As a podcast on iTunes, listenable/downloadable onscreen at Taki’s Magazine, or as a transcript here.

This week’s broadcast covers the politicization of the IRS.  Along the way I express doubt that President Obama knew what was going on.  I just can’t believe he’s that attentive.  And:

I doubt Doug Shulman or Lois Lerner knew anything about this, either.  The problem here is not with the politicos, who come and go; it's much more likely a problem of the permanent bureaucracy—the middle- and low-level worker-bees who staff the IRS and other government agencies.

These are, by definition, government people.  They believe in government and they loathe and despise organizations like the Tea Party, who think we have too much government and too many government people.  With a mindset like that, do you think the government people can resist making life as hard as possible for Tea Partiers and other conservative groups?

I actually wish I could believe it was the President and his appointees who were driving this.  Them we can get rid of at election time. The nameless GS-12 tucked away in the IRS Nonprofit Determinations Office in Cincinnati, the guy the Tea Party group is dealing with, we can't get rid of him.

It's a systemic problem, and, as Paul Mirengoff points out on PowerLine, it will get worse as Obamacare kicks in, and worse yet if the Rubio-Schumer Amnesty Bill gets passed.  Both those measures involve huge expansions of the federal bureaucracy:  more federal worker-bees with more opportunities to promote the left-liberalism they all believe in and put obstacles in the way of those who think differently.

Our country belongs to the government people.  We just live here.