The IRS non-scandal -- the post-mortem.

Now that we have a more or less clear picture of the operations of the IRS office handling non-profit status applications, the "scandal" is ending, not with a bang but a whimper.  And no one is saying, "I was wrong, and I apologize."

The fact is that they investigate any application that looks suspiciously political in nature.  The furor was created by the Republicans requesting an Inspector General's report specifically as to whether any Tea Party groups had been picked for extra scrutiny.   Then everybody -- media included -- just assumed it was a report about who got investigated.

It's that old trick of playing with "studies:"   You ask how many oranges were sold?  And then you use the answer to be outraged that "only oranges were sold."

Salon.com's Alex Seitz-Wald dissects what happened and blames the media for jumping to conclusions and not doing the reporting to show what we now know.    Yes, the media failure was atrocious;  but let's not leave out Darrell Issa's contribution.   Eager to investigate the Obama administration on as many issues as possible, the odious Issa held his usual hyper-partisan, mean-spirited hearings in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform -- and ruined careers and reputations, as usual..

Here's what the Salon article concludes:

But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones;  that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line;  that the IG’s report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans' request;  and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn’t even know about it until shortly before the public did.

In short, the entire scandal narrative was a fiction.  But it had real consequences, effectively derailing Obama’s agenda not long after a resounding reelection, costing several people their careers, and distracting and misinforming the public.  It’s not that nothing went wrong at the IRS, but that the transgression merited nowhere near the media response it earned. But instead of acknowledging its error or correcting the record, the mainstream political press has simply moved on to the next game.

And, I might add, Darrell Issa and his Republican partners in reprehensible political misuse of office have also remained silent on the damage they caused.

They should be impeached.

Ralph