GOVERNANCE BY INTIMIDATION

RAND SIMBERG: A CULTURE OF INTIMIDATION. “If Barack Obama didn’t directly order the harassment of his political enemies, he certainly encouraged it.” Punch back twice as hard.

MICHAEL BARONE: Benghazi and IRS Targeting: Politics by Other Means. “What do the Benghazi cover-up and the IRS scandal have in common? They were both about winning elections, under false pretenses.”

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Durbin Asked IRS’ Shulman to Probe ‘Several’ Conservative 501(c)(4) Groups in 2010. “Democrats’ background on the issue underscores their interest in turning the current scandal into a campaign finance narrative.” (You may remember Durbin as the Sen. Who compared our troops to Pol Pot, Nazi Genghis Khan)

TWEET OF THE DAY: “These scandals are so bad that for the first time Obama wants to talk about the economy.”

COVERUP: Report: IRS Deliberately Chose Not to Fess Up to Scandal Before Election. “[I]f this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

BARACK OBAMA AND THE CASE AGAINST EMPATHY. “Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.”
Psychopaths are surprisingly high in empathy. They understand other people’s feelings very well. They just don’t care, except to the extent that they can use them for their own benefit.
In a thoughtful new book on bullying, “Sticks and Stones” (Random House), Emily Bazelon writes, “The scariest aspect of bullying is the utter lack of empathy”—a diagnosis that she applies not only to the bullies but also to those who do nothing to help the victims. Few of those involved in bullying, she cautions, will turn into full-blown psychopaths.

Related: A Bad Week For Obama, A Worse Week For Statism.

UPDATE: Frank J. Fleming: Without letting the left in charge every so often, our arguments about how awful the government could be would only be theoretical.

PEGGY NOONAN: This Is No Ordinary Scandal: Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government. “Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don’t, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn’t stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.”

Peggy’s right, but I was saying the same thing — right there in the Wall Street Journal — way back in 2009, when she was still going on about Obama’s transformational energy. So welcome to the party. Wish you’d gotten here before the re-election. . . .

Posted at 10:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

JAMES TARANTO: President Asterisk: Why the Obama IRS scandal may be worse than “a cancer on the presidency.” “No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. The use of the Internal Revenue Service’s coercive power to suppress dissent against Obama is the political equivalent of steroids. The history books should record Obama’s re-election with an asterisk to indicate that it was achieved with the help of illicit means. . . . One thing we have learned from the IRS scandal is that sports journalists are morally superior to political journalists. Whereas the former understand that cheating is an assault on the basic integrity of the sport, the latter all too often treat it as if it were just part of the game.”