Ed Morrissey today went out of his way to prove that he is still the absolute master of the sublimely stupid question. Opening up a “Open Thread” over at HotAir today with the following title.
Open thread, live video: Can Issa connect the dots in IRS hearing today?
posted at 10:41 am on July 18, 2013 by Ed Morrissey
According to Carl Cameron’s report of a conversation he had with Darrell Issa yesterday, today’s hearing in the House Oversight Committee will connect the dots in the IRS scandal all the way to the White House. That’s hardly a great strategy in setting expectations — unless Issa really knows he can deliver on that promise. Starting at 11 am, we’ll soon find out (via Common Cents and Gateway Pundit):
The star of today’s show will almost certainly be Carter Hull. When his name first popped up, it seemed that Hull might have been at the BOLO nexus, and possibly the key to the scandal. His testimony in depositions didn’t disappoint, either. Instead of being a driver of the effort, Hull told investigators that he had been placed in the “demeaning” position of having his approval authority stripped on Tea Party cases, which went to Washington and the IRS chief counsel’s office rather than concluded positively for the applicants, as he would have determined.
Expect Issa and Republicans to spend a lot of time with Hull, drawing him out on those points, and with Elizabeth Hofacre as well. She has been a gold mine of information on the lower-level operations, and will likely serve to rebut Democrats’ attempts to show equivalence between treatment of conservatives and progressives in the tax-exempt unit. That will balance out the efforts of Democrats on Oversight to pillory J. Russell George for not providing them that equivalence in the first place.
The fireworks should be spectacular today, with the hearing shifting from a veneer of bipartisanship earlier this summer to a full-fledged partisan battle to control the IRS scandal narrative now.
Darrell Issa is the consummate master of advancing the financial and political future of Darrell Issa and only Darrell Issa. If Darrell Issa isn’t personally profiting then nobody will profit, his words and actions become to quote William Shakespeare, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Anyone foolish enough to expect anything else from Darrell Issa deserves the disappointment that they will certainly receive at the end of today’s hearing. Just as they deserved that disappointment for expecting Issa to deliver on the “Fast and Furious” hearings, and the “Benghazi” hearing or any other damned hears that Issa has held.
In the end, the conclusion of today’s hearings is about Darrell Issa selling the American people out for whatever he can, just as he always has.
The Wilderness of Mirrors 