Quick Link: Peggy Nonnan on the IRS Hearings

Peggy Noonan has a column up for the Wall Street Journal about the hearing concerning the IRS behavior in targeting conservative but not liberal groups for reviews. From this, we learn three things:

1. "Rogue agents" apparently include the IRS' Chief Counsel (appointed by Obama himself):
   'When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. {snip} So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.'
2. Conservative groups were in fact singled out and targetted for being conservative, whereas liberal/progressive groups were not singled out/targetted for being liberal/progressive:
   'Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. "I would send those to general inventory." Who got extra scrutiny? "They were all tea-party and patriot cases." She became "very frustrated" by the "micromanagement" from Washington. "It was like working in lost luggage." She applied to be transferred.'
3. There's a reason why very few people watch C-Span, which is nevertheless the one news organization which deliver the straight facts (literally, but you have to watch the whole hearing/proceeding etc. since they often don't summarize):
   'That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.' 

At least, that's what I got from it. That, and that Republicans need to "up their game", which might (we can hope) lead directly to Obama himself. It would be nice to see him impeached, but somehow I doubt that all these scandals (individually or together) will end up giving us that happy result.