The media are abuzz with the IRS affair. As you may have heard, former IRS official Lois Lerner, in charge of tax exempt groups, directed harassment operations targeting conservative groups. She also recommended auditing Republican Senator Charles Grassley. Appearing in front of the House Oversight Committee (HOC) in May 2013 and again last March, she pled the Fifth and refused to answer any questions. Later, IRS commissioner John Koskinen announced that potentially damning emails that were subpoenaed by the committee had disappeared in a series of computer crashes affecting Lerner’s machine, as well as the machines of at least six other IRS officers with whom she was not discussing anything important anyway.
Soon thereafter, neighbors of the plush EPA office in the District of Columbia reported hearing a huge "you can do that?" cry of relief. The EPA, you see, is also being investigated by the HOC, for unrelated power grabs. It promptly announced that it, too, had been a victim of these temperamental machines and that disk crashes had eliminated all compromising emails that had been subpoenaed. So there.
The administration had already spent millions retrieving emails containing only irrelevant, harmless messages, and duly supplied them to the HOC, chaired by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.). Surely, the administration implied, enough is enough. Besides, President Obama himself had designated conservative groups as a "threat to our democracy" as early as 2010. With such divine sanction, how could the IRS be blamed for its actions?
The gremlins sneak in with the mail, escape from the mail rooms, kick office doors, gnaw hard drives, eat magnetic tapes, shred paper records, and hypnotize IT managers into a hardware destruction trance.
Some journalists are starting to smell a fish, but not our modern-liberal media. Oh no. They are jumping to the defense of Lerner, claiming that Republicans are on a witch hunt. This reference to the paranormal may be more accurate than they think. It is the only explanation that makes sense.
Consider the accumulation of bad luck, hardware problems, incompetence, and plain carelessness that was apparently at work. Lerner's drive crashed, and so did the drives in her colleagues' machines — in June 2011, just ten days after being informed of the pending investigation for the targeting of conservative groups. Then, in September, the IRS canceled its contract with email backup software vendor Sonasoft, purged its Exchange email server of old mail, destroyed the tape backups, and decommissioned 22 perfectly good storage servers that were used to archive emails and documents, all the while breaking the laws and rules that mandate the IRS to keep backups. The details of what happened at the EPA are not public yet, but they'll probably reveal a similar pattern of cataclysmic incompetence and bad luck.
This long chain of implausible events cannot be random. The only explanation is supernatural.
Any sane, right-thinking person is forced to conclude that the Republicans send invisible gremlins with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests they issue to our honest, hard-working federal officials. The gremlins sneak in with the mail, escape from the mail rooms, kick office doors, gnaw hard drives, eat magnetic tapes, shred paper records, and hypnotize IT managers into a hardware destruction trance. These critters are hellbent on destroying records just to embarrass Democratic officials. The fact that the officials are saved from the even greater embarrassment of having to wear those unsightly orange prison jumpsuits is purely coincidental.
Fortunately, there is a solution. After all, the US is still at war in Afghanistan, as the press tends to forget. So Obama could stop the madness by simply classifying the work of all federal bureaucrats as wartime secrets, thereby defeating further FOIA requests.
It is high time that the Republican FOIA freaks stop terrorizing our nation with their invisible gremlins. Sanity must return.
References
Forbes timeline: http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/06/25/the-timeline-of-irs-targeting-of-conservative-groups/
EPA data: http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/210564-epa-says-hard-drive-crashed-emails-lost
