When news broke last month that the IRS had targeted for extra scrutiny conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status, politicians wasted no time in jumping on it. “These actions by the IRS are an outrageous abuse of power and a breach of the public’s trust,” said one. “The actions of the IRS are unacceptable and un-American,” said another. “There’s no excuse for ideological discrimination in our system,” said a third.

Republicans scoring easy political points? Nope. Those condemnations were all from Democrats (Max Baucus, Joe Manchin and Tim Kaine, respectively). And the senators were only following the lead of the guy at the top, President Obama, who declared the targeting of conservative groups—wait for it—“outrageous.”

Well, with each passing week that outrage is looking a little less outrage-y. Last week, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House committee overseeing the IRS inquiry, released the transcript of an interview that committee staff did with a staffer from the Cincinnati office that handled the 501(c)(4) applications, a self-described conservative Republican, who flatly denied that there was any politically-driven targeting going on. Earlier this week, newly released IRS documents showed that groups other than Tea Party-affiliated ones were also being flagged for extra scrutiny based on their profile: ones with the word “progressive” and “occupy” in their names and ones that promoted medical marijuana and the new health care law, among others.

The new revelations have raised serious questions about Treasury Department Inspector General, J. Russell George, a George W. Bush appointee and former House Republican staffer whose report describing the targeting of Tea Party groups sparked the firestorm. Why did George’s report not make clear that the Cincinnati office was holding up for extra scrutiny other groups as well in its effort to screen out groups that were too politically-focused to merit 501(c)(4) status? George first replied that he had focused on the Tea Party targeting because that’s what Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House committee, had asked him to look into. This was an unsatisfying explanation—how could George declare that Tea Party groups had been singled out for special treatment without examining the treatment of other applicants? Now, George is putting forward another explanation that conflicts conspicuously with his first one: that his report had emphasized the Tea Party targeting because it was simply on a different scale than what other groups faced.

But the revelations also bring to the fore a question that has been nagging at me from the moment this story broke: why were Obama, congressional Democrats and liberals more generally so quick to cede territory on the alleged scandal, thereby furthering the impression that something truly terrible had happened in Cincinnati? Not to be all “I told you so,” but I and a few others were warning from the outset that the scandal seemed far less likely to be Nixonian skullduggery than a hamhanded effort by overmatched back-office clerks to enforce the absurdly murky rules surrounding 501(c)(4)s. It was simply implausible to me that a cabal of civil servants had gotten it in their heads to go on an ideological crusade against a bevy of small-fry conservative activist groups—implausible not least because these same civil servants were at the same time leaving unscathed the big conservative groups, such as Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, that were having a big impact on elections and were most brazen about testing the boundaries for 501(c)(4) activity.