Instead of showing us endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing, could Fox News send a cameraman to cover the ongoing congressional hearings where witnesses are testifying to the agency’s abuse of conservative groups?

I already knew that government workers waste millions of taxpayer dollars, but the blinding partisanship of the Revenue Service’s abuses is truly shocking.

For example, the IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites for the purpose of harassing NOM’s donors.  The effort was successful.

The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of a Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. blamed the conservative groups themselves. “Each of your groups was highly political,” he lectured them. To avoid being persecuted by corrupt IRS agents, they shouldn’t have requested tax-exempt status. (In 2008, McDermott was ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court to pay more than $1 million to John Boehner for publishing an illegally taped private conversation, so we know he hates corruption.)

It is a fact that the IRS harassed groups with the words “tea party,” “patriot” or “liberty” in their names. But how did IRS treat left-wing groups?  Here are just a few of the far-left political groups certified by the agency as tax-exempt:

— Media Matters for America, a media “watchdog” group that has never noticed one iota of pro-Obama bias in the media;

— Moveon.org, which ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler under its 501(c)(4) arm;

— The Center for American Progress, an auxiliary of the Democratic National Committee funded by George Soros and staffed by former Clinton and Obama aides to promote the Democratic agenda;

— The Tides Foundation, which funnels money to communist and terrorist-supporting organizations;

— The Ford Foundation, which funds only liberal causes and has never found a criminal law that isn’t “racist.”

— ACORN (now operating under other names, still tax-exempt), “community organizers” who engage in profanity-laced protests at private homes, dump garbage in front of public buildings and disrupt bankers’ dinners in an endless quest to get more people on welfare, destroy the capitalist system and incite revolution;

— Occupy Wall Street, which — in its first month alone — was responsible for more than a dozen sexual assaults; at least half a dozen deaths by overdose, suicide or murder; and millions of dollars in property damage.

That’s to say nothing of Planned Parenthood, PBS and innumerable other Democratic front-groups that not only have tax exemptions, but get direct funding from the government.

These outfits are regarded by the IRS as nonpartisan community groups, merely educational or charitable, even as dozens of patriotic, Christian or tea party groups are given anal exams to obtain their tax exempt status.

The conservative groups raked over the coals by the IRS actually were nonpartisan, in the sense of not favoring one political party or another.  The tea party forced sitting Republican senators off the ticket in Alaska and Indiana, and toppled “establishment” Republicans in Utah, Delaware, Nevada, Florida and Texas. Far from being a secretly pro-Republican group, the tea party has been a nightmare for Republicans.

Show me one time that the Center for American Progress was a problem for Democrats.

It is obviously in the interest of the left to show us liberal groups also harassed by the IRS, so it’s striking that they haven’t been able to produce one yet.

Instead, they hearken back to the Bush years to claim that the IRS once audited the NAACP, which is treated as ipso facto political harassment.

First of all, the NAACP doesn’t exactly have a sterling record when it comes to organization funds. In the 1990s, the NAACP used tax-exempt contributions to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in hush money to the mistress of then-executive director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. — as detailed in outraged columns by the black columnist Carl Rowan.

Find a tea party organization that’s done that, and we’ll understand the IRS conducting a three-year proctology exam on the group.

Second, the Bush-era audit of the NAACP was prompted by a blindingly partisan speech given by NAACP chairman Julian Bond at an organization meeting in Philadelphia in July 2004. As a 501(c)(3) group, the NAACP is prohibited from supporting or opposing any candidate for elective office.

And yet Bond attacked a slew of elected Republicans by name, denouncing the entire party as one whose “idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.”

That’s what we call “black-letter law” on improper activity for a tax-exempt organization.

The NAACP responded to the IRS’ letter by screaming that it was political payback. Instead of simply quoting from Bond’s speech to explain the audit, Bush’s IRS commissioner requested that Treasury’s inspector general investigate the agency’s tax-exempt unit for political bias. The IG’s report found no politics in the NAACP audit.  To the contrary, it turned out that more “pro-Republican” groups (18) had been audited than “pro-Democratic” groups (12).

Nonetheless, the NAACP simply refused to cooperate with the IRS. There was nothing the Bush administration could do. No Republican was going to allow the NAACP’s tax-exempt status to be revoked on his watch. Two years later, the IRS issued a letter clearing the group.

Today, the NAACP openly engages in partisan activity, such as a current weeks-long protest of Republican legislators in North Carolina.

Democrats defend the IRS by saying, “Why would the IRS be so stupid to audit and harass only conservative Tea Party groups?” As a devoted true-crime devotee, I can tell you that when you’re caught red-handed, it’s never a good defense to say, “Why would I be so stupid to kill my wife right after taking out a huge life insurance policy on her?”

You were that stupid and you got caught.

COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER