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John Fund explains the three signs of a “cover-up.”

The late columnist William Safire once said that a good clue that someone in Washington was engaged in “an artful dodge,” i.e., a cover-up, was that they used the phrase “mistakes were made.” Safire defined it as a “passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.” 

The phrase became infamous when both Richard Nixon and Ron Ziegler, his press secretary, deployed it to explain away Watergate without explaining who did what and when or whether any ill motive was involved.

Astonishingly, the Internal Revenue Service resurrected the Nixonian expression within hours of its clumsy revelation that it had targeted tea-party groups and other organizations with “patriot” or “9/12” in their names. “Mistakes were made initially,” the official IRS statement on May 10 read, implying that the mistakes ended after a short “initial” period. We now know that the scandal and cover-up unfolded over a three-year period, and the IRS publicly acknowledged them only after the 2012 election was safely past.

Here are some other clues that a Washington cover-up is going on.

1. No one seems to be able to name the players.
Last week, former acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller claimed he had identified “rogue” employees at the IRS’s Cincinnati office who were at the center of the scandal. But an IRS staffer at the Cincinnati office at the center of the scandal told the Washington Post this week: “Everything comes from the top. We don’t have any authority to make those decisions without someone signing off on them. There has to be a directive.”

Perhaps that’s why on Friday, Miller had this exchange during his House testimony with Representative Kevin Brady (R., Texas) .

Brady: “Who is responsible for targeting these individuals?”

Miller: “I don’t have names for you.” …

Michael Barone claims the IRS and AP scandals will have a chilling effect on free speech. 

Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.

There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security.

The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on a Monday, after the AP was told that administration spokesmen would officially announce it the next day.

That tends to undercut Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that the story was based on one of “the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen” and “put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole.”  …

Jennifer Rubin says Dan Pfeiffer’s weekend efforts were the worse attempts at damage control ever.

… So far, the administration isn’t fooling anyone. Most high-profile mainstream journalists now concede that both the underlying scandals and the defense are problematic. (Ron Fournier: “The problem with this scandal, and it actually relates to the other ones that we’ll talk about later, is when you’re in a position of government and saying, ‘We’re not corrupt, we’re just incompetent,’ that’s a bad place to be. . . What unites all these things is it undermines the credibility of the administration and the president in a competence of government.”)

Democrats  on oversight committees who were willing to carry some water for the White House on Benghazi appear entirely unwilling to do so both on the IRS scandal (in which Congress was arguably misled) and the Associated Press (which strikes at liberals’ media allies).

Pfeiffer’s outing, if nothing else, suggests that the White House is entirely tone deaf, is unaware that its excuses sound as bad as the offenses and is unable to conceal its  desperation in trying to paint this as all the GOP’s fault.

A president actually in command of his administration would bring in a new chief of staff and new communications personnel, and figure out how to at least appear interested in getting to the bottom of these issues. It is the only way to allow himself a sliver of a chance to keep moving forward on his agenda. But then again, his agenda may be irrelevant at this point.

David Harsanyi wonders why Justice was bugging FOX News reporters since the administration has been saying FOX isn’t really a news organization. 

We now know that the Justice Department kept exceptionally close tabs on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, following his trips in and out of the State Department, hacking his personal emails and phone calls. Normal newsgathering activities are being treated as criminal activities by the White House.  But consider what the same White House had to say about Fox News back in 2009.

You might remember the concerted effort by White House officials to brand the right-leaning Fox News as a bogus news outlet, unworthy of attention. I’m not talking administration partners like Media Matters or Think Progress, but high ranking officials.

There was Anita Dunn, then communications director, who attempted to defang Fox coverage of the White House by claiming:

“They are — they’re widely viewed as, you know, part of the Republican Party. Take their talking points and put them on the air. Take their opposition research and put them on the air, and that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.” …

Ron Fournier who was quoted above by Jennifer Rubin writes in the National Journal about how obama can restore the public’s trust and rescue his presidency. Why the hell would we want to see that done? The article is a good example of how worried the media have become.

Swamped in controversies, President Obama and his slow-footed team are essentially telling the American public, “We’re not crooked. We’re just incompetent.”

The IRS targeting conservatives, the Justice Department snooping at The Associated Press, the State Department injecting politics into Benghazi, the military covering up sexual assaults, and the Department of Veterans Affairs leaving heroes in health care limbo – each of these so-called scandals share two traits.

First, there is some element of “spin,” the cynical art of telling just enough of the truth to avoid political embarrassment. Obfuscation and demagogy, the dirty tools of political quackery that Obama pledged to purge from Washington, enjoy top-shelf status at his White House.

Second, there is almost comical bungling. While denying involvement in high crimes and misdemeanors, the Obama administration appears to be pleading guilty to lesser crimes of bureaucratic incompetence.  But that is an unsustainable position for a president who wants Americans to believe again in the power and grace of good government, particularly as it relates to the implementation of Obamacare. …

 

A new bio of Thatcher is reviewed by Daniel Hannan. Remember him? He’s the guy who said Gordon Brown was the “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government.” 

All Britons remember where they were when Margaret Thatcher resigned in 1990. It was our equivalent of the Kennedy assassination—events that, curiously enough, both fell on Nov. 22. No British politician in living memory had provoked such strong feelings. At Thatcher’s funeral in April, 23 years after she left office and a decade after her last intervention in public life, the battles she had so enjoyed were re-enacted: Many threw flowers before her coffin, while a few, their faces twisted in unfeigned loathing, yelled abuse.

 

The funeral was a reminder of what conviction politics looks like. These days, our leaders consult their pollsters, weigh their words, fret about how they are coming across. Margaret Thatcher, as Charles Moore shows in the magisterial first volume of his authorized biography, had a healthy interest in public opinion, but she never lost sight of where she wanted to go. While others drifted with the current, she was like a shark swimming only forward: focused, patriotic, slightly humorless and needing remarkably little sleep.

These were, happily, just the attributes that the times demanded. It is hard to convey the sheer wretchedness of the nation she was elected to govern in May 1979. Since World War II, Britons had seen their empire vanish, their standing deteriorate, their credit expire. Successive governments had inflated away their debts, with a disastrous effect on competitiveness and productivity.

By the mid-1970s, the U.K. had reached its lowest point. These were the years of double-digit inflation, of power cuts, of shortages. There were constant strikes, and trade-union leaders were better known household names than elected ministers. A Conservative government—a government of which Thatcher was the despairing education minister—was reduced to passing laws regulating prices and incomes. …

Andrew Malcolm has late night humor

Leno: So many scandals now for President Obama–IRS, AP. You know it’s really bad when Obama says, ‘Hey, let’s talk about Benghazi.’

Letterman: Reporters were all over Obama at his news conference. But Obama did pretty well. He’d been listening to their phone conversations.

Conan: A new movie coming about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s early years together. The movie has a happy ending, and then Hillary walks in.

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Mark Steyn knows how our government works.

Speaking at OhioStateUniversity this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists, with a straight face, that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “President of the United States” and a “Government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated, like Beyoncé Knowles and Admiral Sir Charles Knowles. One golfs, reads the prompter, parties with Jay-Z, and guests on the “Pimp With A Limp” show, and the other audits you, bugs your telephone line and leaks your confidential tax records. But they’re two completely separate sinister entities. So it’s preposterous to describe Obama as Nixonian: Beyoncé wouldn’t have given Nixon the time of day.

If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journal column thus:

“Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

“Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. … The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you) the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.” …

John Kass says you can find out how DC works by looking at Chicago.

The Internal Revenue Service scandal now devouring the Obama administration — the outrageous use of the federal taxing authority to target tea party and other conservatives — certainly makes for meaty partisan politics.

But this scandal is about more than partisanship. It’s bigger than whether the Republicans win or the Democrats lose.

It’s even bigger than President Barack Obama. Yes, bigger than Obama.

It is opening American eyes to the fundamental relationship between free people and those who govern them. This one is about the Republic and whether we can keep it.

And it started me thinking of years ago, of my father and my uncle in Chicago and how government muscle really works.

Because if you want to understand The Chicago Way of things in Washington these days, with the guys from Chicago in charge of the White House and the federal leviathan, there’s one place you start:

You start in Chicago. …

And Charles Krauthammer knows the administration interest in the Benghazi cover story.

… the overriding political interest was the need to protect the president’s campaign claim, his main foreign policy plank, that al-Qaeda was vanquished and the tide of war receding.

But then things got worse — the coverup needed its own coverup. On Nov. 28, press secretary Jay Carney told the media that State and the White House edited nothing but a single trivial word. When the e-mail trail later revealed this to be false, Carney doubled down. Last Friday, he repeated that the CIA itself made the edits after the normal input from various agencies.

That was a bridge too far for even the heretofore supine mainstream media. The CIA may have typed the final edits. But the orders came from on high. You cannot tell a room full of journalists that when your editor tells you to strike four paragraphs from your text — and you do — there were no edits because you are the one who turned in the final copy.

The Clintonian wordplay doesn’t stop with Benghazi. Four days after the IRS announced that it discriminated against conservative organizations, Carney said repeatedly in his daily briefing that, if true, the president would be outraged.

If? By then, the IRS had not only admitted the grievous misconduct but apologized for it — and the president was speaking in the conditional.

This could be the first case in presidential history of subjunctive outrage. (It turned into ostensibly real outrage upon later release of the Inspector Generalreport.) Add that to the conditional truths — ever changing, ever fading — of Benghazi, and you have a major credibility crisis.

Note to the White House: Try the truth. It’s easier to memorize.

NewsBusters says Bob Scheiffer at Face the Nation was not happy Sunday when he laid into Dan Pfeiffer, the latest administration flack. 

… But with all of these things, when these things happen, you seem to send out officials many times who don’t even seem to know what has happened. And I use as an example of that Susan Rice who had no connection whatsoever to the events that took place in Benghazi, and yet she was sent out, appeared on this broadcast, and other Sunday broadcasts, five days after it happens, and I’m not here to get in an argument with you about who changed which word in the talking points and all that. The bottom line is what she told the American people that day bore no resemblance to what had happened on the ground in an incident where four Americans were killed. …

… But what I’m saying to you is that was just PR. That was just a PR plan to send out somebody who didn’t know anything about what had happened. Why did you do that? Why didn’t the Secretary of State come and tell us what they knew and if he knew nothing say, “We don’t know yet?” Why didn’t the White House Chief of Staff come out? I mean I would, and I mean this as no disrespect to you, why are you here today? Why isn’t the White House Chief of Staff here to tell us what happened? …

And Jennifer Rubin is happy someone in the media is interested in Benghazi.

… Bob Woodward says, “I would not dismiss Benghazi,” as the president has tried to do. Blanket announcements by the media or the White House that it is a made up scandal with no attempt to wrestle with the nitty-gritty facts, the executive inattention and the strategic negligence aren’t compelling. For one thing, it is cause for concern when the administration can admit in private such gross errors yet no one will admit that publicly. If nothing else, it is a scandal that we still don’t know what the president was doing, how we left our people as sitting ducks and why so many people who should have known better could have come up with a cock and bull story, for which, by the way, they never came forward to tell us that what they had said had been wrong.

Come to think of it, there is one big difference between Benghazi and Watergate. In the latter, the press was interested and determined to get to the truth, not content to say, “Nixon has enemies.” In the former, the lack of curiosity if not skepticism is a sign how far we’ve come from a truly aggressive, independent media to act as a check on government.

Even left winger Andy Borowitz is making fun.

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.