Peggy Noonan writes in her July 19 column that a massive "bombshell" landed this week courtesy of House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa's latest hearing into the matter: "The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office -- that had been established -- but to the office of the chief counsel." This new, shocking information, per Noonan, is a "bombshell" because "the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency." Noonan need not have waited for Darrell Issa to drop the "bombshell" news that the IRS chief counsel's office was linked to the targeting. She could have just re-read her own Wall Street Journal column from May 18:

Any doubt that Peggy Noonan is a hopeless shill should really have been cleared up by now ... in which she noted the same supposed bombshell. Or it would have been a bombshell, had the entire "scandal" not fallen apart around Darrell Issa's ears.

We've sort of moved past that now. While I'm impressed at Noonan's commitment to environmentally responsible scandal recycling, the rest of the non-Noonan world has been asking how we could have had an entire "scandal" about IRS behavior towards suspected-political conservative groups that carefully edited out all mention of identical scrutiny given to non-conservative groups. You know, the rather gaping thing-left-out that undermines the very premise of the scandal that Darrell Issa had been stoking. There was a point when Noonan might have pulled an Emily Litella and backed sloooowly away from Issa's circus, but Peggy Noonan is not like that. Peggy Noonan is very dedicated to her career as a clown.

I'm actually still interested in this scandal. I think we should all be keenly interested in the question of how it could have gotten so very far with none of the supposed "investigators," Republican or otherwise, bothering to mention that the "targeted" groups really were only part of a larger and perfectly legitimate effort to sift political organizations out of the supposed tax-exempt pot. How do you manage to leave that out? For months? How many separate people have to be either crooked or stupid to make that happen?

Somehow I don't think Issa's going to be jumping on that question with the fervor he's jumped on every other hack effort and petty nothing of the last few years. And Noonan? Noonan is content to stand on the big red ball and juggle. Keep 'em happy, Noonan, at least until the trapeze act is ready.

