely insane.
	These are the questions the IRS was asking when it was trying to decide on the status of these organizations, right?
	Yeah, that's right.
	And they were trying to find out the member list and all that.
	Because everything that the IRS asks you in these questionnaires...
	It's going to become public knowledge.
	I mean, it's going to be public.
	It's going to be public.
	So they were trying to get membership so that the Democratic machine could find out who was there and harass them, I'm sure, even further.
	So if I want to hire, if I'm interviewing a woman for a job, it's illegal for me to ask her if she intends to have children.
	But the IRS is allowed to ask people about the content of their prayers.
	I mean, it's really almost like a bad joke.
	I mean, you could invent something that's just more lunatic and ridiculous and such an invasion of privacy.
	I mean, the privacy of the voting booth is supposed to be sacrosanct, but now they want to try and dig out memberlets from people and publish them publicly.
	I mean, this is mad.
	But think about the IRS. It's all about, you know, there is no privacy from government because of the IRS. Because, you know, my father used to call the income tax return a confession.
	Because you weren't returning anything to the government.
	You were just confessing to the government.
	You weren't giving them anything they already had.
	You were confessing everything about yourself in order to qualify for all these various exemptions.
	I mean, the government knows everything about you.
	My dad would say that the government knew more about American citizens because of the income tax.
	Then the Soviet Union used to know about Soviet citizens.
	Well, I guess because of the technology, right?
	And have you read at all this morning, they've just released around this sort of phone tapping, or not phone tapping, they've been getting the phone records from the reporters.
	And now this Fox News reporter had his movements tracked via key cards, they traced his call, they searched his email.
	I mean, this is, again, without informing him at all, and simply because they had some suspicion that he was doing something possibly nefarious, And, you know, what's great about it is finally they've had the idiotics, the poor judgment to target reporters.
	Because, boy, if there's anything that's going to start to turn reporters against the current administration, which has been far too long in coming, given the massive illegalities of what Obama and his cronies have been up to, You target reporters and the reporters will turn on you, because as soon as you target reporters, people aren't going to want to talk to reporters.
	If they lose their sources, they're actually going to have to start to do real reporting, which they haven't wanted to do for many years.
	They just want to pass along information from those in government.
	So if you threaten their livelihood, they'll turn against you.
	So I think this has been a joyous event for those of us skeptical of state power, that they have actually had the poor sense to target reporters, which is going to break some of that unholy alliance, I hope.
	I think we're good to go.
	This is nothing compared to that.
	Like, we're making a mountain out of a political molehill.
	I mean, do you think that this is really a molehill compared to Watergate or Iran-Contra that was a mountain?
	Well, I mean, certainly with regards to Watergate, it's far worse, right?
	Watergate was a third-rate Berkeley attempt where nothing ended up being stolen, and the perpetrators got 20 years Wasn't the big thing about Watergate not necessarily the burglary, but the cover-up of the burglary?
	Wasn't that what What it was all about was about that they lied and tried to cover it up so that, you know, rather than confessing, you know, like Clinton and Hillary and Monica Lewinsky, that, you know, it wasn't so much what was done, but the fact that he wasn't honest when he was first asked about it.
	Well, sure.
	Okay, let's say that is the issue.
	Okay, fine.
	But the cover-up here has been just as extensive, just as long, and about a far more important thing.
	This could have...
	I mean, if you look at what they've lied about Benghazi, which we can talk about if you like, but what they've lied about is that Benghazi involved the deaths of four Americans and was critical eight weeks prior to the election if the American public had known that the incompetence of the administration I don't know.
	These are election-changing events.
	Watergate was not an election-changing event.
	This could have resulted in a fundamentally stolen election because they hid all of this really essential information.
	Although you could say that Watergate was an election-changing event in that Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter probably because of the bad taste that was still in the electorate's mouth from Watergate.
	So it didn't change the prior election, but I think it changed the subsequent election.
	Maybe that was a good thing because it paved the way We're good to go.
	There could be.
	We haven't peeled back the onion yet to see what's beneath the surface on this potential cover-up of this IRS scandal.
	Because we know at one point they were asked whether or not they were targeting.
	They denied it.
	The IRS denied they were doing this.
	And then they found out they were doing it some months later.
	Now, whether the original denial, the guy denying it, whether he knew it or not, I don't know.
	But at some point it was discovered.
	And rather than being forthright, it was, in fact, covered up.
	And the question is, who covered it up?
	How high does it go?
	And we don't know the answers to that yet.
	855-4SHIFT. We'll be back.
	We've got more with Stefan Molyneux after this.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	The Peter Schiff Show.
	If knowledge is power, then the Peter Schiff Show is a uranium-enriched 10,000 megawatt nuclear reactor.
	Stay plugged in.
	Stay brilliant.
	This is the Peter Schiff Show.
	We're talking about abuse of executive power with Stefan Molyneux, who is the host of Free Domain Radio.
	And first, Stefan, I just got to let you know I was very saddened to have recently learned of your diagnosis with lymphoma.
	And I certainly want to express to you my heartfelt hopes that you can overcome this disease as swiftly as possible.
	I'm sure my audience as well will wish you the best in this fight.
	Well, thank you very much.
	Everything's going very well so far, so I remain perhaps delusionarily optimistic, but I really appreciate your time.
	Thank you, and thanks to your audience.
	Well, fortunately, your recovery is not being left to the government and the Obama administration.
	I guess there's still enough free market forces in medicine so that we have a chance to overcome these kind of diseases.
	But we might not be as fortunate when it comes to overcoming the disease of big government.
	And I wanted to talk a little bit, too, now about the Benghazi, because it seems like the whole thing erupted at a time which should have been very opportunistic, I guess, for Romney, because they had it even during the debates.
	It blew up between presidential debates.
	But the Obama administration seemed to do a pretty good job of shoving this whole thing aside.
	Now it seems to be resurrecting itself a little bit with respect to whether or not Hillary Clinton's political ambitions need to be tarnished.
	But what's going on there?
	And is there still an investigation?
	And are we going to learn anything more about any kind of Watergate-style cover-up of that incident?
	Yeah, I mean, it's horrendous.
	I mean, the CIA warned of prior attacks.
	There have been five or six other prior attacks in the neighborhood on Western targets.
	And Hillary Clinton appears to have said, we need less security there, not more.
	And she withdrew some of the security.
	At first, she denied it, and then there's memos with her signature on it.
	So it's the worst kind of cover-up.
	And this is one of the things that unbalances these elections so much, Peter.
	I mean, if the government has all this information, But the person who's challenged the government, right, the candidates for the Republicans, they don't have this information.
	So when the government comes out, as Susan Rice did in the Sunday shows right after the attack, come out and say, oh, it was because of some YouTube video that they spontaneous them.
	This is all lies.
	And the CIA knew that it was a lie.
	Their jaws dropped in astonishment, just like the slam dunk thing for the Iraq, you know, the RWMDs and so on.
	But these are very serious things.
	This is where people get killed.
	There's nothing on the scale of what's going on.
	Well, yeah, it seems to me from just an anecdotal, just looking at what happened.
	So they made a mistake.
	They withdrew security despite having been warned that they needed more security.
	And then, you know, they get caught with their pants down.
	They made a mistake.
	And they say, well, we need an excuse.
	We need to come up with something other than the truth so that we can cover up the fact that we screwed up.
	And so they invent this alternate story about, well, it was some spontaneous thing, so nobody could have had any advance warning, and what is really terrorism?
	And it seems like the whole story was made up as some kind of explanation to cover up their own incompetence.
	But the question is, you know, where did it come from?
	Who gave the orders to make this story up?
	Did Hillary Clinton come up with it?
	Or did Barack Obama know about it?
	Did they say, well, we can't tell the truth.
	It's a campaign.
	It's an election year.
	I'm positioning myself as a guy that killed bin Laden.
	I stamped out terrorism.
	We can't let the truth come out.
	So we need some kind of excuse.
	We need some kind of smokescreen that we can create.
	Did they have some kind of conversation like that?
	And if so, was there any evidence of it?
	But legally, I would argue, legally and morally, according to the government's own standards, it doesn't matter who gave the order.
	Whoever's in charge has to take the fall.
	I mean, you know this as the head of a financial organization, that if something untoward happens in your organization, you're the one who ends up facing problems, right?
	I mean, you are the head, and therefore, right?
	So if you're the head of the state department and all of this stuff is happening, it doesn't matter if they gave the order or not.
	You're responsible for what happens in your organization.
	So she is accountable as whether she gave the order or not.
	Yeah, well, you know, Barack Obama is no Harry Truman.
	You know, it's not the buck stops with me.
	It's like, I never saw the buck.
	The buck never got to me.
	What buck?
	I didn't even know he had a buck.
	A flow-through buck tunnel.
	That's the idea, yeah.
	But I do think it would be, I think it's a higher degree, you know, if you knew about it at some point along the way.
	It does show that if the president had no idea, if there really was a cover-up going on and the president had no idea that it was happening, maybe that shows that he's aloof and incompetent.
	But it would be worse, in my mind, if he played an active role in the cover-up, if he found out about it and then went along with the cover-up because he didn't want to tell the truth.
	I mean, that, I think, would be an impeachable offense.
	If he simply was aloof and just has no idea what's going on in his own administration, I think it's a different level of You know, of blame.
	Well, okay, but I would make the argument, Peter, that once he found out who got prosecuted, right?
	Oh, yeah, nobody.
	Nobody has gotten prosecuted.
	Nobody has lost their job.
	Nobody's faced any sanctions.
	He hasn't.
	So, I mean, okay, he fired one head of the IRS who was leaving anyway.
	I mean, who cares about that?
	But the point is, now he knows what happened, who is being held accountable, and that to me indicates a huge amount of moral corruption.
	The higher you go, the higher your moral standards need to be, and it's quite the opposite with the government.
	And, you know, to me, if nobody is, you know, being, you know, being fired or prosecuted, makes me think, what have they got on the president?
	I mean, the only reason why the president might not be going after somebody is because that person might talk.
	They might have a lot of information.
	And the only way the president can shut them up or, you know, guarantee that they remain silent is not to prosecute them.
	Not to give them a reason to talk.
	So it could be a quid pro quo going on that, you know, the people that know something about the president's involvement are not being targeted because of the fear that they might spill the beans.
	Oh, yeah.
	Look, everybody is neck deep in gasoline and everybody has a match.
	This is a mafia style, mutually assured destruction scenario.
	They're all in the same tangled web.
	And I'm sure that anyone could pull a grenade in that whole room.
	So yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of ass covering.
	There's a lot of misdirection.
	And it's just the weaselly nature of the lies, the delays.
	I mean, it's just horrendous what is going on.
	And I hope that people are starting to wake up for it, because this is even worse.
	I mean, not in terms of body count, the Iraq body count.
	Can you imagine, Stefan, imagine if Bush was still president and it was, you know, liberal groups, it were minorities, it were women's groups or African-American groups that the IRS was targeting.
	I mean, they'd have his head on a spike.
	I mean, this would be way worse than Watergate.
	I mean, we'd be...
	But hey, Stefan, we're running out of time.
	We've got a hard break.
	Hey, thanks for coming on the show.
	Again, Free Domain Radio, that's where you can hear Stefan Molyneux daily.
	Hour 2 of the Peter Schiff Show coming up after this.

▲