Obama's Darkest Day

Aside from that Jonathan Karl piece and that little dust up over the IRS how did your day go Mr. President?
Not even Tom Clancy, at the peak of his literary career, could have penned as much White House drama as unfolded upon the Obama administration yesterday. Finding that they had been lied to for 8 months the White House press corps was not the same docile bunch of guys and girls who were so much fun at the correspondent's dinner just 10 days ago. It was a cross examination not a press briefing. Not a single reporter in the White House press pool believed that YouTube story.  Perhaps the reporters realized that they had been played for fools since the 2008 Iowa primary. The honeymoon ended quickly and it was as nasty as an Alec Baldwin divorce.
In the midst of the charge of the fourth estate a career IRS supervisor, soft spoken Lois Lerner, confessed that her agency had been engaged in unlawful and unconstitutional behavior for years and she was sorry and promised it wouldn't happen again. I couldn't have been more surprised if she had concluded with a tribute to Grover Norquist. WTF! One would think a political appointee or at least a public relations flack would have made that confession rather than a civil service division head. Is she a whistleblower or merely politically tone deaf? Evidently it was a spontaneous admission as it was made during a tax conference hosted by the American Bar Association as if political profiling was just another arcane tax issue akin to accelerated depreciation or mortgage interest credit. One doubts if the White House saw this one coming. Naturally Jay Carney mentioned that the IRS was headed by a Bush appointee when the profiling began and he wasn't sure when the President first heard about it but it was "inappropriate" and the President expected a thorough investigation by the Treasury Department’s inspector general. The Daily Caller credits Mark Levin and his Landmark Legal Foundation for alerting the IG but as I wrote in a previous post Jay Sekulow of American Center for Law and Justice has also complained bitterly to the IRS.
As Senator Mitch McConnell called for a full investigation of the IRS branding the profiling as "political thuggery" and two House committees , Oversight and Ways and Means were fighting over jurisdiction, the IRS released a statement that differed from Lerner's account that "mistakes were made" and "organizations that included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status were singled out for additional reviews."
Not at all explained the IRS " Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale. We fixed the situation last year and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system."
Oh good. The more explanations; the better. What is this the Jodi Arias defense?
Here is the IRS complete and I suppose official explanation.

Between 2010 and 2012, the IRS saw the number of applications for section 501(c)(4) status double.  As a result, local career employees in Cincinnati sought to centralize work and assign cases to designated employees in an effort to promote consistency and quality.  This approach has worked in other areas. However, the IRS recognizes we should have done a better job of handling the influx of advocacy applications.  While centralizing cases for consistency made sense, the way we initially centralized them did not.  Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale. We fixed the situation last year and have made significant progress in moving the centralized cases through our system.  To date, more than half of the cases have been approved or withdrawn.  It is important to recognize that all centralized applications received the same, even-handed treatment, and the majority of cases centralized were not based on a specific name. In addition, new procedures also were implemented last year to ensure that these mistakes won’t be made in the future.  The IRS also stresses that our employees – all career civil servants — will continue to be guided by tax law and not partisan issues.

The IRS supposes that the public will buy the latest explanation just if it had been authored by Admiral Mullens and General Pickering. It could be an honest account but the same division of the IRS was in hot water just last year when confidential tax documents filed by American Crossroads were illegally leaked to the media and published by ProPublica, a project funded in part by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. No one has ever been charged with that felony.
I'm mindful that early on this administration, in a mixture of bravado and banality, savored the advice to "Never let a crisis go to waste". Yesterday it may have thought that it had had too much of a good thing.