Boy, the Head of the IRS Went to the White House A Lot

And now it looks like the IRS was a key part of Obama's successful re-election effort.

Megan McArdle uses a particularly weak "mirroring" technique to clear Team Obama. Mirroring is when you project your own beliefs and attitudes onto others.

I think the administration needs to explain this. Not because I think that Obama called Doug Shulman into his office to tell him to persecute the Tea Party. That explanation is unlikely for all sorts of reasons:


1. Delaying perhaps 100 applications for 501(c)(4) status did not meaningfully impact the election. I'm not minimizing what happened to those groups; it's absolutely outrageous that the IRS told its workers to be on the lookout for the words Tea Party and Patriot in the names. But I can't believe that it was a deliberate political strategy, because there's no way such a strategy would have worked. It's moronic: all cost and no benefit. And whatever you think about Obama's political strategists, they are definitely not morons.


2. If they were having secret, clandestine meetings to order grossly illegal behavior, it would probably be foolish to have them in the White House, where the visits would be recorded. Much easier for the staffer to meet in the IRS, or a nearby Starbucks.

To this day you still have people wondering how the most arguably progressive and educated nation in 20th Century Europe, Germany, the home of Schiller and Goethe could have descended in to the mire of totalitarianism.  McArdle and most of the people in the press simply don't want to face the possibility that Team Obama could be behind this.  Because then they would have to face the fact that something or someone would have to do something about it.