God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

  Just when you think stories about the TSA can’t get any sillier, along comes one that shaves a few more IQ points from their collective bureaucratic brain. In May 2012 at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, a couple who asked not to be identified were awaiting takeoff on a JetBlue flight when an airline employee told them they had to get off the plane. The TSA wanted to talk to them. They were baffled and asked why. They were told it wasn’t about them, but their daughter, Riyanna. She’d been flagged as being on the terrorist no-fly list. Well, her parents were stunned. The dad pointed out that Riyanna is eighteen months old. How could she be on the no-fly list? Didn’t matter: They were ordered off and spent half an hour with the TSA before being told they could reboard the plane, with no apology or explanation [ABC News 25, “Baby, 18 Months Old, Ordered off Plane at Fort Lauderdale Airport,” May 14, 2012].

  They chose to leave the airport instead. They’re of Middle Eastern descent and figured that their flight would have been an uncomfortable one. They still want to know how a toddler got onto a terrorist no-fly list. (Although I bet a lot of us have flown next to some toddlers we wished had been on a no-fly list. Just for the record, it’s not the toddlers who drive me nuts—it’s usually their parents I’d like to ban. But I digress.)

  Newark Liberty International Airport is one of America’s busiest, and that means the TSA puts passengers through draconian security measures to make sure each one is the person he or she claims to be. But who’s checking the checkers? For twenty years, Jerry Thomas worked in private security at the Newark Airport. He rose through four different security firms, passing background checks at every step until May 2012, when he was jailed on $75,000 bond. “Jerry Thomas” was accused of actually being Bimbo Oyewole, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria. The real Jerry Thomas was the victim of an unsolved murder in Queens two decades ago, and authorities believed Oyewole stole his identity. He’d been in airport security, scrutinizing other people’s identities, ever since. Feeling safer now?

  The TSA is but one of many ingredients in the “alphabet soup” of federal agencies that are supposed to protect our freedom but are in many ways threatening it. The worst abuser of all is the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service. Only in “government speak” can one call what they do a service. They remind me of a sadistic coach at my high school who used to enjoy “giving licks” to teen boys for any infraction of his rules. Just so you know, “giving licks” was the term used to describe the coach hitting the butt of a student with a short-handled boat paddle, riddled with holes to minimize wind resistance and enhance striking power.

  Such activity would likely land a person in jail today, but in the sixties it was just part of the school day. The coach had a rule that if you got a “lick” you were required to say, “Thanks, coach, may I have another one?” And most often he would say, “Sure,” and pop you again. One might get three or four before the coach finally said, “No, I think you’ve had enough,” and stop his twisted abuse of a helpless adolescent. Whenever I think of the IRS, I see that coach standing with his paddle, expecting me to say, “Thanks, IRS, may I have another one?”

  The IRS has become a criminal enterprise—yes, that’s what I said—a rogue agency that abuses its power by harassing groups for political reasons and then destroying the evidence by pretending that “my computer crashed and I don’t have a backup” and taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions as to why only conservative, or Tea Party, or pro-freedom, or pro-life, or pro-marriage, or pro-Israel groups were targeted for a level of harassment and bureaucratic bullying that, by comparison, could make mafia tactics feel like gentle massages.

  Abuse of citizens by the IRS is especially pernicious. Unique among federal agencies, it can launch an investigation on its own without notifying the target, conduct the investigation, accuse a citizen of wrongdoing, require the person to prove his or her innocence, render a verdict, assess the punishment (plus interest and penalties), and impose it in virtually any way the agency sees fit—garnishing of wages, perhaps, or seizure of property. One-stop shopping! In the criminal justice system, a suspect must be notified of the charges, have the evidence presented before a fair and impartial jury of his peers, be considered innocent until proven guilty, have the case adjudicated by a member of another branch of government, and even have the cost of legal representation borne by the government, if need be. Not so with the IRS—it’s cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, rolled into one. Convenient, to be sure! Accountable and answerable to virtually no one, but feared by all. It’s the closest thing America has to a goose-stepping Gestapo.

  Even if the IRS ultimately can’t nail someone’s hide to its “trophy wall” and must find the accused completely innocent, it still may completely break a person or a company. It ruins lives—all in the name of being a “service.” Calling the IRS a “service” is like calling your taxes a “voluntary contribution.”

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The IRS is a criminal enterprise, it systematically violates our constitutional rights, and it has got to go. I mean it needs to cease to exist, and, yes, this can actually happen—if enough people decide it’s time to stop bending over and taking it. To reference Monty Python’s “dead parrot” sketch, the IRS needs to shuffle off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and join the choir invisible. It needs to be an ex-IRS. We should repeal the Sixteenth Amendment allowing the government to tax our income, and replace income tax with the Fair Tax. No more IRS. No more intrusion. No more audits. No more lawbreaking. And they wouldn’t be around to have any involvement in our health care, either.

  In the summer of 2014, we witnessed a stunning cascade of revelations: Two years’ worth of e-mails from one Lois Lerner, aka “Lois the Letter-Loser,” had been lost in a computer crash. Neither she nor anyone else at the IRS had made hard copies of any of the e-mails that were lost, even though such copies are required by law. In an incredible coincidence, the crash had wiped out the records from the exact period being investigated by Congress for illegal targeting of political groups. And it had happened, very conveniently, after the IRS was notified by letter of the investigation. The IRS had a backup system, but those records were—gosh darn it—erased. Lerner’s hard drive had been “recycled,” meaning that IT experts wouldn’t be able to recover the lost e-mails from it. It turned out that six other people had lost their e-mails in similar hard-drive crashes.

  Okay, then … how about tracking down the e-mails from the other end, from the recipients? That’s a great idea! Well, the IRS hadn’t bothered to do that. Meanwhile, the President and his lackey press secretary claimed there wasn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS and that the White House wasn’t involved in targeting groups that disagreed with the President’s policies. At the same time, the head of the IRS was revealed to be a major Democrat party donor (another coincidence) who, in his appearance before Congress, defiantly personified utter indifference to the law, IRS procedures, abuses, and the people trapped in his spidery web.

  I suspect that the revelations thus far have only scratched the surface of criminal conduct at the IRS. It appears that they’ve gone to a terrible amount of trouble to hide something. The IRS gets away with a level of corruption that would—and should—land others in prison for a very long time. Yet the head of the IRS stuck out his chin with firm resolve and refused even to apologize to Congress for any of this. And some of the very people at the heart of the scandal have collected bonuses, taken early retirement, lawyered up, and shut up.

  This is the agency that expects me to produce a receipt from seven years ago if I claimed a charitable deduction but can’t even follow the law to retain their records—of possible criminal behavior? For three years?

  Will a citizen out in Bubba-ville be able to avoid an audit by saying, “My computer got ‘Lernered’”? Everyone here in the real world knows the answer to that is a big fat NO. It’s bad enough when government acts with disregard in the way they spend our money. It’s worse when they
force us to obey every “jot and tittle” of the law but recklessly, intentionally, and flagrantly ignore it themselves. And then they have the unmitigated gall to call themselves a “service.”

  If you ever wanted to see a textbook example of the Domino Theory as a reaction to bureaucratic overreach, just take a look at recent history. In December 2010, in Tunisia, a country smaller than the state of Oklahoma, one bullying civil servant confiscated a street vendor’s merchandise and humiliated him. Tunisian authorities were so used to trampling on people’s basic rights and human dignity that this one probably never gave the man a second thought. But he was in such despair that he set himself on fire in protest. His death by fire inflamed the long-festering anger toward the government into a massive protest that toppled the national leadership. From Tunisia, the anti-government protests spread throughout the Middle East. Egypt’s leader toppled next, then Libya fell, and Syria and Iraq have been in a mess since. The violence and uncertainty caused the price of oil to leap, and the escalating unrest in that part of the world increasingly threatens all of us. But as the whole world rocks and roils, I think it would be a good idea to think back and remember the spark that set this wildfire. It all started with just one government bureaucrat, drunk on too much power, trampling on the rights of one individual.

  America is not just a nation of immigrants—it’s a nation of pioneers. Our population is descended not simply from cultures around the world but from a very specific subset of those cultures: the people who looked at the situation around them—whether there was famine, dire poverty, religious persecution, totalitarian oppression, or just the general unfairness of a strict class system—and declared, “There has to be someplace better than this, and whatever risks I might face, I’m going to go find it.” Think about it: If your ancestors were content to hold their tongues in front of the king and meekly accept whatever scraps of gold, food, or freedom (or kicks in the groin) he handed out, then you’re probably still living in the same place they did. By and large, our ancestors came here to escape the tyranny of governments that treated their people as serfs of the state, subject to the whims of the king, dictator, or military functionary. The Founders were so paranoid about government getting too big and out of control that they added some clarifications to the Constitution that we have come to know as the Bill of Rights. As I’ve said, the Bill of Rights didn’t tell citizens what they could do—it told the government what it could not do. And the Fourth and Fifth Amendments spell out some protections for American citizens:

  Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

  Read that over again. Slowly. Then again. Ask yourself if you feel that the NSA indiscriminately capturing your phone calls and e-mails (even if they promise not to peek!) can be reconciled with this. Would Thomas Jefferson or James Madison submit to a full-body scan at the TSA checkpoint and allow a total stranger sporting a federal badge and blue gloves to very intrusively pat him down?

  Even the Supreme Court, in June 2014, struck down the notion that a police officer can take your iPhone and go through your e-mails, directories, phone logs, and photos just because he stopped you for speeding. And it wasn’t the typical close SCOTUS vote—it was a 9–0 stinging rebuke of both the Bush and Obama administrations for operating on the premise that the label “national security” made all things okay. By anyone’s reading of the actual text of the Fourth Amendment, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not okay.

  The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution reads:

  No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment of indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

  It bears repeating: The purpose of the Bill of Rights was never to limit the rights of the citizen, but rather the power of the government. The burden of proof is on the government to show just cause for entering one’s home, forcing one to answer questions, or in any way impeding a citizen’s personal liberty.

  When the government tells me I have to turn the lights off the flags that fly over my house, they’re not only taking away lights, they’re taking away my liberty. Granted, if the lights are shining in my neighbors’ windows or blinding aircraft pilots, then turning them off honors someone else’s liberty and safety. But what should be rare actions to restrict the use of property have become commonplace as government escalates its controlling demands and limitations on what I do with my property and how I exercise my personal freedoms.

  Most people living in my world just want to be left alone. In Bubba-ville, we don’t need a lot of micromanaging; we already tend to see the good things around us as a blessing from God that requires good stewardship on our part. When government acts like an all-powerful God, the result is a serious breakdown that could best be described by that classic line from the film Cool Hand Luke, when the warden tells Luke (Paul Newman): “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

  If the Founders who gave up so much to create liberty for us could see how our government has morphed into a ham-fisted, hypercontrolling “Sugar Daddy,” I believe those same patriots who launched a revolution would launch another one. Too many Americans have grown used to Big Government’s overreach. They’ve been conditioned to just bend over and take it like a prisoner. But in Bubba-ville, the days of bending are just about over. People are ready to start standing up for freedom and refusing to take it anymore.

  11

  Reality-TV Culture

  THERE’S NO QUESTION THAT our society at large has been affected by the rise of “reality TV,” both in the impressions it gives the world of what working-class Americans are like, and the influence it’s had on the attitudes and behavior of American youth.

  For many Bubble-ville elites, the only mental images they have of people who live outside their gated communities and high-rise Manhattan apartments are the ugly stereotypes they see on reality-TV shows: drunken, brawling New Jersey guidos; shallow, social-climbing suburban “housewives”; obese, illiterate Southern rednecks; and so on. I much preferred it when city slickers got their ideas of what we Southerners were like from The Andy Griffith Show. Or even The Beverly Hillbillies. At least the Clampetts were a hardworking, down-to-earth, God-fearing, loving family, with far more common sense and morals than their greedy, conniving banker, Mr. Drysdale. If you compared the typical Southern family of today to many of the Wall Street bankers of today, that old sitcom might seem like prophecy.

  But wait, you protest, I can’t possibly be saying that The Beverly Hillbillies was more realistic than reality TV! Yes, I am. And so were Mork and Mindy, Bewitched, and My Mother the Car.

  Not since Obamacare was dubbed the “Affordable Care Act” has anything been so wildly misnamed as “reality TV.” One thing that Michael Moore should have taught us by now is that just because something looks like a documentary and sounds like a documentary, that doesn’t mean there’s a lick of truth in it.

  Reality TV is a genre of television that allegedly dispenses with the artifices of scripts and acting to give the viewer a glimpse of raw, real life unfolding spontaneously in front of the camera. In fact, it bears about as much resemblance to real life as the glop on your movie popcorn does to real butter. Reality TV doesn’t do away with scripts, it just does away with good scripts. Good scriptwriters strive to create original, engrossing stories and complex, multilayere
d characters. Most reality-TV shows are just as scripted, except at a level of sophistication a notch below cave paintings or Three Stooges movies.

  People who are desperate to get on TV will gladly follow crude scenarios for staged conflict and outrageous behavior that are assembled later in the editing room to create whatever impression the producers want to convey. Top writers of drama or comedy expect to be paid commensurate with their talent, but why pay their price when the lowest common denominator yields similar ratings at lower cost? That’s why so many of the best writers, like The Sopranos creator David Chase and Matthew Weiner of Mad Men, are on cable channels that are willing to pay for quality to enhance their reputations. And it’s working: in 2013, HBO garnered 108 Emmy Award nominations. The “Big Four” broadcast network ABC had 45.

  It’s no coincidence that the rise of reality TV ran parallel to the erosion in viewership and falling ad revenues of traditional television. If a struggling network can draw just as many viewers by serving up cheap garbage as by preparing expensive gourmet fare, then they’ll be dumpster diving into reality programming every night of the week.

  If I sound cynical about the big television networks, don’t take my word for it. Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels well remembers the day he lost his innocence. In 1979, fed up after five years of battling with NBC over what he saw as their constant blocking of his attempts to improve SNL, Michaels had a meeting with the then-head of programming, Irwin Segelstein. In Bill Carter’s terrific book The War for Late Night, Michaels recalls that Segelstein listened quietly to his litany of complaints before setting him straight on how the TV business really works. He quotes Segelstein as telling him: