FROM AUSTIN BAY, a crackling column on Iraq.

Meanwhile, since Harry Reid was spewing a lot of revisionism today, here’s a flashback to what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

FASCIST IMPULSES: Hillary Clinton cannot let you hold a viewpoint about guns that is terrorizing the vast majority of Americans. “Not only did Hillary completely turn her back on ‘balanc[ing] competing values’ and ‘more thoughtful conversation,’ she doesn’t want to allow the people on one side of the conversation even to believe what they believe. Those who care about gun rights and reject new gun regulations should be stopped from holding their viewpoint. Now, it isn’t possible to forcibly prevent people from holding a viewpoint. Our beliefs reside inside our head. And in our system of free speech rights, the government cannot censor the expression of a viewpoint. But the question is Hillary Clinton’s fitness for the highest office, and her statement reveals a grandiose and profoundly repressive mindset.”

You can see why her supporters wanted to ban the word “bossy.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: President Double-Asterisk: First, we found out agency was targeting Tea Party. Now IRS emails are missing. Cover-up? Plus, a proposal for collective punishment.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 405. It’s a big one.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Missing Email Is The Least Of The IRS’s Problems.

Naturally, many are suspicious that this is a convenient cover-up for destroying evidence, along the lines of the infamous missing 18 minutes of the Nixon tapes, which were allegedly erased when President Richard Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, accidentally stepped on the recording pedal while answering the phone. The very least you can say is that the timing looks awfully suspicious: The sudden destruction of Lerner’s archived e-mail seems to have occurred on or around June 13, 2011, just 10 days after Representative David Camp sent a letter to then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman asking whether conservative groups were being targeted.

As it happens, I used to administer just the sort of e-mail systems that the IRS seems to be using. So I fired off a set of queries to the IRS about its e-mail system, its archiving policies and how the loss of data happened. Many of those queries remain unanswered, but I was given some documents that explain how the files could have been lost. My conclusion: It is plausible that this was an innocent coincidence. But it is only plausible if the IRS is managing its IT systems so badly that it is very easy to lose critical records — or for abusive employees to destroy the evidence of their misbehavior. A private company under investigation that responded to regulators, or a judge, with this sort of explanation rather than producing the requested documents would rightly expect to be handed an adverse judgment or a whopping fine. This incident should be thoroughly investigated, and steps should be taken throughout the government to make sure that no similar incident can ever happen again. . . .

To believe the IRS requires a pretty low opinion of government competence. My friends who work in regulated sectors such as finance are outraged by the IRS’s description of how it was running its backup process, because the government subjects them to constantly ratcheting standards for document retention — specifying how long, and on what format, they have to keep every communication ever generated by their firms. How dare they demand higher standards of regulated companies than they do of the regulators?

Standards are for the little people. But I favor collective punishment.

INCREASINGLY IMPLAUSIBLE: IRS Claims Six More Computer Crashes Led to Lost Emails.

IF COLLEGES CAN’T HANDLE DISAGREEMENT, WHO CAN? I think I found the flaw in your reasoning here: “The university is a sphere wholly dedicated to the search for truth and exploration of how the world does and should work.” See, that’s not true. If it were true, we wouldn’t have these problems. It should be true, of course, but the people who have the power to make it true don’t want to.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: President Double-Asterisk: First, we found out agency was targeting Tea Party. Now IRS emails are missing. Cover-up? Plus, a proposal for collective punishment.

FALLING BELOW THE BUSH TRAJECTORY: New NBC News/WSJ Poll: A Disaster For Obama (Not Much Better for Hillary). Well, to be fair, he’s falling below the Bush performance.

POLITICIZING ANTI-TERROR WORK? ABSURD. Stratfor Chief: Benghazi Arrest Timing Is Suspicious.

JAMES TARANTO: Is The Ocean Vet? The VA and the Obama administration’s priorities.

“VA officials were not immediately available for comment Monday,” the Washington Times reported yesterday. “Representatives at the national VA declined to comment on the record for this story,” the Daily Beast informed us late last month. “The VA did not immediately respond to a request for comment,” according to a mid-May NBC News report.

Those are the first three of some 70 no-comments compiled by the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee for a webpage optimistically titled “VA Honesty Project,” whose purpose is “to highlight the Department of Veterans Affairs’ lack of transparency with the press and the public about its operations and activities.”

“Because the Department of Veterans Affairs is a taxpayer funded organization, it has a responsibility to fully explain itself to the press and the public,” the committee’s site declares. “Unfortunately, in many cases VA is failing in this responsibility, as department officials–including 54 full-time public affairs employees–routinely ignore media inquiries.”

To be sure, the VA, both its flacks and its managers, have had their hands full of late dealing with the recent revelations of incompetence and corruption–reported to have proved deadly in some cases–at the department’s network of hospitals.

Or have they? Somehow whoever administers the department’s official Twitter account found time yesterday morning to post this comment: “Our ocean is under threat. Join people all over the world and make a difference. #OurOcean2014 http://thndr.it/1tP7rrQ.”

There’s always time for our political class to talk about global warming, instead of doing its job.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Contempt Of Congress: The agency now admits it didn’t fully comply with subpoenas.

DAILY BEAST: Shades Of Nixon In Missing IRS Emails. Ya think?

One doesn’t need reams of reports or public-opinion polls to understand the gut plausibility of an IRS scandal in full flower. Yet the Obama administration seems not to have imagined that this burgeoning problem might require more attention than anything else Republicans are screaming about. Rather than a president in over his head, Obama is behaving like a president who doesn’t believe the onus should be on him to head off an appearance of impropriety at the pass.

No matter how old-school the IRS scandal feels, that naïve arrogance feels rather new on the scene—the sort of attitude given off by people who believe deep down that if you have the correct stance on policy, you ought to be immune to political attack.

Well, that’s their experience with a compliant press. Maybe it’s changing.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Why Darrell Issa just asked the IRS to hand over a hard drive.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa on Tuesday issued a subpoena to the Internal Revenue Service, ordering the agency to turn over the hard drive they claim is responsible for wiping out two years of critical email communications.

Issa has dramatically widened his probe into the IRS after the agency announced last week that it had lost the emails, which may have provided information about an IRS policy of targeting for extra scrutiny and delay many conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Issa is not only seeking emails, but wants equipment, “communication devices,” printed documents and just about anything else related to former IRS official Lois Lerner, who has refused to testify before Congress and who the GOP believes is a central player in the targeting scheme.

“After a year of beating down efforts by the Obama administration and its allies to obstruct an investigation into targeting, the IRS now says it lost perhaps the most critical evidence,” Issa said. “We still do not have answers about how and why the IRS tried to deceive Congress about these missing e-mails. This subpoena seeks those answers.”

Keep the pressure up. There are multiple people who know what really happened, and eventually one of them will crack, despite the pressure to keep quiet.

HILLARY CLINTON: THE WOMEN AND THE GIRLS:

The Clintons have a problem getting tripped up by their own sanctimony. The great feminist, we know from a recording of her talking about her victory in a case representing a child rapist, cackled over pulling a fast one on the prosecution. The Post’s Melinda Henneberger observes, “Even rapists deserve adequate legal representation, of course; that’s how our justice system works, no matter how reprehensible the crime. . . . In an interview in the mid-1980s for an Esquire magazine piece that never ran, Clinton’s glee is audible about the prosecution’s big mistake in the case, when it accidentally discarded key evidence. Some are writing off the remarks, as one fellow journalist put it on social media, as ‘typical gonzo defense lawyer talk.’ It is not, however, typical talk for a lifelong defender of women and children.” Nor is it “typical” (decent? acceptable?) for the feminist icon to make the claim that the 12-year-old was the sexually promiscuous.

And that in turn brings back another problem for the feminist heroine: Henneberger reminds us: “The ‘little bit nutty, little bit slutty’ defense has a long, ugly history. It’s jarring to see it trotted out against a kid by a future feminist icon. The argument also bears an uncomfortable similarity to Clinton White House descriptions of Monica Lewinsky, who without that semen stain on her little blue dress would have been dismissed as a stalker who had fantasized that she had a relationship with President Bill Clinton.”

To sum up, it’s not the trust or the legal representation of a rapist that matters; it is that her greed and ambition consistently get the better of her, to the detriment of those women and girls she claims to be helping.

That’s because she’s helping herself.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Bloomberg: Wealthy Clintons Use Trusts to Limit Estate Tax They Back.

Bill and Hillary Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the U.S. from being dominated by inherited wealth. That doesn’t mean they want to pay it.

To reduce the tax pinch, the Clintons are using financial planning strategies befitting the top 1 percent of U.S. households in wealth. These moves, common among multimillionaires, will help shield some of their estate from the tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.

The Clintons created residence trusts in 2010 and shifted ownership of their New York house into them in 2011, according to federal financial disclosures and local property records.

Among the tax advantages of such trusts is that any appreciation in the house’s value can happen outside their taxable estate. The move could save the Clintons hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes, said David Scott Sloan, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP in Boston.

Is anyone surprised?

VICTIMIZING THE ACCUSED? Wendy Kaminer: Obama’s Campus Sexual Assault Guidelines Raise Concerns.

DATA: How Often Men And Women Masturbate, By Age.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: A Bunch Of New York Women Paid To Go To Silicon Valley To Find Millionaires And Ended Up In Tears.

ESSAYS IN entitlement.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: President Double-Asterisk: First, we found out agency was targeting Tea Party. Now IRS emails are missing. Cover-up? Plus, a proposal for collective punishment.

21ST CENTURY RETIREMENT: Ten women to every man, a black market in Viagra, and a ‘thriving swingers scene.’