Thursday Open Thread [5.23.13]

This is both hysterical funny and hysterical crazy (not to mention headache inducing):

That’s why you saw the House of Representatives pass my [Michelle Bachmann’s] bill, the full repeal of Obamacare last week, and that’s why I have renewed confidence that we can see this bill pass in the Senate and I think the President will ultimately be forced to repudiate his own signature piece of legislation because the American people will demand it.

And I think before his second term is over, we’re going to see a miracle before our eyes, I believe God is going to answer our prayers and we’ll be freed from the yoke of Obamacare. I believe that’s going to happen and we saw step one last week with the repeal of Obamacare in the House. We have two more steps. We serve a mighty God and I believe it can happen.

Yah, Michelle, you keep telling yourself that. Methinks you will be disappointed in your God quite soon, as the repeal bill will never be heard in the Senate and even if it did, it will be defeated.

So the Right Wing and the Media’s meme since the IRS controversy began was “HOW DARE THE PRESIDENT TARGET CONSERVATIVE GROUPS!!!” The assumption was that the President or the very least his White House or Executive staff were directly involved in ordering the added scrutiny on the tea party groups.

That has been disproven. There is no evidence anywhere that anyone from the White House, including the President, told the IRS to do anything. In fact, we discovered that the White House found out that there was an investigation into the actions of the Cincinnati IRS office, and allowed that investigation to proceed. Jeffrey Toobin says that is the opposite of a Nixonian Watergate-style coverup.

When you can’t prove that the White House did anything wrong, and you can’t prove that the White House knew that someone else was doing something wrong, what do you try to prove? That the White House knew there was an investigation into whether someone else was doing something wrong! That may sound scandalous, but, in fact, it’s perfectly appropriate.

That’s the lesson of the past several days in the evolving (and probably shrinking) Internal Revenue Service matter. Washington scandals and pseudoscandals follow a familiar pattern. First, there is an allegation of wrongdoing. Second, there is the question of a coverup: Who knew what when? (This dates from Howard Baker’s famous question at the Senate Watergate hearings: “What did the President know, and when did he know it?”)

[Certain White House officials over the last few weeks found out about the investigation into the IRS’ actions, but they didn’t tell the President,] [b]ut shouldn’t [they] have told the President about the audit? Actually, that would have been just about the worst thing they could have done. “The thing you most want to avoid is that the White House, or anyone else, tells the I.G. what to do or contacts individuals who are being questioned in the audit and tries to influence their responses as well,” Fine said. By not telling the President, Ruemmler made sure that Obama could not be accused of influencing the audit.

In other words, White House officials seem to have engaged in the opposite of a coverup. They let the investigation proceed, and let the Inspector General do his job. They let the process play out. They played by the rules, which is what lawyers are supposed to do.