"Non-Scandal" Update

You might have heard that the IRS was also targeting progressive groups, not just the Tea Party. Every lefty friend I have on Facebook posted something to that effect, and Ace Commenter Rich made an allusion to it earlier in the week. So we were assured that the IRS scandal involving harassment of the Tea Party was really a non-scandal, non-story, and that we should forget about it and concentrate on something more important, like anything else.

Oops:

Liberal groups seeking tax-exempt status faced less IRS scrutiny than Tea Party groups, according to the Treasury Department’s inspector general.

J. Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, told Rep. Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) in a letter dated Wednesday that the IRS did not use inappropriate criteria to scrutinize groups with “progressives” in their name seeking tax-exempt status.

“Our audit did not find evidence that the IRS used the ‘progressives’ identifier as selection criteria for potential political cases between May 2010 and May 2012,” George wrote in the letter obtained by The Hill.

But what about the Tea Party groups?

The inspector general stressed that 100 percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “patriots” and “9/12” in their name were flagged for extra attention, while only 30 percent of the groups with “progress” or “progressive” were highlighted as potentially political. George’s letter does not say why the progressive groups were given extra scrutiny.

I blame George W. Bush.