Lois's Politico interview

A few noteworthy takes on it today.

 Ian Tuttle at NRO  notes the use of the she's-a-deep-and-complex-figure tactic:

“Lerner . . . has been painted in one dimension: as a powerful bureaucrat scheming with the Obama administration to cripple right-leaning nonprofits,” writes interviewer Rachel Bade. In reality, the scandal-hounded Lerner is — didn’t you suspect? — “a much more complicated figure than the caricature she’s become in the public eye.”

Of course, Richard Nixon was “complicated,” too, but he did not get 3,700 rehabilitative words in Politico.

And what's with the interviewer allowing her to avoid the elephant in the room?

In her interview, Lerner says she “declined to talk” about her part in the targeting scandal, as if Jack Bauer were plugging her nails with bamboo shoots. At The Federalist, David Harsanyi corrects that misrepresentation: “You didn’t decline to talk, you are benefitting from a clause in the Constitution that allows a person to shield themselves from self-incrimination. This fact certainly doesn’t make you guilty, but it almost surely means you’re hiding something pretty important.”

That latter point is worth reiterating: Lerner, like any defendant, is innocent until proven guilty, and she deserves the fair administration of the legal process. Individuals who have personally attacked her or threatened her or her family do a disservice to the cause of good government that they claim to represent. That said, if it acts like a corrupt tax official, and if like a corrupt tax official it refuses to quack . . .  

Tuttle notes that the attempt at defense that posits Lerner as an interchangeable cog in a braoder scenario makes the essential case that those without filters on their glasses are making: Lerner's a microcosm, an embodiment, of a view of governance, that is at odds with what America is, or at least has been:

Says Karen Grier, a tax attorney who worked with Lerner, “You could take her out of there and just stand in a different person, and no matter who it is, we would have the same result.”

Bade no doubt intended Grier’s quote as a defense of Lerner, but it suggests the point made by Lerner’s accusers on the right: that this is not about Lois Lerner — or Daniel Werfel, or Steve Miller, or any of the head honchos who made easy, early targets. The violation of the First Amendment rights of hundreds of organizations was not the work of one or two “rogue” operatives in Cincinnati, or in Washington, but the result of systematic malpractice at several levels. And that Lois Lerner has become a symbol of institutional corruption festering in America’s tax bureau is not the collective projection of Rush Limbaugh callers but the predictable result of her decision not to fess up to obvious wrongdoing and not to help those with the power to reform the IRS rein in its propensity for mischief. She will not earn any sympathy — nor does she deserve any — for flaunting her lack of cooperation in the pages of Politico. 

Repair Man Jack at Red State points out that you really can't accuse Lois of lying:

Politico may be what Politico truly is; however Lois Lerner was in no way lying when she said she was proud of how she did her job. She believes that if you are a Conservative you are unerringly a gibbering, fleck-spittled Cro-Magnon of Backwardation. You therefore need to be eliminated from any capacity in which you can impact the direction of Post-modern America. It is her job to take an aluminum softball bat to your knee-caps before you are able to catch up to any of the good guys representing the higher, more evolved species. That is what the honest, self-assured Progressive believes about anyone who disagrees with his or her political viewpoint.

As for public integrity? Screw it. It was a less important moral value. Her official powers were just another bastard sword. Who cares where you ram it through the carapace as long as the dragon flops over dead. She was totally impartial. Anybody she thought sucked got sliced and diced. What could be more fundamentally just? As far as Lois Lerner was concerned she was a gallant and proud paladin of the public trust. She can’t understand why you aren’t more thankful she was on the public payroll. And if you think I write any of this tongue-and-cheek; you do not get what Conservatives and Traditionalists are up against as we try our hardest to save America from those who would plow it under in the sacred name of !PROGRESS!

There never should have been an IRS.  (1913 was a particularly bad year for America; in addition to imposing the income tax on itself, it made Senators electable by the people, just like the House, rather than by state legislatures.)  ANd now we can see why more clearly than ever: It can be used as a tool not only for taking money and invading individuals' privacy willy-nilly, but advancing one vision  - the one with no use for freedom - and putting the other out of business.