By CHQ Staff | 5/23/13

Reagan biographer and conservative political guru Craig Shirley has made a powerful case on Breitbart’s BigGovernment for our position that the Tea Party victims of IRS discrimination must be made whole.

In our estimation, Shirley’s key point is this:
“Conspiracy is not too tough a word to use or to say in polite company that the Tea Parties were denied their civil rights to political participation by their own government and outside agitators.

by Craig Shirley 22 May 2013

As the old saying goes, beware of Greeks bearing gifts; but as the new saying goes, beware even more of Republicans bearing bribes. In either case, one could get destroyed (or at least corrupted) from the inside by trusting the wrong people.

Since 2006, with the beginnings of the breakaway of populist conservatives from the national Republican Party via the Tea Party movement, the GOP has been trying to figure out how to co-opt and capture it once again, just as George W. Bush did with many elements of the conservative movement in the early years of the 21st century.

But with the unofficial (and official) rise of the Tea Party movement, this development has struck fear in the Washington establishment because it represents an intellectual challenge to the anti-intellectual status quo of the Democrats and the Big Government Republicans.
Dorothy Parker observed her own destructiveness and the “curling smoke” of the “burning bridges” of her escapades. The IRS and the Washington Establishment may have irreparably burned down the bridge of legitimacy granted it by the American people, and the national Republicans smell an opportunity in the curling smoke.

By Craig Shirley May 20, 2013 @ 5:52 am

The hoopla over the new George W. Bush Library in Dallas, as well as some gauzy looks back [2] penned by former aides, shows we are in the middle of “The Great Bush Revisionism.” The former president is being lauded [3] and congratulated [4]. But for what?

A new examination of Bushism may be helpful because the current scandals in Washington are the symptoms of too much power and too much arrogance.

[5]The Internal Revenue Service did not target the Republican Party, which is considered part of the establishment. It targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups that were viewed as a threat to the establishment.

Americans need to be wary of revisionism at all times. They need to remember clearly how things were.
Recall the 2004 White House Correspondents Dinner. President George W. Bush showed a slide show featuring photos of himself searching for non-existent weapons of mass destruction [6]. The tuxedoed guests saw the president looking under sofas and other places for the missing WMDs. The Washington elite, as well as their Hollywood and Wall Street guests, laughed uproariously.

May 16, 2013

5/16/2013 9:48:00 AM – Craig Shirley

Emotions are running high on the right side of the political spectrum since the terrifying discovery that the Internal Revenue Service has for years been harassing dozens – maybe hundreds – of Tea Party and conservative grassroots groups.

Within those victimized (and now vindicated) Tea Party groups is rage but also a sense of satisfaction that they have been proven correct. The Obama government – indeed the entire Establishment – was out to get them, and now the world knows it.

It’s not often that an individual or group gets to be a hero and a victim all at the same time. The fact that this has come with such a tidal wave confirms what conservatives have feared about liberals and big government. Of course, it can happen again.

by Lloyd Grove Apr 24, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

On the eve of the dedication of his presidential library, can George W. Bush be rehabilitated?

Such things have been known to happen.

Modern scholars, for instance, consistently rate Harry S. Truman in the first rank of American presidents. But when Truman left the White House in January 1953, he was one of the least respected chief executives in history—his nearly eight years in office beset by petty scandals, a lingering war in Korea and the indelible image of a ward-heeling haberdasher unworthy of the godlike legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.