While we were asleep

Not much coverage of this issue that I could find:

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

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.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

That's the dispatch of Wall Street Journal cub reporter Peggy Noonan, now fully awake from her 2008 dreaming. We aren't hearing much about the various scandals these days, because a lot of people would prefer not to talk about them. Noonan is right, though -- if an Obama political appointee directed decisions of the IRS that effectively took a lot of Tea Party groups off the field during the 2012 election cycle, that's huge news. More, much more, at the link.