Money Down the Rat Hole - Three Signs There’s a Cover-Up

Why do we put up with their theft, lies and waste? m/r

Three Signs There’s a Cover-Up | National Review Online

from MAY 20, 2013   By John Fund

“Mistakes were made….I don’t recall” and other surefire clues. 

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” 

The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved.

Astonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation that it had targeted tea-party groups and other organizations with “patriot” or “9/12” in their names. “Mistakes were made initially,” the official IRS statement on May 10 read, implying that the mistakes ended after a short “initial” period. We now know that the scandal and cover-up unfolded over a three-year period, and the IRS publicly acknowledged them only after the 2012 election was safely past.

Here are some other clues that a Washington cover-up is going on.

1. No one seems to be able to name the players. ...

2. Spinners minimize the scandal by claiming it would have been impossible to detect it. ...

3. Critics are discredited. …

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