The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
“The Obama administration is making the case for conservatism better than Mitt Romney ever did.”–subheadline, Slate.com, May 14

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control 
“Chris Matthews Sours on Obama”–headline, Politico.com, May 15

bow4News of the Tautological

  • “Solar Activity Continues on the Sun”–headline, RedOrbit.com, May 15
  • “Maine Abortion Bills Likely to Divide Pro-Choice, Pro-Life Advocates”–headline, Portland Press Herald website, May 16

Understanding the Scandals
… scandals have even former White House aide David Axelrod complaining that government is too big. Yesterday he said this to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough:

Look, it’s an interesting case study because if you look at the inspector general’s report [on the IRS abuses], apparently some folks down in the bureaucracy–you know we have a large government–took it upon themselves to shorthand these applications for tax-exempt status in a way that was, as I said, idiotic, and also dangerous because of the political implications. One prima facie bit of evidence that nobody political was involved in this, is that if anybody political was involved they would say: Are you nuts?

Part of being president is there’s so much underneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.

To David Ignatius of the Washington Post, it’s all evidence that government is dangerously ineffective:

The crippling problem in Washington these days isn’t any organized conspiracy against conservatives, journalists or anyone else. Rather, it’s a federal establishment that’s increasingly paralyzed because of poor management and political second-guessing.

What should frighten the public is not the federal government’s monstrous power but its impotence.

But there’s a more disquieting interpretation. The Benghazi and IRS scandals were both clearly political in nature: The dissembling about what happened in Libya was manifestly an effort to prevent a foreign-policy disaster from becoming a political problem for the president in the weeks before the election; the IRS abuses were an effort to intimidate and silence the president’s political enemies.

What about the Justice Department’s decision to cast aside decades-old traditions governing press freedom in order to monitor the communications of Associated Press reporters and editors? This Washington Post report suggests a political motive for that one, too:

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

As HotAir.com’s “AllahPundit” interprets it: “CIA asked AP not to expose Yemen terror plot bust until White House was ready to crow about it publicly.”

If you think about the government in terms of its original mission–“to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty”–then Ignatius is right. It’s disturbingly ineffective.

But what if the government between 2009 and 2012 took on a different mandate, namely helping to re-elect Barack Obama? Then the Benghazi and IRS scandals, and possibly the AP one, look frighteningly effective.

If, as Axelrod implies, agents of the government did all this without the president’s direction or even knowledge, that is even more frightening. That would mean, to quote a great orator, that the federal government has become “some separate, sinister entity” in which the leaders we entrust with authority cannot be held accountable for its abuse.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.