DAVID HARSANYI: Sorry, Politico, but Lois Lerner Is Not A Victim. Nope. She’s a perpetrator.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey Points And Laughs At Politico.

She’s entitled to take the Fifth. And we’re entitled to be suspicious when a high-level bureaucrat caught up in a scandal refuses to be accountable to Congress and then wants our sympathy on the pages of Politico.

The rest of this piece is sheer drivel, and perhaps the most monumental effort ever made in print to deliberately miss the point. Rachel Bade starts off in the lead suggesting that anti-Semitism is what’s driving the criticism of Lerner, goes through a few paragraphs of “some say” framing of Lerner criticisms and defenses, and then goes into a lengthy anecdote about how Lerner rescued pets during Hurricane Katrina. Only after dozens of paragraphs do we get to the section titled “Unanswered Questions,” where Bade finally concedes this point:

As head of the division where it all began, Lerner certainly bears some of the blame for the selective scrutiny of tea party applications, and numerous emails understandably raise eyebrows.

So yes, the claim that Lerner “didn’t do anything wrong” is complete nonsense. Democrats, Bade assures us, are “still furious that Lerner didn’t tell Congress about the situation sooner,” but doesn’t get around to mentioning that Lerner hasn’t told Congress about it at all, let alone sooner. Instead, Bade shortly returns to her real interest, which is framing Lerner as someone of courage who won’t let critics “ruin her life.” Too bad Lerner didn’t have that same ethos about the people whose grassroots groups were targeted by her unit.

A sorry effort, and one that reveals more about Politico and Rachel Bade than it does about Lois Lerner. And it makes me wonder: Was she an anonymous source for Politico in the past, and is this a reward for past service?

ASHE SCHOW: Desperate Democratic women up the rhetoric amid midterm concerns. “In what appears to be an act of desperation, Democratic women have begun using domestic violence and other intense language against Republicans in the final months of the 2014 elections.”

Out: Bogus charges of racism. In: Bogus charges of rapism.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 501.

JAY COST: If the GOP wants to win, it needs to talk to the middle class.

Congressional Republicans would have better spent their time drawing up a middle-class agenda. They could start by adopting the perspective of families that make about $65,000 per year. These people’s economic situation is uncertain, and they pay a goodly portion of their income to the IRS—not so much through the income tax, but through Social Security and Medicare taxes, which flow into the federal government’s general revenues. So a middle-class agenda would aim to make these voters more secure and stop the government from wasting their money.

Economic security for this group primarily means lowering the cost of education, health care, and energy. Where has the Republican party stood on this in the last two years? Mike Lee has promoted interesting education reform ideas, but the leadership has not gotten behind them. The 2017 Project has put together a health care reform package that aims to contain costs for people like these, but the party leadership has offered nothing. About the only area where the party has done much is energy; not coincidentally, the energy sector is a major donor to the GOP.

What of cutting government? Republicans in Congress too often suggest that the first dollar to be cut come from programs that the middle class finds useful or worthwhile. Corporate welfare, meanwhile, which takes up a shockingly large portion of the budget, is almost never discussed. To wit, why did the congressional Republicans not make a full-throated assault on Obamacare’s risk corridor program, which is a naked payout to insurance companies? Why did they cave on the Export-Import Bank, which is a payoff to Boeing? Why did they buckle on tax reform, an opportunity to excise tens of billions in payola to the well connected? Middle America would not miss these programs. Indeed, it would be glad to see them go. Ask the average American if he thinks special interests hold too much sway, and prepare yourself to be told, “Hell, yeah, they do!”

And what about Congress itself? Middle-class people get angry at the thought of Congress because they (correctly) regard it as corrupt and irresponsible. Republicans have an ironclad grip on the House. Why not pass some tough reform measures to make members behave better?

Why, indeed?

2016 IN A NUTSHELL, FROM FRANK J. FLEMING: “Hillary has to be careful to not let the fact that she’s not particularly good at anything distract from how she’s a woman.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Utah teacher to stand trial on charges of sex with second boy. “The 35-year-old woman is charged in Farmington’s 2nd District Court with four counts of first-degree felony rape and two counts of first-degree felony forcible sodomy — accused of having sexual relationships with two of her former students.”

AT AMAZON, fresh deals in the Fall Outlet Event.

Also, 25-50% off Boots. For men, women, and children.

BARACK OBAMA, BAD BOYFRIEND. “PS: How effective is it? Well, Vox reportedly hates it, in much the same way that a classical Central European vampire hates sunlight and whitethorn. So there’s that.”

EVER SINCE ITS BOGUS IRAQ-CASUALTIES REPORT, THE LANCET HAS BEEN A JOKE: Leading British medical journal refuses to retract open letter on Gaza written by authors concerned that “Jews control the media, politics and banking.” “What is new is that the Telegraph reports that two of the five authors of the open letter, Dr Swee Ang, an orthopedic surgeon, and Dr Manduca, a professor of genetics at the University of Genoa in Italy, sent emails to their contacts endorsing a raving anti-Semitic video from David Duke entitled ‘CNN, Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix.'”

UPDATE: From the comments: “Britain’s intellectual classes seem to have gone full-raving-fascist in their Jew-hatred. The Rotherham rape gang scandal shows that Britain is now getting the religious minority it deserves.”

LOIS LERNER TOOK THE FIFTH, but now she’s telling Politico that she did nothing wrong, and that she’s the real victim here. And note the prominent play Politico gives to alleged anti-semitic epithets, and to Lerner’s brownie-baking. So why the media-rehab operation — and that’s what this is — and why now?

But it’s nice to hear that even the Washington revolving-door apparat finds her “untouchable.” Perhaps that’s because nothing much in this story suggests that she didn’t target Tea Party groups for partisan political reasons.

MARY BURKE PLAGIARISM SCANDAL EXPANDS: Wisconsin Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Also Copied Some Text In Other Plans.

Scott Walker’s campaign: “Mary Burke’s plagiarism is clearly not an isolated incident as she claimed last week but a disturbing pattern of intellectual dishonesty. It’s time for Mary Burke to come clean with Wisconsin voters.”

THE GAMERGATE SCANDAL CONTINUES TO UNFOLD: ‘They’re On To Us’: Gaming Journalists Respond to Critics in Newly Revealed GameJournoPros Emails. I’d say it’s basically Journolist for dummies, but that was the original Journolist, too. . . .

Plus: “What will strike many readers as remarkable is how ill-prepared senior editors on the GameJournoPros list were for the controversy that arrived when questions began to be asked openly about their closeness to their subjects and the general standards of ethics in video game journalism.”

MOST OF THEM VOTED FOR HIM, THOUGH: Journos, whistleblowers decry Obama’s tightening noose on news, information. “The administration uses FOIAs as a tip service to uncover what news organizations are pursuing. Requests are now routinely forwarded to political appointees. At the agency that oversees the new health care law, for example, political appointees now handle the FOIA requests.”

You want to teach him a lesson? Start covering him the way you’d cover a Republican president.

BRAVER AND MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN YESTERDAY’S CLIMATE MARCH: Russian peace march draws tens of thousands in support of Ukraine.

IT’S APPALLING TO SEE SEN. MARY LANDRIEU (D-LA) enabling the alcohol culture that so contributes to the #rapeculture on campus. “After running into a family friend, Landrieu made her way across a portion of the expansive field to a tent of welcoming fans, who quickly asked her to do a keg stand. She declined, but agreed to hold the spigot for someone else, who gripped the metal keg as others held his legs in the air.”

Take my advice: Send your kids somewhere safe.

JOHN FUND: The Crumbling Climate-Change Consensus: Extremists’ rhetoric heats up as their case falls apart.

THE NRA goes after Mike Bloomberg. Why shouldn’t he get the Koch treatment?

#NARRATIVEFAIL: The Rape Epidemic Is A Fiction: Sexual assaults today are a third of what they were twenty years ago. Remember, none of this is about reality, or the welfare of women. It’s about Hillary battlespace preparation, and jobs and power for “social justice warriors.”

DEMOCRATS ON WHISTLEBLOWERS: SNITCHES GET STITCHES. Decorated Wis. cop says he paid dearly for blowing whistle on DA’s crusade against Gov. Walker.

DAVID HARSANYI: Biden Gets Another Free Pass.

Remember when the media freaked out for three days over Sarah Palin’s completely innocuous use of the term “blood libel”?

Nearly every major media outlet took a deep dive on this critical outrage. Millions of Americans learned more about how Jews in the Middle Ages were sometimes falsely accused of kidnapping and murdering Christian children so they could use the blood for ritualistic baking. But more significantly: What did Palin mean? Was she sending a veiled message to evangelical voters? Was it just anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head again?

There will be no such national conversation over Vice President Joe Biden’s recent comments. While extolling the virtues of his son Beau at a speech at Legal Services Corp., our Clouseau-esque vice president launched into one of his folksy populist rants. “When he was over there in Iraq for a year,” he explained, “people would come to him and talk about what was happening to them at home in terms of foreclosures, in terms of bad loans that were being — I mean these Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas.” . . .

Is there any question that the repercussions for these sorts of mistakes are meted out asymmetrically? There is simply no way a Republican could get away with the buffoonery Biden peddles almost daily. Is the lack of genuine scrutiny over Biden’s mistakes a reflection of the media’s handling him like an unserious person? If that’s the case, then shouldn’t the president be open to far more criticism for putting the country in such a precarious position? Or is it that Biden finds himself in the right party? Either way, it reflects poorly on the media.

Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Enrollments Decline at 8 of 9 Ohio Law Schools.

GOOD QUESTION: Remind me again, why isn’t Condi Rice running for president? “For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen any recent polling on Condi but as of December 2012, no major Republican except Christie had a favorable rating comparable to hers. And Christie now isn’t what Christie was then, needless to say. Exit question: Is her reluctance about running mainly about not wanting to field ‘How come you aren’t married?!’ questions for the next six years? I think the media would tread lightly there, but they’d tread.”

If she were a Democrat, it would be bigoted even to ask.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Ex-Clearfield High teacher takes plea deal in sex assault case. “Gaile Kristine Supp, 24, was charged in April 2013 with object rape, a first-degree felony, in 2nd District Court. The student told investigators she went to Supp’s West Haven home to get help with homework. Instead, her teacher showed her a sexually explicit movie and sexually assaulted her, according to a probable cause statement. On Sept. 3, Supp pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of sexual battery, a third-degree felony.”

THE GOAL IS TO KEEP THE ISSUE OFF THE TABLE BETWEEN NOW AND NOVEMBER, NO MORE, NO LESS: Obama’s Halfhearted War On Terror.