IRS frequently used as tool to silence political enemies

Gail Russell Chaddock of CSMonitor didn't have a problem blaming Calvin Coolidge for the wrongdoing of his subordinates in her "Playing the IRS card: Six presidents who used the IRS to bash political foes"

"There's no evidence that President Coolidge personally directed the IRS to punish political enemies. But his Treasury secretary – banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon – had no such scruples."

Presumably CSMonitor was applying Truman's actual "buck stops with me" 






vs  Obama's "buck stops with you" slogan to slag off Coolidge:




In fairness, even though Obama seems to have gotten his prepositions mixed up, he nevertheless seems to have relayed the spirit if not the letter of Truman's quote, from 13 July 2012 Daniel Harper Weekly Standard article: "Obama: 'Harry Truman Said the Buck Stops with You'"

" Well, here's what I know, we were just talking about responsibility and as president of the United States, it's pretty clear to me that I'm responsible for folks who are working in the federal government and you know, Harry Truman said the buck stops with you."
 

 However, ABC, not surprisingly, rejects this guilt by association, guilty until proven innocent bias when describing Obama's scandal from their 15 May 2013 story "IRS Has Long History of Political Dirty Tricks" :

"Nobody has shown that Obama had anything to do with this. We do not know if that's true or not. That's one of the mysteries that undoubtedly will come to light," he told ABC News."

I might agree w/ABC's conclusion, except Democrats and their media are stonewalling any investigation to determine if Obama, like his predecessors, were responsible for his subordinates actions. As you're taught in the military: "You can delegate authority but you can never delegate responsibility."

But I ultimately agree with WashingtonsBlog 22 May 2013 post: "The IRS Targets Political Opponents Under Both Liberal and Conservative Administrations"

"Obviously, the fact that 'everyone does it' is no defense. No one should do it … And anyone who does should be prosecuted."

I suppose in defense of Obama's IRS henchwoman, Lois Lerner, she at least has of late taken a slightly more ethical course of action by only taking the 5th Amendment vs point blank lying, as her predecessors apparently felt entitled in doing, from James Bovard's 14 May 2013 WSJ article: "A Brief History of IRS Political Targeting":

"The IRS has usually done an excellent job of stifling investigations of its practices. A 1991 survey of 800 IRS executives and managers by the nonprofit Josephson Institute of Ethics revealed that three out of four respondents felt entitled to deceive or lie when testifying before a congressional committee."