David Brooks: ‘We as a country have become over-addicted to scandal’
...“I have a perverse relationship to Watergate, because it made me interested in politics,” Brooks said. “It was those hearings, watching those hearings on TV that really lit the fire for me that this was really important, that what happened in Washington was tremendously important, for good and evil, a test of character and a test of virtue. And it should be pointed out that, in Watergate, we saw acts of cowardice. We also saw some incredible acts of courage from some of the people chasing it down and reacting with integrity. To me, the aftershocks have been negative mostly, in part, as Mark [Shields] described, with loss of trust in government, in part the rise of a scandal culture.”...

Oddly, the IRS didn’t seem interested in large 501s
...The nation’s tax agency has admitted to inappropriately scrutinizing smaller tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, and senior Treasury Department officials were notified in the midst of the 2012 presidential election season that an internal investigation was underway. But the IRS largely maintained a hands-off policy with the much larger, big-budget organizations on the left and right that were most influential in the elections and are organized under a section of the tax code that allows them to hide their donors....

Why might that be? Groups like American Crossroads and Priorities USA can afford to defend themselves, even if we entertain for a moment the fantasy that this IRS would go after a group of former Obama advisers. Bullies don’t pick on those who can effectively defend themselves. Also, these groups get a lot of attention, and starting a war with Karl Rove would have exposed this effort a lot more quickly than anyone in the IRS or the Obama administration might have wanted.

Had these enforcement efforts actually been legitimate, the IRS would have wanted that kind of attention. The fact that they actively avoided accruing it speaks volumes about its perceived legitimacy even among its perpetrators.

This tells us, then, that the IRS wanted to target conservative groups who couldn’t afford to defend themselves, and who could be easily intimidated out of organizing for their agendas. That’s not a strategy for reform or enforcement, but simply a brute-force bullying effort in order to sideline grassroots opposition to the current administration. Contra the AP, that’s not irony at all, but corruption and abuse....