TaxProf Blog

Paul L. Caron
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Sunday, September 27, 2015

The IRS Scandal, Day 871

Lerner 1

  Lerner 2

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/09/the-irs-scandal-day-871.html

IRS News, IRS Scandal, Tax | Permalink

Comments

Too bad LLerner doesn’t have a sense of humor. Partisan attacks on dogs haven’t gone well, historically. Americans like dogs. On September 23, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the 1944 presidential campaign in Washington, D.C., speaking at a dinner with the International Teamsters Union. The half-hour speech was also broadcast on all U.S. radio networks. In the speech, Roosevelt attacked Republican opponents in Congress and detailed their attacks on him. Late in the speech, Roosevelt addressed Republican charges that he had accidentally left Fala behind on the Aleutian Islands while on tour there and had sent a U.S. Navy destroyer to retrieve him at an exorbitant cost to the taxpayers (not reported on DefenseProf blog as a 800+ day scandal):

These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don't resent attacks, and my family don't resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I'd left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him—at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars—his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself ... But I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my dog.

If Lerner had not taken the 5th, and if she had a sense of humor, who knows what offense Toby might have taken at the current right-wing attacks?

Posted by: FDR Fan | Sep 28, 2015 8:19:35 AM