Bob Woodward: IRS Scandal Worse Than Nixon's IRS Abuses But Obama Should Investigate Himself

Virtually every president since Richard Nixon has treated the Washington Post's Bob Woodward with kid gloves, granting him unprecedented access to the White House so he can write books about key events of each presidency from which he makes lots of money, which is quite a contrast to the key adversarial role he played in helping develop the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. Take these comments by Woodward on how the current IRS scandal is much worse than what occurred during Watergate, but it's not Watergate he confidently assures us. Woodward notes that Nixon's Treasury Secretary balked at requests from the Nixon White House group to target groups and individuals deemed enemies. Nonetheless, Woodward thinks Obama, not a special prosecutor as he supported during Nixon's Watergate, should conduct the investigation despite the fact that it was President Obama who was publicly demonizing the very groups that were targeted by the IRS. Politico has the comments Woodward made on "The O'Reilly Factor" yesterday:

“This fiction that somehow [The IRS is] totally an independent agency is absurd,” the legendary journalist said Monday on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News, saying that in the Nixon era, the Treasury secretary refused to audit Democratic groups when the IRS commissioner was asked to do so by the White House.

“Clearly in the pipeline, lots of people knew some of this or should know it. And I agree, this should be investigated, but you know who should lead the investigation? President [Barack] Obama.”

Woodward said he would put in a request to the administration for more information about the nearly 150 times former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman was cleared to go to the White House, saying, “They should get on top of this story.”

“Much hangs in the balance here, not just the reputation of the news media for aggressiveness and some form of neutrality, but the whole relationship that the White House and the government has with the public about trust. … I think Obama can get ahead of this and really answer some of these questions,” Woodward said.

“This is not Watergate at all, but the road to Watergate is concealment, is not coming clean. … ‘Let’s call executive privilege; let’s stonewall.’ And if they do that, they will dig themselves in a hole.”

It seems that all the key players in the mainstream media have become so incestuously tied to the people they're supposed to help keep on the straight and narrow by watching over like a watchdog that they're no longer capable of fulfilling their purpose.