Barack Milhous Obamixon

Joe Klein at Time.com on the IRS's intensive, targeted auditing of conservative political organizations:

I don’t think Obama ever wanted to be on the same page as Richard Nixon. In this specific case, he now is.

"Way to go, Barack! You've outdone even me!"

But Nixon was a beginner compared to Obama, which we already knew back in 2009:

Back in the day, when a president wanted to compile a list of his enemies, he had to do it not much differently than the ancient scribes - laboriously by hand, only a little faster because of typewriters and memeograph machines. Tricky Dick Nixon, poor fellow, started off with a paltry 30 names, but through dint of studious devotion to enemy-identifying and intensive risk of writer's cramp, his staff was able finally to identify 30,000 enemies by name.

Beginners. Pikers. Rank amateurs.

Thanks to the blessings of modern technology, the White House can now compile an enemies list of millions of names - nay, tens of millions - simply by publishing a web page asking for electronic submissions to the list.

Even the Washington Post knew the White House was keeping an enemies list, and called it by that name in 2011.

The president’s order would force anyone seeking a federal contract to declare whether they are a friend or an enemy — excuse me, “opponent” — of the Obama White House. Worse still, it would set up a central database listing those contributions at a federal government Web site — creating what amounts to an electronic, searchable “enemies list.” ... 

In other words, this effort isn’t about improving the integrity of federal contracting; it’s about Nixonian political intimidation. But with one crucial difference: Even Richard Nixon didn’t create his enemies list by executive order.

But Obama did create it by personal, signed order. 

Update: The real question is whether this will matter to enough Americans to bring about actual, substantive change in Washington. I think the answer is no, for the same reason that Benghazi doesn't matter.

The vast mass of Americans have been brainwashed into believing that there is really nothing to be done about the regime that governs most aspects of their lives. The regime does everything it can to encourage this belief. All this given, I conclude that the most likely outcome is not that Americans will overthrow the regime, but that the regime itself will commit suicide, as an unintended consequence of its worldview and the gross errors that worldview includes.

Update: Hey, Joe Klein, nice JournoList journalist gig ya got going there. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Update: Glenn Reynolds has a huge roundup, including of Massachusetts Democrats openly calling for Congressional investigations.

Outraged Bay State Democrats are blasting President Obama for exhibiting a Nixonian abuse of power after the stunning news that the Department of Justice secretly obtained Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeted conservative groups — new scandals emerging against the backdrop of heightened Benghazi criticism.

“There’s no way in the world I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing. If they did that, there should be hell to pay,” U.S. Rep. Michael E. Capuano (D-Somerville) said about the IRS scandal. “Not only is it bad government and bad to society, it is horrendous politics. The worst thing you can do is give your opponent an easy hammer with which to hit you.”

No, actually the worst thing you can do is commit the abuse of power in the first place. That it gives your opponents a hammer to hit you with is collaterally bad, not centrally.

Update: "Mistakes were made" - a little history lesson