Asked about the administration's response to the Internal Revenue Service's admission, former senior presidential adviser David Axelrod tried to distance President Obama from the bureaucrats who targeted conservatives.

The targeting, Axelrod told MSNBC, was done by "folks down in the bureaucracy—you know we have a large government." And that's why the president didn't know what was happening. "Part of being president is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast," he said.

That's right. The government is just so big that the president can't possibly be involved in everything that's happening, and can't know what multiple offices of tax bureaucrats across the country are doing. This is mostly just excuse-making from Axelrod, but fair enough, I suppose. Still, if the "vast" size of government makes oversight and management of the bureaucracy a problem, it seems like there's a fairly obvious approach one might take to begin addressing it.

Watch the clip, via NRO, below.