This is the post where I paraphrase 10 things in the NYT article "Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash."

Here's the text, by Eric Lipson, Ian Austen, and Sharon LaFraniere. I'm blocking and indenting their text and boldfacing key words that made me feel compelled to paraphrase so I could see what they were muting or failing to pursue with investigative vigor.

1. Government officials and its contractors were in conflict, and some people — who? — made questionable decisions and demonstrated poor leadership.

[T]ensions between the government and its contractors, questionable decisions and weak leadership within the Medicare agency turned the rollout of the president’s signature program into a major humiliation.

2.The Obama administration, dazzled by its grandiose idea of making a dazzling website, refused even to engage with the reality that was plaguing the computer technicians: It was impossible to meet the deadline with a website that even worked.

The prime contractor, CGI Federal, had long before concluded that the administration was blindly enamored of an unrealistic goal: creating a cutting-edge website that would use the latest technologies to dazzle consumers with its many features. Knowing how long it would take to complete and test the software, the company’s officials and other vendors believed that it was impossible to open a fully functioning exchange on Oct. 1.

3. Delusional Obama officials panicked and only interfered in ways that made the impossible task even more difficult.

CGI and other contractors complained of endlessly shifting requirements and a government decision-making process so cumbersome that it took weeks to resolve elementary questions, such as determining whether users should be required to provide Social Security numbers. Some CGI software engineers ultimately walked out, saying it was impossible to produce good work under such conditions.

4. The truth is being suppressed. What would we hear from a full-on whistleblower?

“Cut corners, make date,” said one specialist, who like most of the people interviewed for this article would not allow his name to be used because the Obama administration has requested that all government officials and contractors involved keep their work confidential.

5. What the hell is MarkLogic and why did it get this sweet deal that caused so much grief?

Another sore point was the Medicare agency’s decision to use database software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. CGI officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar.

6. There was a competent person who could have been in charge, but he was identified with Romneycare.

The Medicare agency was not everyone’s first choice to run the $630 million project. White House officials at first debated whether to name an outsider, such as Jon Kingsdale, who set up the landmark Massachusetts health insurance program, or even to create a new agency.

7. The one named informant is Wallace Fung, who seems sympathetic to Henry Chao, the completely unqualified/unempowered administration official who got stuck in charge of the project, and Fung tells us that Chao was freaked out about the delusional, disastrous demands coming from the White House.

As a result, the president’s signature initiative was effectively left under the day-to-day management of Henry Chao, a 19-year veteran of the Medicare agency with little clout and little formal background in computer science. Mr. Chao had to consult with senior department officials and the White House, and was unable to make many decisions on his own. “Nothing was decided without a conversation there,” said one agency official involved in the project, referring to the constant White House demands for oversight....

One evening last summer, [Chao] called Wallace Fung, who retired in 2008 as the Medicare agency’s chief technology officer. Mr. Fung said in an interview that he told Mr. Chao to greatly simplify the site’s functions. “Henry, this is not going to work. You cannot build this kind of system overnight,” Mr. Fung said he told him. “I know,” Mr. Chao answered, according to Mr. Fung. “But I cannot talk them out of it.”

8. The original plan was to build the sites for the individual states that declined — as was their option in our constitutional system — to build websites, but somewhere along the way, for some reason — political? — the White House decided it wanted one big federal website, and this switcheroo wreaked havoc on the design work.

A pattern of ever-shifting requirements persisted throughout the project, including the administration’s decision late last year to try to redesign the site’s appearance and content to make it more informative to consumers, according to many specialists involved. The administration also decided to reconfigure it as a national site, instead of one where each state had its own front page, after many states decided not to open their own exchanges.... “It was monstrous, a monstrous impact,” said one specialist about the amount of code that had to be rewritten because of the redesign and other similar changes.

9. Administration officials trying to cover their asses got paranoid that the technicians were trying to cover their asses. (Maybe, like me, they didn't know whether using code to patch a flaw is a coverup or actually the way you fix flaws in code.) And like a bunch of social workers they reinterpreted the technical problems as personality conflicts and wasted the technicians' time making them drive to Baltimore to participate in some inane make-nice therapy group. (Oh, how I wish I could see the actual quotes from the unnamed CGI and QSSI people who, I suspect, were royally pissed at this idiotic exercise!)

Eventually, Medicare agency officials began to suspect that staff members at CGI were intentionally trying to hide flaws in the system, to cover up for their inability to meet production deadlines. They ordered CGI technicians to drive from their offices near Dulles International Airport in Virginia to the agency headquarters near Baltimore to review their code with government supervisors. The Medicare agency was also growing frustrated with tension among contractors, noting that initial tests of parts of the system were being delayed because of “coordination issues” between CGI and QSSI, which won another part of the job after losing the lead contractor role.

10. Obama lied straight-faced at us or his people completely tricked him into talking up the website and how great it was going to be. When he could have used his charm to manage and mellow our expectations, he inexplicably chose to amp us up.

Despite the behind-the-scenes crisis, the president expressed confidence about the exchange just days before its debut. “This is real simple,” Mr. Obama said, during a speech in Maryland on Sept. 26. “It’s a website where you can compare and purchase affordable health insurance plans side by side the same way you shop for a plane ticket on Kayak, same way you shop for a TV on Amazon. You just go on, and you start looking, and here are all the options.”

Scenes from the drive from Lincoln, Nebraska to Madison, Wisconsin.

1. On 2 overpasses to I-80, there were groups of protesters with signs calling attention to the Obama scandals: Benghazi, IRS, Fast & Furious. I saw at least one Gadsden flag.

2. "The corn and soybean crops looked really good. I didn't see any poor crops at all." So says Meade when I ask him about the highlights of the drive. Some people driving from Nebraska to Madison might say "Ugh, corn. Too much corn. When will we get past all this corn?" But Meade is not one of those people. His father was in the popcorn seed business.

3. Mostly looking for coffee, we got off the interstate in Williamsburg, Iowa, where there's a big outlet store shopping center. Meade wanted to go into Lids to get some baseball hats, so I went into the Coach store and was checking out with a book bag and at the next cash register, there was a woman who was quickly replaced by a man who said she didn't speak English. The older woman behind the counter plied him with cheerful questions including "Where are you from?" He said "Iraq," but he said it in his Iraqi accent, which is nothing like eye-RACK or even eee-ROCK. It was more eee-RAHqqq. The woman said she wasn't familiar with that country, and the man repeated the name, perhaps wondering whether this woman had not heard of the events of the last 10 years. I didn't want to intrude. I cast a glance at her and then at him, as they kept going back and forth, and it was obvious she was never going to hear the word he was saying as "Iraq." Finally, I said to her, "He's saying  eee-ROCK," and of course, she knew Iraq. To him, I said, sympathetically, "It was the way you said it."

4. Meade's team the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Milwaukee Brewers, so Meade listened to the whole game on the satellite radio as he drove, and Meade didn't see that I'd put in the earbuds and was listening to an audiobook (which happened to be "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"). I laughed and he said "I wonder if they cooked up sushi?" because he thought I'd laughed at the baseball announcer who'd just said that the people coming to the Miller Park were tailgating and "cooking up every kind of food imaginable." Apparently, my laugh was perfectly synchronized. Meade's reference to sushi harkened back to lunch, wherein I ate this:

"He said I'm way over the top in referring to the Obama administration as the regime. It's over the top."

"And to say that we're in the midst of a coup d'etat, that's going too far. It's just going too far, that it's unpatriotic, and it's not conservative. I'm not conservative and I'm certainly not patriotic because I'm portraying myself and all conservatives as anti-government."

So begins a Rush Limbaugh monologue, from yesterday's show. The critic he's responding to is WaPo columnist Michael Gerson (who was a Bush speechwriter). Rush says:

It's really, really bad what the IRS is doing to the Tea Party, but that's as far as Gerson's willing to go.  He doesn't want to extrapolate it might mean anything.  But to me it does.  I don't know what he thinks about it.  I think he thinks all governments engage in excesses, and some governments have individuals who go outside the boundaries and this is par for the course....

Gerson said: "It is one thing to oppose the policies of the administration; it is another to call for resistance against a 'regime' and a 'police state.'" Rush read that and said:

Who did that?  He means armed resistance. That's what he's not saying. Nobody's doing that.

Rush doesn't like the way Gerson finds more in Rush's statements than Rush has literally said. But in order to say that, Rush must find something in Gerson's statements that Gerson has not literally said. And Rush is also going on about how President Obama is responsible for things that Obama hasn't literally said:

Herbert Meyer... the former national security official of the Reagan administration... described Hitler and Nazism, and he made the claim, 'cause his column focused on people hoping there's a smoking gun linking Obama to all of these scandals.  And Herbert Meyer said there isn't gonna be a smoking gun.  There is no memo.  Obama doesn't have to write a memo of instructions or desires 'cause everybody working for him already knows what he wants.  Everybody working for him is a miniature Obama, or a full-fledged Obama.  And as an example, Herbert Meyer used Hitler and the Nazis, and he said (paraphrasing), "Despite the fact that everybody knows that Adolf Hitler ran the Holocaust, you will not find one document where Hitler issues orders for the Holocaust to be carried out.  If we needed that to prove what Hitler was, we would never be able to prove it because it doesn't exist."

Rush goes on to complain about the mild-mannered campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney, whom he portrays as unwilling to go after Obama, and he's afraid that's where conservatives will do once again, as Jeb Bush lumbers onto the stage. Rush wants some tough dissent from the Republicans, but he must know that you can go too far with that and sound like a raving lunatic, which is what I think Gerson meant to say. Here's Gerson (from the second link, above):

Questioning the legitimacy of our government is the poisoning of patriotism. It is offensive for the same reasons it was offensive when elements of the left, in the 1960s and 1970s, talked of the American “regime.” 

And in Wisconsin, in 2011, when our duly elected Governor, Scott Walker, was protested by hordes of people who chanted "This is what democracy looks like" as they tried to interfere with what they'd convinced themselves was an illegitimate regime. And you'd better believe they compared Walker to Hitler:

"President Obama held an off-the-record meeting with select reporters from some of the nation’s largest print and online outlets Monday..."

"... in the White House’s latest effort to placate an increasingly restive press corps."

Initially billed as a conversation with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, the president made a surprise appearance — a very unusual move — and the White House placed the proceedings off the record beforehand. The meeting came amid a series of scandals crashing over the White House that has placed the administration on defense in a way it hasn’t been until now.

"State Department brass quashed several internal probes into possible sexual assaults, prostitution solicitation and drug dealing by diplomatic personnel overseas..."

"... according to a bombshell broadcast report today."

Internal memos by the department’s internal watchdog, the Inspector General, showed there were open investigations last year of several state employees - including an ambassador suspected of trolling a park for prostitutes — that simply went away, allegedly because of pressure from high-ranking State Department officials, CBS News reported.

"Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant..."

"... according to people briefed on the negotiations," writes Claire Cain Miller in the NYT.

The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions....

While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so....

[I]nstead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said....

Read the whole thing. I found it telling that the NYT threw in — amidst all the legal and technical things — this paragraph:

Even as the White House scrambled to defend its online surveillance, President Obama was mingling with donors at the Silicon Valley home of Mike McCue, Flipboard’s chief, eating dinner at the opulent home of Vinod Khosla, the venture capitalist, and cracking jokes about Mr. Khosla’s big, shaggy dogs.

And with that, I feel the mainstream tide turning against Obama. The meaning of the famous smile has changed.

"Thank You for Data-Mining: The NSA's 'metadata' surveillance is legal and necessary."

Say the editors of the Wall Street Journal.

Someone leaked a classified three-page order from the special court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian newspaper, who is a committed anti-antiterror partisan....

I suspect it was someone who wanted to distract us from the IRS scandal (and other scandals) so that the scandal of the moment would be one that's about Bush. I supported Bush's war on terror and resisted the "committed anti-antiterror partisan[s]." It became very important to fight terrorism after 9/11, and one reason I decided to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 was that I thought it would be helpful for Democrats to be put in a position where they would need to endorse things Bush chose to do to protect us from terrorist attacks. This is what we are seeing now. It's also important not to violate constitutional rights, but questions of rights and national security need to be analyzed. Don't assume Glenn Greenwald has it right. He's an advocate for one side of a difficult argument.

Back to the WSJ:

The outrage this time seems to stem from the fact that the government is widely collecting call records, not merely those associated with a particular suspect or group. But this fear misunderstands how the program works. From what we know, the NSA runs algorithms over the call log database, searching for suspicious patterns over time.

Here's where the other Obama scandals come in. How do we know the government is dutifully concentrating on national security — fighting terrorists and not political enemies? That kind of mistrust matters, but it's not specific to the NSA program. It undermines everything government does. What would you like government to stop doing now that you can't trust it with anything?

If the NSA's version of a computer science department operates like the rest of FISA, the government is cautious to ensure that its searches are narrowly tailored and specific protocols are reviewed by FISA judges.

If... That's an important if, but that's not the focus of the criticism by people like Greenwald.

The real danger from this leak is the potential political overreaction....

"I'm a little concerned that things have gotten a little out of whack."

For the annals of great quotes from the Obama administration.

The Sebelius Shakedown... the Pigford scandal....

There's such a dense pack of scandals that some of them have already passed beyond notice. As for the rest of them... people are getting tired....

Is that how it works? Something else that might happen is a swirling amorphous feeling that there are scandals everywhere, the administration is scandal-plagued, and everything about government falls into disrepute. There's nothing to expose or solve anymore. Everyone becomes cynical and dismissive and won't even listen to the explanations or pay attention to any specific facts and answers that might emerge.

Ah! They're all a bunch of crooks!

Of course, Republicans are hoping people will end up with the opinion The Democrats are all a bunch of crooks!

George Bush "demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not."

Jennifer Rubin, on today's "Fox News Sunday":

I think the question is whether the president is ever going to order his people to cooperate. Lois Lerner took the Fifth and was then put on [administrative leave].... But [Obama] has not sent out an order as George Bush did, in the Valerie Plame decision, I do not want anyone in this administration to refuse to cooperate. That cost some people in his administration dearly. But no one took the Fifth in that case. Karl Rove testified, Scooter Libby testified. He demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not. And I think that whole hide the ball mentality, and the president's unwillingness to push his people forward to give a complete story is going to hurt him as well.

Considering all the scandals...

... why was nothing dropped yesterday? It's Saturday morning. I'm not seeing anything particularly bloggable. Whatever happened to the old Friday night document dump?

A Google news search on "IRS"... "IRS turns over video of employees line dancing to Congress"...

Googling "Eric Holder"... "Attorney General Eric Holder Tells Media Outlets Leak Guidelines Will Change"...

Googling "Benghazi"... "Officials instructed Benghazi hospital to list Stevens as 'John Doe'"...

ADDED: There's this:

The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation.

Should Republicans make the 2014 elections about Obama?

"'I don’t think I’d personalize it,' said John Linder, the former congressman from Georgia who ran the National Republican Congressional Committee during the late 1990s while Newt Gingrich and House Republicans were preparing an impeachment case against President Bill Clinton."

Mr. Linder said he fought and lost a battle with Mr. Gingrich over their strategy in the 1998 midterm elections, which Mr. Gingrich thought should be focused on assailing Mr. Clinton’s character.

“I didn’t want to talk about Clinton at all,” Mr. Linder recalled, saying the same logic should apply today. “Obama was not in the Justice Department. Obama was not working in the I.R.S.” His advice? “Don’t overreach,” he said.

The analogy to 1998 isn't exact. Clinton was active in doing the things that got him into impeachment trouble, but those things weren't about the political ideology that he shared with the Democrats in Congress. Voters might want Congress to go after him more aggressively, but it made sense, if you agreed with Democratic Party ideology, to regard the sex-and-lies scandal as secondary to the overall legislative agenda when deciding who should represent your district in Congress.

Obama is — or looks — passive. You've got the difficulty of attaching him to the scandals. You have to argue that he should have known more, or he must have known more than we're seeing, or he's not rigorous enough in supervising his multitudinous underlings, or he's responsible for the "climate" within which everyone understands the sorts of things they ought to do to satisfy their superiors. Voters need to be convinced to blame Obama for the things that have gone wrong. But what has gone wrong is something that is wrong with governing.

In both cases — Clinton and Obama — there's room for the argument that we need stronger supervision from Congress. But going after Clinton over sex and lying was only loosely connected to the ongoing work of government. With Obama, the most central work of government has been compromised. It's not just a matter of letting the President off the hook and moving forward to deal with the real problems that affect Americans. Regardless of how directly Obama is implicated and how much any given voter wants to blame Obama, the scandals make a strong argument for opposite-party control of Congress.

That's all I'm going to write this morning about how 2014 is different from 1998 other than to say I have not made the argument that Republicans would do well to personalize the election.

"American voters say 76 - 17 percent, including 63 - 30 percent among Democrats, that a special prosecutor should be appointed..."

"... to investigate charges the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today."

President Barack Obama gets a negative 45 - 49 percent job approval rating, compared to 48 - 45 percent positive in a May 1 survey... conducted before the IRS allegations surfaced....

Americans are divided 49 - 47 percent on whether Obama is honest and trustworthy, down from 58 - 37 percent, the last time Quinnipiac University asked the question September 1, 2011.

Support for an independent prosecutor to probe the IRS issue is 88 - 6 percent among Republicans and 78 - 17 percent among independent voters, 78 - 17 percent among men and 74 - 18 percent among women.

"There is overwhelming bipartisan support for a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. "Voters apparently don't like the idea of Attorney General Eric Holder investigating the matter himself, perhaps because they don't exactly think highly of him. Holder gets a negative 23 - 39 percent job approval rating."

"As Anger at Eric Holder Grows, So Does His Value as Obama’s Lightning Rod."

"Holder is the latest in a long line of attorneys general who do the boss’s dirty work and absorb anger that would otherwise reach the president, writes Nick Gillespie."

Via Instapundit (where there are additional links on this topic).

"The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret..."

"... arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time," writes Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker.

The new details indicate that the government wanted the option to search Rosen’s e-mails repeatedly if the F.B.I. found further evidence implicating the reporter in what prosecutors argued was a conspiracy to commit espionage.

"A White House can powerfully shape other perceptions... For years the administration has conducted a concerted campaign to demonize Fox News..."

"... delegitimizing it as a news organization, even urging its ostracism," writes Charles Krauthammer.

Then (surprise!) its own Justice Department takes the unprecedented step of naming a Fox reporter as a co-conspirator in a leak case — when no reporter has ever been prosecuted for merely soliciting information — in order to invade his and Fox’s private and journalistic communications.

No one goes to jail for creating such a climate of intolerance. Nor is it a crime to incessantly claim that those who offer this president opposition and push-back — Republicans, tea partyers, Fox News, whoever dares resist the sycophantic thrill-up-my-leg media adulation — do so only for “politics,” power and pure partisanship, while the Dear Leader devotes himself exclusively to the nation, the middle class, the good and just.

The climate theory of Obama's responsibility. You don't need to actually connect anything to the President. You just show how he created a climate, and the underlings responded accordingly, as he can be said to know and intend that they would.

If you want to needle those who don't like this theory, you could call them climate skeptics.

The figurative use of the world "climate" goes back as far as 1661, according to the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary.

1661   J. Glanvill Vanity of Dogmatizing xxiii. 227   The larger Souls, that have travail'd the divers Climates of Opinions, are more cautious in their resolves....
1765   L. Sterne Life Tristram Shandy VIII. i. 2   In this clear climate of fantasy and perspiration, where every idea, sensible and insensible, gets vent....
1860   F. D. Huntington Christian Believing & Living vi. 105   Every moral climate here is more or less tainted, and grows pestilential if we linger in it too long....
2004   H. Kennedy Just Law (2005) xiii. 272   It is crucial that a climate of suspicion does not develop which creates reservations amongst citizens about voluntarily submitting to DNA intelligence screens.

Watch out for anthropogenic climate change! 

WaPo article "On IRS issue, senior White House aides were focused on shielding Obama" seems to be about throwing White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler under the bus.

Here's the article.

[White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and other senior White House aides] agreed that it would be best not to share [news of an upcoming inspector general’s report on the Internal Revenue Service] with President Obama until the independent audit was completed and made public....

... Obama’s top aides were trying to shield him from any second-term scandal that might swamp his agenda or, worse, jeopardize his presidency....

But Ruemmler and McDonough’s careful plan for the IRS was upended on May 10, when Lois Lerner, a senior official at the agency, broke the news.... Senior White House officials were stunned to see the IRS trying to get ahead of its own story...

I don't know how much of this to believe, but the article strains to portray Ruemmler as narrowly legalistic:

Ruemmler views her mission strictly as advising Obama on the law and protecting executive branch prerogatives, colleagues and friends said. “She’s a lawyer’s lawyer,” said Neal Katyal, acting solicitor general in Obama’s first term...

Yet Ruemmler’s lawyerly focus sometimes conflicts with political imperatives....

In the IRS case, many prominent Washington lawyers say Ruemmler made the sensible legal call. She protected her client — Obama — by distancing him from a politically sensitive problem and ensuring that he could not be accused of meddling in an inquiry.

How "protected" is he from the criticism that he was out of touch and failing to protect us?

As counsel, Ruemmler is a regular presence in the Situation Room and the Oval Office, making legal judgments....

“I think she’s one of the most cool-headed people in the entire White House and does a lot to ensure that nobody gets themselves in trouble,” said [Stephanie] Cutter.... “she did the president a huge service by keeping it away from him until the IG report was final. That’s her modus operandi. . . . It makes everything that much cleaner.”

Much cleaner! Ruemmler is fastidious about keeping the President clean.

Associates say the way the IRS situation was handled fits with Ruemmler’s approach to making decisions: wary to act before knowing all the facts, but then decisive once they are clear.

“She’s very deliberate,” said Akin Gump lawyer John M. Dowd, a friend. “There’s no reason to go busting into it. . . . Even though it’s a hot subject and there’s going to be some political implications, to me you wait until you’ve got a work product in your hands.”

See how all these compliments are really blaming her for the President's being out of touch?

Unlike most senior White House aides, Ruemmler has no campaign experience. Although she has worked in Washington for years, as a prosecutor and as a litigation partner at Latham & Watkins, former colleagues said she showed little interest in politics.

So we're supposed to think that keeping the President insulated from knowledge that could be used against him wasn't political. It was the doings of a nonpolitical, legalistic lawyerly lawyer's lawyer.

Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis said Ruemmler lacks political and media savvy. He said she had “an obligation to give the president a heads-up and generally describe what might be coming down the track [on the IRS] so you can do crisis management planning.”

So now you see, her lack of political savvy led to something that wasn't good for the President politically. She was just so darned law-focused that she failed to meet an obligation. The article ends with 2 seeming defenses of Ruemmler, but they reinforce the theory that Obama knew nothing because Ruemmler was completely legalistic and not at all political:

1. David Plouffe said others gave political advice, and Obama "needs a top-flight lawyer who’s going to run a good process, and that’s what she’s done."

2. Beth Wilkinson (Washington lawyer and former Justice Department official) said:  “She stays in her lane, which people appreciate.... She really sees her role as the counsel to the president and to protect the presidency and provide legal advice. She doesn’t try to do other people’s jobs.”

What it means if the Democrats believe "there will be hell to pay" if there's a special prosecutor in the IRS scandal.

The Washington Times reports:

Rep. Stephen Lynch, Massachusetts Democrat, warned IRS and Treasury Department witnesses before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform not to stonewall congressional efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal.

“We know where that will lead, it will lead to a special prosecutor. … There will be hell to pay if that’s the route that we choose to go down,” he said.

Why will there be "hell to pay"? The Democrats have been saying a few low-level functionaries adopted a misguided policy and the Republicans are playing politics. If they really believe that, they should expect a neutral arbiter to vindicate their version of the story.

So if they think there will be "hell to pay," then I infer: 1. The Democrats' version of the story is itself political spin, 2. It is playing politics to say the Republicans are playing politics, and 3. The neutral arbiter will tell something close to the Republicans' version of the story (in which case Democrats will be deprived of the excuse that the Republicans are playing politics).

"Petraeus’s role in drafting Benghazi talking points raises questions."

"Security at this annex was the responsibility of the CIA, not the State Department. But because the annex operated under diplomatic cover, its existence as an intelligence facility was classified...."

"Top IRS official will invoke 5th Amendment."

"Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening — or why she didn’t disclose it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor III."