Where in the world did "Low level IRS employees" get the idea that Tea Party, Patriot, Constitution, and Small Government groups should be harassed?

It started in 2009, with the dismissive attitude of politicos and pundits towards the nascent Tea Party movement.  Washington's Political elites began what has amounted to a four year long sneer at the popular movement.

Rachel Maddow got all giggly over the derogatory sexual term, "Teabagger," which President Obama was happy to adopt.  As the movement continued to grow throughout 2009, the giggles were traded for  accusations as pundits and politicos made desperate efforts to cast the Tea Party movement as racist and violent.

Frank Rich of the New York Times and Dana Milbank of The Washington Post painted Tea Partiers as violent, racist rednecks, with Rich going so far as to compare Tea Partiers' protests against Obamacare to Kristallnacht.  Millbank would go on to assert that Tea Party protesters who were gathered, waving flags on the South lawn of the Capitol during the final evening leading up to the vote on Obamacare as a "hideous sight," (The online version of the article was scrubbed, deleting the term "hideous.")

Despite the presence of multitudes of cameras and microphones at the moment of claimed racial slurs on CapitolHill on that weekend of the health care reform vote, no audio or video evidence has been brought forth.  To this day, despite the fact that Andrew Brietbart had offered a $100,000 reward, no one has stepped forward with evidence this ever actually occurred.

Fast forward:

During the summer of 2011, following the success of the Tea Party in the 2010 elections, and because the Tea Party members of Congress dared to resist calls for "bipartisanship" and "compromise" during deficit ceiling and budget debates, vituperation was ratcheted up a few more notches.  

William Yeomans, professor at American University's Washington College of Law, wrote in a piece in Politico "It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House 'hostage takers.' But they have now become full-blown terrorists.    . . . Tea party members must reassess their distorted vision of patriotism and join true patriots in Congress in raising the debt ceiling promptly until 2013, without inflicting further economic harm on already struggling Americans."

Thomas Friedman equated the Tea Party members of Congress with Hezbollah.  Nicholas Kristof suggested they are Al Qaeda.

According to another report in Politico, Vice President Joe Biden said members of the tea party,  "have acted like terrorists," expressing his agreement with Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania at a Democratic Caucus meeting.

In July, 2011, Nancy Pelosi blurted, "What we're trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We're trying to save life on this planet as we know it today."

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, claimed that the debt ceiling deal was a "sugar-coated Satan sandwich." He explained, "What you see is antithetical to everything the religions of the world teach: take care of the poor, take care of the aged."  In essence, to him, the Tea Party is akin to the Antichrist.

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen sounded like a conspiracy theorist when he described the Tea Party as 'nihilist' and decried it for 'using Washington to attack Washington.'   Poor little defenseless Washington.  Big, bad Tea Party

DeWayne Wickham, writing for USA Today, said: "This total lack of respect is downright contemptible - if not unpatriotic ... Today, you might not see the overt actions of racist southern governors like Ross Barnett or George Wallace in the 1960s. But the presence of Jim Crow Jr. - a more subtle form of racism - is there."

There have been plenty of other colorful snipes at tea Partiers. Maureen Dowd described them as "towel-snapping Tea Party crazies ... who hate government."

And it's not just the left flank of Washington's aristocracy that has expressed animosity toward the Tea Party.  Echoing a Wall Street Journal editorial, former presidential candidate John McCain, speaking from the Senate floor, derided tea partiers as "Hobbits."

Let's not forget that for the last few years, every time there has been a mass shooting or a terrorist plot revealed, the media reflexively pointed their fingers at the Tea Party movement. 

Just three short hours after the first reports came in about the mass shooting in Tucson, Paul Krugman of the New York Times posted in his "Conscience of a Liberal" blog a quote by Rep. Gifford's grieving, distressed father that "'the whole Tea Party' was her enemy."  His intention was to lead the reader to conclude that the Tea Party was somehow to blame.  Debbie Wasserman Schultz followed suit:  "I hesitate to place blame, but I have noticed it take a very precipitous turn towards edginess and lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement."

When a Times Square terrorist bombing plot was foiled, Mayor Michael Bloomberg went on the record saying, "somebody with a political agenda that doesn't like the health-care bill or something."  The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss suggested that the bomber must be " . . . a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right."

And last summer, Good Morning America Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos suggested that the man responsible for the shocking Aurora, Colorado theater shootings which left at least 14 dead and scores wounded, might be a Tea Party member. 

In all of these cases, the wild assertions of Tea Party guilt were dead wrong.

So where did "lower level IRS employees in Cincinnati" get the idea to impede Tea Party Constitution groups? 

Let's review the possibilities:  President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; Former DNC Head Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Senator John McCain, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO); New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg; USA Today's DeWayne Wickham; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews; ABC's Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos;  The New York Times' Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman; The Washington Post's Richard Cohen, Dana Millbank, and Eugene Robinson; and the Editors of the Wall Street Journal.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg, the fountainhead of the fabricated cascade of false information meant to destroy the Tea Party movement, Patriot, Constitution and Small Government groups.

The IRS's mistreatment of these groups is evidence of our Political Aristocracy becoming unglued, unhinged and unstable.  It is evidence of the fragility of their grip on both Washington and the Nation.