Here’s the back story: Paul Krugman has an article called “How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled” in the current New York Review of Books. It’s a long article, but in it the Professor makes the point that austerity economics is more about morality than economics. It grows out of an emotional need to make somebody pay for our sins.

Michael Kinsley wrote what was supposed to be a rebuttal to Krugman that made Krugman’s case. Kinsley accuses Krugman of making a moral case against austerity, and then said austerity is good because it is payment for past sins and just like eating one’s spinach. See also Michael Kinsley Humiliates Himself In Terrible Defense Of Austerity and Kinsley loves austerity because it is “spinach.”
,
Since then there has been a high-level piling on, joined by people like Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias, as well as some blog posts by Krugman himself. This includes a post today called Macroeconomic Machismo.

It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks — and not just the neocons — was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back.

Actually, I suspect that even the torture thing had less to do with sadism than with the desire to look tough.

And the austerian impulse is pretty much the same thing, except that in this case the mild-mannered pundits want to look in the mirror and see Paul Volcker.

It occurs to me this theory could be extended to just about every stupid thing in U.S. history, from the firing on Fort Sumter to the McCarthy witch hunts to LBJ’s ordering troops into Vietnam. Feel free to discuss.

See also Neocons:Munich :: Austerians:Stagflation

Jay Rosen reviews the saga of ABC News’s Jonathan Karl and the fabricated email about Benghazi talking points, and says Karl got played by his source. But at FAIR, Peter Hart makes a strong case that Karl was a right-wing mole all along.

Karl has been disingenuous about his bogus reporting, and I believe ABC has yet to acknowledge what happened.

After several days of scandal flame-fanning by Republicans, President Obama’s approval ratings are actually up just a tick.

The latest wrinkle in Benghazi gate is that President Obama may not have been in the White House situation room during the attacks. Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer, on Fox News, said that the precise location of the President during that attack was an “irrelevant fact,” and the wingnuts are getting huffy about this.

Dear Wingnuts: Do we want to review where President Pet Goat and Vice President Undisclosed Location were during the 9/11 2001 attacks? And somebody’s got the nerve to complain that the President may not have been in the situation room?

Via Kevin Drum, here’s an LA Times article on why the Administration was not happy about the leak of information to AP reporters.

Disclosure of a highly classified intelligence operation in Yemen last year compromised an exceedingly rare and valuable espionage achievement: an informant who had earned the trust of hardened terrorists, according to U.S. officials.

The operation received new scrutiny this week after the Justice Department disclosed it had obtained telephone records for calls to and from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press news service and its journalists in April and May 2012 in a high-level investigation of the alleged leak of classified information.

To make a long story short, British intelligence had a mole planted in al Qaeda in the Saudi Peninsula, and he had given the U.S. some information on new bomb-making techniques and the people behind them, but information leaked to and published by the AP made further use of the mole impossible. Apparently the Administration was after the leaker, not the reporters.

So the Amazing Keyboarding Vegetable has one of his standard, weaselly, more-in-pity-than-anger columns up about When Good Governments Go Bad. A sample:

It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.

It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem. If that’s the case, then the members of the I.R.S. leadership are suffering from a tunnel vision that turns outside reality into abstractions. When government workers lose touch with the normal human context of their job, that’s when the real horror show commences.

But it’s not really hard to tell now, because the IG report found that when upper management found out what the Cincinnati staffers were up to, upper management ordered them to stop. To give the Cabbage credit, he is silent on the issue of Benghazi emails, which may signal some parts of the Republican establishment are ready to shut up about them.

On the very same editorial page today, the editorial board of the New York Times writes,

The Internal Revenue Service, according to an inspector general’s report, was not reacting to political pressure or ideology when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny in evaluating requests for tax exemptions. It acted inappropriately because employees couldn’t understand inadequate guidelines.

Here it gets juicy —

But reality simply isn’t solid enough to hold back the vast Republican opportunism on display this week. Whatever cranky point Republicans had been making against President Obama for the last five years — dishonesty, socialism, jackbooted tyranny — they somehow found that these incidents were exactly the proof they had been seeking, no matter how inflated or distorted.

“This is runaway government at its worst,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said at a Tea Party news conference on Thursday about the I.R.S. scandal. “Who knows who they’ll target next.” Representative Michele Bachmann knew. Standing next to Mr. McConnell, she said the I.R.S.’s next target would obviously be the religious beliefs of people seeking health insurance.

For Senator Mike Lee of Utah, these incidents proved that the federal budget has to be cut even more deeply. “We need to return it to a simpler, more manageable government,” he said, “because that’s the only way that we’re ever going to prevent things like this from happening.”

There are no “things like this,” beyond a coincidence of bad timing. But they do have one thing in common: when bound together and loudly denounced on cable television and in hearings, they serve to obscure the real damage that Republicans continue to do to the economy and the workings of government.

Now, you and I already know this. But compare/contrast to the way media acted during the endless Whitewater/Monica investigations. CBS News has actually said that Republicans provided “doctored” versions of White House emails to make the White House look bad. And the report didn’t tack “Democrats do it too” at the end. At least some parts of national media are not helping Republicans cover their butts for a change.

The scandals are falling apart, writes Ezra Klein. He takes apart all three — Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP/DOJ mess. Regarding Benghazi, Steve Benen is Watching a ‘scandal’ evaporate before our very eyes. He adds,

There’s just nothing left. Trying to characterize this as a genuine political story worthy of attention has been a misguided partisan exercise for months, but now, it’s reached the point of ridiculousness.

But there is no sign that the Right is letting up. A Fox News guest has even compared the IRS non-scandal to Nazi Germany.

One of the many charming traits of today’s conservatives is that they never stop flogging the dead horse. There might be nothing left of the beast but hide and bones, but the Right will keep flogging, hoping to wring some more life out of it.

Greg Sargent considers who the horse flogging will hurt more, the GOP or the President.

It’s always possible that the scandal pile-up will undermine confidence in Obama’s leadership or feed a negative storyline about Obama and bigger, intrusive government, a point made by Karen Tumulty today. But it’s also possible that the scandals will be perceived as inside-the-Beltway noise and that voters won’t blame them on Obama or see in them any larger storylines about his leadership or vision. Indeed, a glance at Mike Allen’s Playbook suggests the narrative is already shifting: “OBAMA ACTS ON THREE FRONTS to calm storm.” And predictions that suddenly the voters will come to see Obama’s vision of government as dangerous, out of control, and radical have been made for literally years.

I can think of a third possibility — that most people outside the Beltway will be even more disgusted with Congress than it is already, for wasting time on this nonsense rather than addressing real issues.

Not that it’s going to settle anything, but two of the scandals roiling Washington this week are deflating faster than a cheap party balloon.

A report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says IRS scandal came out of the Determinations Unit of the Rulings and Agreements office. The Determinations Unit offices are in Cincinnati. The Determinations Unit was using “inappropriate criteria” for singing out applications for tax-exempt status to review. They also made “unnecessarily burdensome” requests for more information from some organizations. However, requests were not being denied.

Joan Walsh:

The report blamed “inadequate management” for the review process, which began under Bush-appointed leadership, and it reads like everyone’s worst nightmare of incompetent government. But it finds no evidence that anyone higher than middle management was responsible for the review. Moreover, although it’s clear that groups with Tea Party or Patriot in their names came in for more scrutiny and delay than most liberal groups, more than two-thirds of the groups flagged for review had nothing to do with the Tea Party. And none of the conservatives were denied tax-exempt status, though many faced long delays. Ironically, the only group that saw its status denied (for 10 of its chapters) was Emerge America, which works to elect Democratic women to office.

Someone in the IRS is saying today that two “rogue” agents in the Cincinnati office were primarily responsible for the “inappropriate” reviews.

I said this wouldn’t settle anything, and of course it won’t. Rightie bloggers are telling each other that the IG report says all kinds of things it didn’t actually say, and linking to each other as sources, so the misinformation mill is cranking as hard as it can crank. See also Charles Pierce.

Also, too, yesterday we learned that the alleged White House email that suggested some kind of cover up regarding Benghazi was a fabrication. The ABC White House correspondent who originally claimed to have “obtained” the email and appeared to quote directly from it in his reporting appears to have fabricated a pretend email from summaries and paraphrases provided by his source. Of course, in Rightie World it’s the ABC News email that’s the real one, and the White House version that’s a fake.

Update: The acting IRS commissioner was asked to fall on his sword, so to speak.

See Steve Benen.

The so-called IRS scandal is getting dumber by the minute. Jeffrey Toobin:

It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations. There are significant advantages to being a 501(c)(4). These groups don’t pay taxes; they don’t have to disclose their donors—unlike traditional political organizations, such as political-action committees. In return for the tax advantage and the secrecy, the 501(c)(4) organizations must refrain from traditional partisan political activity, like endorsing candidates. …

… Some people in the I.R.S. field office in Cincinnati took the names of certain groups—names that included the terms “Tea Party” and “patriot,” among others, which tend to signal conservatism—as signals that they might not be engaged in “social welfare” operations. Rather, the I.R.S. employees thought that these groups might be doing explicit politics—which would disqualify them for 501(c)(4) status, and set them aside for closer examination. This appears to have been a pretty reasonable assumption on the part of the I.R.S. employees: having “Tea Party” in your name is at least a slight clue about partisanship. When the inspector-general report becomes public, we’ll surely learn the identity of these organizations. How many will look like “social welfare” organizations—and how many will look like political activists looking for anonymity and tax breaks? My guess is a lot more of the latter than the former.

The real scandal, Toobin says, is that all kinds of political groups have gotten away with calling themselves “social welfare” organizations to get the tax break.

Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work. For example, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the Koch Brothers, was an instrumental force in helping the Republicans hold the House of Representatives. In every meaningful sense, groups like Americans for Prosperity were operating as units of the Republican Party. Democrats organized similar operations, but on a much smaller scale. (They undoubtedly would have done more, but they lacked the Republican base for funding such efforts.)

Andy Kroll:

It began back in March 2010, when the tea party movement was all the rage. According to a leaked timeline (PDF) from a draft report by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, IRS staffers began flagging applications from groups with politically themed names like “We the People” and “Take Back the Country.” Staffers also targeted groups whose names included the words “tea party” and “patriots.” Those flagged applications were then sent to specialists for a more rigorous review than is typical.

The IRS gave extra scrutiny to 298 groups applying for tax-exempt status, the Washington Post reported. Seventy-two of those groups had “tea party” in their title, 13 had “patriots,” and 11 had “9/12,” shorthand for the 9/12 movement started by conservative TV host Glenn Beck.

But IRS officials not only singled out tea party and liberty groups. They also looked for “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform/movement,” according to the leaked timeline. This included groups that planned to focus on government debt and spending, taxes, or those trying to “make America a better place to live.” In June 2011, Lerner reportedly became aware of what was going on and directed staffers to change to how they vetted nonprofit applications.

I don’t know how the IRS defines “social welfare,” but IMO promoting a political agenda, even if candidates are not endorsed, ain’t it.

Garance Franke-Ruta points out that members of Congress had been pushing the IRS to be more vigilant about allowing political organizations to claim tax-exempt status. Alex Seitz-Wald reminds us that when George W. Bush was president, the IRS went after Greenpeace, the NAACP and a liberal church. See also David Sirota, “Stop holding Democrats to a different standard.”

Right now the Daily Mail is bristling with outrage that the IRS allegedly asked one Teabagger group who was donating money and how the donations were being used. These seem to be logical questions to ask if you are trying to determine if the group is actually being used for political purposes. And so far there is no evidence that the President knew this was going on until last week.

First off, Newt demonstrates why he really needs to shut up and go quietly to the Old Hornytoads Home.

Today Darrell Issa returned to the claim that President Obama did not call the Benghazi attacks a “terrorist act,” but an “act of terror,” which means something entirely different.

What can one say but … please proceed, congressman.

Joan Walsh notices that some on the Right no longer comprehend the difference between real and phony allegations.

The National Journal’s Ron Fournier tweeted “Welcome to the 90s,” with no apparent irony or self-awareness about the role of the media in ginning up that decade of phony scandals that paralyzed our last popular second-term Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

In fact, Fournier contends Benghazi will hurt Clinton and President Obama, even though he acknowledges the GOP’s claims are overblown. “If nothing else, Benghazi is a blow to the credibility of the president and his potential successor, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. This could be big … Credibility is Clinton’s vulnerability, dating to the unjustified financial accusations that triggered the Whitewater investigation. Doubts persisted about her veracity and authenticity throughout the 2008 presidential campaign.”

Read that again: “Credibility is Clinton’s vulnerability, dating to the unjustified financial accusations that triggered the Whitewater investigation.” The accusations were unjustified, Fournier admits, but they hurt Clinton anyway. Why? Because reporters continued to act like they were justified, even in the face of contrary evidence.

And so it goes with Benghazi. Welcome to the ’90s!

I’d rather not go back there, thanks, especially if I have to re-live the ’00s.

Update: Ok, here’s another one. Today Marco Rubio called for the resignation of the IRS Commissioner. Jonathan Chait explains why that is a problem — currently, the position of IRS Commissioner is vacant.

The IRS commissioner from that period is already gone.

The IRS commissioner during the probe was Donald Shulman, a holdover from the Bush administration. He left his job last November. There’s an acting commissioner right now, but he assumed his acting role well after the Cincinnati probe ended. The position of IRS commissioner is vacant, which may explain why Rubio’s letter calls for “the IRS Commissioner’s resignation” but doesn’t name whom Rubio wants to resign. Does he want the acting commissioner to resign? The old commissioner to re-resign? Appoint a new commissioner and then force that person to immediately resign?

How many Republicans does it take to make a measurable IQ? That’s what I want to know.