Maddow Warns Tea Party Is Coming Back

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Congresswoman Michele Bachmann still exists … After dissolving into the things like the Michele Bachmann for President campaign and other things that didn’t really turn out to much. The Tea Party movement now wants to be back on the wings of the IRS scandal that they an other conservative groups got singled out for extra scrutiny in their applications to the IRS for tax exempt status. That’s a thing that they, naturally, think is terrible and not at all the kind of thing that the IRS should be doing. The awkwardness of the politics here is that everybody agrees with them on this, including their nemesis, President Obama himself

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What we do not know yet is if the IRS’ bungled handing of private documents over to ProPublica is linked at all to the bigger scandal here, right? To the IRS improperly scrutinizing conservative groups’ applications. But you know what? Don’t like the right-wing dance off with your pants off naked, ecstatic, accusatory joy over there being an IRS screw up distract you from the fact there really was an actual screw up here. When Michele Bachmann says it, it’s easy to believe it is definitely, categorically not true. But in this case unauthorized disclosures of tax information that was supposed to be private, that seems to be a real thing and that is the next part of this to watch.