Muscatine

"...you're beginning to see now a line of defense emerging on these cases, these three cases, which basically is, yeah, we screwed up. There is this -- Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News has a very interesting story based on conversations with the senior administration official, unnamed, in which they are talking about Benghazi, and what they didn't do that night. And yeah, we should have sent the emergency team, we should have -- and we screwed up. This is an incompetence defense. You see the same thing with the IRS. Bungling in the Cincinnati office is blamed. You see it emerging perhaps with regard to the subpoenas -- or the -- the monitoring of the phone calls of the A.P reporters. And that is that somebody overdid it, overcooked it, went too far. The problem with all of that is at the core of liberalism is the idea that government is a great mediating force, acting on behalf of the national electorate to balance the competing interests of people.

To protect the weak from being dominated by the strong, and so on, and that government agencies can and should do this fine work and are well capable of doing it. When you have simultaneously three scandals affecting different agencies of government, different people, and the White House, and it's all chalked up to bungling, it really diminishes the argument for that side of the political divide.

I repeat - "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." The webs are beginning to become a little less tangled in spite of a chorus of "I don't knows."