Peggy Noonan

What a scandal it was. It had everything—beautiful women, spies, a semi-dashing government minister married to a movie star, a society doctor who functioned, essentially, as a pimp. And the backdrop was an august English country estate where intrigue had occurred before.

Unlike modern political sex scandals, which are cold and strange, it was what a scandal should be: dark, glamorous. Human. No furtive pictures of privates sent to strangers, no haggling over the prostitute’s bill.

President Kennedy loved hearing about the story, and when he was on the phone with his friend the British prime minister, as he often was, asking advice on Cuba or de Gaulle, he was as likely to be asking, sympathetically but pointedly as one who loves gossip would: How’s it going with Profumo? What’s the latest?

It was 50 years ago, the spring and summer of 1963. The prime minister was Harold Macmillan, the last Conservative giant before Margaret Thatcher but more broadly beloved, in part because he wasn’t all that conservative. He was in tune with his times, until he wasn’t. He’d been in government 11 years.

It came out that the secretary of state for war, John Profumo, 48, had become involved with a group of people who gathered at Cliveden, the country estate of the Astor family, about whom controversy had swirled since World War II. Years later Macmillan would write in his diary: “The old ‘Cliveden’ set was disastrous politically. The new ‘Cliveden’ set is said to be equally disastrous morally.”

It was for Profumo. At a pool party hosted by the society doctor, he met a young woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler, who was either a dancer or a prostitute depending on the day and claimant. They commenced an affair. But Miss Keeler was also, she later said, romantically involved with the Soviet naval attaché assigned to London. Yevgeny Ivanov was there the day Profumo met her. And as all but children would have known, a Soviet military attaché was a Soviet spy.

The affair lasted a few months and was over by 1962. But there was a letter. And there were rumors. They surfaced in Parliament, where the Labour Party smelled blood.

When Profumo was caught, he panicked—and lied. That’s what did him in. And his lie was emphatic: He’d bring libel charges if the allegations were repeated outside the House.

Nearby, as he spoke, sat Harold Macmillan, glumly hoping or believing in his minister’s innocence. When Profumo, on the urging of his wife, came clean, Macmillan was left looking like a doddering Tory fool, a co-conspirator in a coverup, or at least a bungler of a major national-security question. Mortally wounded, he considered resigning. His government collapsed a year later.

Profumo—humiliated on every front page as an adulterer, a liar, a man of such poor judgment and irresponsibility that he mindlessly cavorted with enemy spies—was finished. Alistair Horne, in his biography of Macmillan, wrote of Profumo after the scandal as a “wretched” figure, “disgraced and stripped of all public dignities.”

Everyone hoped he’d disappear. He did. Then, three years later, he declared himself rehabilitated. In the midst of a classic Fleet Street scrum—”Do you still see whores?” demanded a hack from the Sun—Profumo announced he’d deepened and matured and was standing for Parliament “to serve the public.” Of course, he said, “It all depends on the voters, whether they can be forgiving. It’s all in their hands. I throw my candidacy on their mercy.”

Well, people didn’t want to think they were unmerciful. Profumo won in a landslide, worked his way up to party chief, and 12 years later ran for prime minister, his past quite forgotten, expunged, by his mounting triumphs.

Wait—that’s not what happened. Nothing like that happened! It’s the opposite of what happened.

Because Profumo believed in remorse of conscience—because he actually had a conscience—he could absorb what happened and let it change him however it would. In a way what he believed in was reality. He’d done something terrible—to his country, to his friends, to strangers who had to explain the headlines about him to their children.

He never knew political power again. He never asked for it. He did something altogether more confounding.

He did the hardest thing for a political figure. He really went away. He went to a place that helped the poor, a rundown settlement house called Toynbee Hall in the East End of London. There he did social work—actually the scut work of social work, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. He visited prisons for the criminally insane, helped with housing for the poor and worker education.

And it wasn’t for show, wasn’t a step on the way to political redemption. He worked at Toynbee for 40 years.

He didn’t give interviews, never wrote a book, didn’t go on TV. Alistair Horne: “Profumo . . . spent the rest of his life admirably dedicated to valuable good works, most loyally supported by his wife. At regular intervals, some journalist writing ‘in the public interest’ would rake up the old story to plague the ruined man and cause him renewed suffering. His haunted, unsmiling face was a living epitaph to the ‘Swinging Sixties.'”

In November 2003, to mark the 40th anniversary of his work, Profumo gave an interview to an old friend. “Jack,” said W.F. Deedes, “what have you learnt from this place?” After a pause for thought, Profumo said: “Humility.”

He was president of Toynbee by then, respected, but nothing quite said what needed saying like what happened at Margaret Thatcher’s 70th birthday party, in 1995. To show their countrymen what he’d done—and what they thought of what he’d done—they invited him, walked him through, and put him in a particular place. They seated him next to the queen. People wonder about the purpose of establishments. That is the purpose of establishments.

When he died in 2006, at 91, the reliably ironic Daily Telegraph wore its heart on its sleeve. “No one in public life ever did more to atone for his sins; no one behaved with more silent dignity as his name was repeatedly dragged through the mud; and few ended their lives as loved and revered by those who knew him.”

*   *   *

So what are we saying? You know.

We’re saying the answer to the politician’s question, “What is the optimum moment at which to come back from a big sex scandal, and how do I do it?” is this:

“You are asking the wrong question.”

The right questions would go something like: “What can I do to stop being greedy for power, attention and adulation? How can I come to understand that the question is not the public’s capacity to forgive, but my own capacity to exercise sound judgment and regard for others?

“How can I stop being a manipulator of public emotions and become the kind of person who generates headlines that parents are relieved—grateful—to explain to their children?”

And of course the answer is: You can do what John Profumo did. You can go away. You can do something good. You can help women instead of degrading them, help your culture and your city instead of degrading them.

You can become a man.

The air is full of the Battle of Gettysburg, whose 150th anniversary this week marked. Those who love history are thinking about Little Round Top and Devil’s Den, Culp’s Hill and the Peach Orchard, and all the valor and mistakes of men at war. The mystery of them, too. How did Joshua Chamberlain, a bookish young professor of rhetoric from Maine, turn into a steely-eyed warrior of the most extraordinary grit and guts at the exact moment those qualities were most needed? He was a living hinge of history. Why did Robert E. Lee, that military master who always knew when not to push it too far, push it too far and order Pickett to charge that open field?

At Gettysburg, great deeds were followed by great words. The battle won the war—it was the turning point—and a speech named the war’s meaning. We will mark the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg address this fall.

What do we know of its writing? Still pretty much what John Nicolay told us in 1894, 31 years later. In an essay in The Century, a quarterly, Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s two private secretaries, sought to put to rest some myths.

On Nov. 19, 1863, President Lincoln would speak at the dedication of the new national cemetery. He had been invited just over two weeks before, so he wouldn’t have long to prepare his remarks. And he was busy with other things—a report to Congress, the day-to-day conduct of the war.

“There is no record of when Mr. Lincoln wrote the first sentences of his proposed address,” wrote Nicolay. “He probably followed his usual habit in such matters, using great deliberation in arranging his thoughts, and molding his phrases mentally, waiting to reduce them to writing until they had taken satisfactory form.”

This is a somewhat unusual way to write an important document. It’s how Samuel Johnson often wrote his essays, getting it right in his head and then committing it, almost fully formed, to paper. From my observation, writers of speeches tend to jot down thoughts, ideas and bits of language and then compose, draft after draft, from the notes. I asked a friend, a writer and artist, if he knew of another writer who wrote as Lincoln and Johnson did. “No, but I know of a great composer who seems to have done exactly that—Mozart.”

Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg by train, arriving near sundown the night before the speech. In his pocket, not his hat, he carried an almost-finished draft, written in ink on Executive Office stationery. He didn’t write any of the speech on the trip—there was too much bustle around him, and the train jerked too much.

That night in Gettysburg, Lincoln stayed in the home of David Wills, a local “eminento” who’d pushed the idea of the national cemetery and helped buy the land. The little town was overrun with visitors. A crowd gathered at Wills’s house and called out to Lincoln to speak.

Here we see a nice moment of the egalitarianism and lack of reverence with which 19th-century Americans approached their presidents.

Lincoln came out and said: “I appear before you . . . merely to thank you for the compliment.” He would not deliver a speech for “several substantial reasons.” One is that he didn’t have one. “In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things,” he added.

“If you can help it,” shot a voice from the crowd.

Lincoln said the only way to help it was to say “nothing at all.”

The next morning, Nicolay joined Lincoln upstairs and stayed for about an hour as the president, with lead pencil, finished the speech.

Days before, Lincoln had told the reporter Noah Brooks that the address would be “short, short, short.” He wasn’t the main speaker of the day; that was the famous orator Edward Everett, who spoke at noon, for two hours.

From Lincoln the crowd expected something quick, maybe pithy, possibly perfunctory. “They were therefore totally unprepared for what they heard,” Nicolay recalled, “and could not immediately realize that his words, and not those of the carefully selected orator, were to carry the concentrated thought of the occasion like a trumpet-peal to furthest posterity.”

Nicolay sat a few feet from Lincoln. “It is the distinct recollection of the writer . . . that he did not read from the written pages,” that there was nothing “mechanical” in his delivery. He spoke instead from “the fullness and conciseness of thought and memory.”

In the end there were three versions of the speech, all the same in meaning but with small stylistic differences.

There was the draft Lincoln wrote in Washington and finished in Gettysburg. There is the version taken down in shorthand by an Associated Press reporter as the president spoke—this would be telegraphed across the country and splashed on the next morning’s front pages. And there is the revised copy Lincoln made after his return to the White House. He compared his original draft with the version in the newspapers and included “his own recollections of the exact form in which he delivered” the speech. That draft is now the official, agreed-upon text.

More from Allen Guelzo’s new “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion,” a sweeping and meticulous recounting of the battle that never loses sight of its essentials. Mr. Guelzo, in an epilogue, says something about the Gettysburg Address I’d not seen noted in a life reading Lincoln.

It turns out Lincoln gave a kind of preview of the address only three days after the battle had ended. It was July 7. Word had reached the War Department of another Union triumph, on July 4, at Vicksburg, Miss. This greatly cheered a glum Lincoln, who’d been grieving Gen. George Meade’s decision not to follow and crush Lee’s forces as they retreated from Pennsylvania. What happened at Vicksburg underscored the momentum toward victory. Lincoln called the news “great. . . . It is great!”

Word swept through Washington. A crowd marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House and called for a speech.

Lincoln improvised from a second-floor window. Actually he rambled, but you can see where even then he was going. Guelzo puts Lincoln’s remarks in italics: “How long ago is it? . . . eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, he said, had put the opponents of that truth on the run.

This, Lincoln said, was “a glorious theme,” but he was not prepared, at that moment, to do it justice.

He would, however, in the next two weeks, as he thought, and formulated, and decided exactly how he wanted to say what he wanted to say.

“How long ago is it—eighty odd years?” would become, “Four score and seven years ago.” Less dry and numeric, that. Almost biblical, as if the events of 1776 were epochal in the history of man.

Which is what he thought.

And he was right.

Happy 237th Independence Day to America, the great and fabled nation that is still, this day, the hope of the world.

“Documents Show Liberals in I.R.S. Dragnet,” read the New York Times headline. “Dem: ‘Progressive’ Groups Were Also Targeted by IRS,” said U.S. News. The scandal has “evaporated into thin air,” bayed the excitable Andrew Sullivan. A breathlessly exonerative narrative swept the news media this week: that liberal groups had been singled out and, by implication, abused by the IRS, just as conservative groups had been. Therefore, the scandal wasn’t a scandal but a mere bungle—a nonpolitical series of unhelpful but innocent mistakes.

The problem with this story is that liberals were not caught in the IRS dragnet. Progressive groups were not targeted.

The claim that they had been rested mostly on an unclear, undated, highly redacted and not at all dispositive few pages from a “historical” BOLO (“be on the lookout”) list that apparently wasn’t even in use between May 2010 and May 2012, when most of the IRS harassment of conservative groups occurred.

The case isn’t closed, no matter how many people try to slam it shut.

On Wednesday Russell George, the Treasury inspector general whose original audit broke open the scandal, answered Rep. Sander Levin‘s charge that the audit had ignored the targeting of progressives. In a letter released Thursday, Mr. George couldn’t have been clearer: The evidence showed conservative groups were singled out for abuse by the IRS, not liberal groups. While some liberal groups might have wound up on a BOLO list, the IRS did not target them. “We did not find evidence that the criteria you identified, labeled ‘Progressives,’ were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2012 timeframe we audited.” One hundred percent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12” in their names were given extra scrutiny. “While we have multiple sources of information corroborating the use of Tea Party and other related criteria . . . including employee interviews, e-mails, and other documents, we found no indication in any of these other materials that ‘progressives’ was a term used to refer cases for scrutiny for political campaign intervention.”

According to a House Ways and Means Committee source, only seven of the 298 cases flagged by the IRS for extra scrutiny appeared to represent progressive causes. Not one of the seven was subject to harassment or abuse. Of the seven, only two were even sent follow-up questionnaires after their applications for tax exempt status were received. Neither of those two was asked inappropriate or invasive questions. And all seven saw their applications approved.

Conservative groups were treated differently, sent to a secondary review group after being flagged for scrutiny. They were subject to undue burdens and harassment—lengthy and invasive questions about donors and even prayer habits. There, in the secondary offices, some of them languished for years. “Some of them are still languishing,” said the source.

Danny Werfel, the acting head of the IRS, who manages at the same time to seem utterly well-meaning and highly evasive, further muddied the waters this week with a report on how the IRS is dealing with the aftermath of the inspector general’s audit. The report seemed to exonerate—”we have not found evidence of intentional wrongdoing at this time”—while admitting, further in: “We are digging deeper . . . to determine if there are instances of wrongdoing.” Which is it?

The report claims that part of the problem is that those who were targeted and abused didn’t “leverage” the Office of Taxpayer Advocate. But when Sen. John Cornyn contacted the local advocate’s office on behalf of the targeted Texas group True the Vote, his letter went unanswered for 11 months, and the eventual reply didn’t answer his questions. Forget how they’d treat an average citizen—that’s how they treat someone who has power.

The Werfel report makes no mention of the agency’s disclosure of confidential tax information—the leaking of confidential tax and donor information of the National Organization for Marriage to the liberal Human Rights Campaign, and the leaking of the applications of conservative groups to a liberal news outfit.

More than 10 pages of the 53-page report are devoted to explaining how important the IRS is, and how excellent its workforce, in spite of lower budgets. There will be “negative repercussions” in future years, it darkly warns, “if our funding is inadequate.” That would have been a good place to mention the bonuses the IRS has been giving itself—almost a quarter-billion dollars the past few years. But no word of that.

There is a muted mention of IRS boondoggles—the conferences, the suites, the “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island” parody videos: There were “management lapses” that led to “wasteful spending.” “Many of these failures reflected a lack of judgment that, unfortunately, was not uncommon across the Federal Government in the years leading up to 2010.” Ah, that explains it.

The report is written in a way that is beyond bureaucratic. It is aggressively impenetrable and requires constant translation. “Information . . . shared with Congress was insufficient.” That means that when Congress asked IRS leadership if there was targeting going on, they lied and said no.

The report’s weaknesses were played out in person during Thursday’s Ways and Means questioning of Mr. Werfel. Chairman Dave Camp said the report fails to address central issues. “Where is the internal oversight?”

Under questioning, Mr. Werfel admitted he had not interviewed his predecessors, who led the IRS in the scandal years, nor exemptions unit chief Lois Lerner.

Did Ms. Lerner attempt to cover up the targeting? “I don’t know the answer. . . . There’s no evidence on the record.”

Who was the person responsible for the Cincinnati office’s targeting of tea-party groups? “We are looking into the facts and circumstances that arose.”

Who in Washington told IRS workers to hold up the applications? “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

How do you know the circumstances within the tax-exempt unit aren’t more widespread within the IRS? “I’ve asked them to look for evidence of problems.”

He did, however, agree that it appears tea-party groups were sent on for extra scrutiny. “We did not find evidence . . . we found no indication . . . that progressives was a term” used to alert screeners. So there’s that.

Who initiated the targeting of donors to apply gift taxes to their donations? This is “subject to further investigation.”

Who leaked the donor lists? “I do not have that information”

Who at the IRS was involved in covering up the patterns of abuse? That’s being investigated, too.

In fairness to Mr. Werfel, there are a lot of people he can’t talk to because they are talking to investigators. But if that’s the case, he can’t declare there’s no evidence of intentional wrongdoing by individuals at the IRS. How would he know?

Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas zeroed in at the end: “This report is a sham.”

No one has gotten near the bottom of this scandal. Journalists shouldn’t be trying to make the story disappear. The revenue-gathering arm of the federal government appears to be politically biased, corrupt in its actions, and unable to reform itself.

The only way to make that story go away is to get to the bottom of it and fully reveal it. It’s not a bungle, it’s a scandal.

Quickly: Everyone agrees the Internal Revenue Service is, under current governmental structures, the proper agency to determine the legitimacy of applications for tax-exempt status. Everyone agrees the IRS has the duty to scrutinize each request, making sure that the organization meets relevant criteria. Everyone agrees groups requesting tax-exempt status must back up their requests with truthful answers and honest information.

Some ask, “Don’t conservatives know they have to be questioned like anyone else?” Yes, they do. Their grievance centers on the fact they have not been. They were targeted, and their rights violated

The most compelling evidence of that is what happened to the National Organization for Marriage. Its chairman, John Eastman, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, and the tale he told was different from the now-familiar stories of harassment and abuse.

In March 2012, the organization, which argues the case for traditional marriage, found out its confidential tax information had been obtained by the Human Rights Campaign, one of its primary opponents in the marriage debate. The HRC put the leaked information on its website—including the names of NOM donors. The NOM not only has the legal right to keep its donors’ names private, it has to, because when contributors’ names have been revealed in the past they have been harassed, boycotted and threatened. This is a free speech right, one the Supreme Court upheld in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to compel the NAACP to surrender its membership list.

The NOM did a computer forensic investigation and determined that its leaked IRS information had come from within the IRS itself. If it was leaked by a worker or workers within the IRS it would be a federal crime, with penalties including up to five years in prison.

In April 2012, the NOM asked the IRS for an investigation. The inspector general’s office gave them a complaint number. Soon they were in touch. Even though the leaked document bore internal IRS markings, the inspector general decided that maybe the document came from within the NOM. The NOM demonstrated that was not true.

For the next 14 months they heard nothing about an investigation. By August 2012, the NOM was filing Freedom of Information Act requests trying to find out if there was one. The IRS stonewalled. Their “latest nonresponse response,” said Mr. Eastman, claimed that the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them. Mr. Eastman called this “Orwellian.” He said that what the NOM experienced “suggests that problems at the IRS are potentially far more serious” than the targeting of conservative organizations for scrutiny.

In hearings Thursday, Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who disagrees with the basic stand of the NOM, said that what had happened to the organization was nonetheless particularly offensive to him. The new IRS director agreed he would look into it.

Almost a month after the IRS story broke—a month after the high-profile scandal started to unravel after a botched spin operation that was meant to make the story go away—no one has been able to produce a liberal or progressive group that was targeted and thwarted by the agency’s tax-exemption arm in the years leading up to the 2012 election. The House Ways and Means Committee this week held hearings featuring witnesses from six of the targeted groups. Before the hearing, Republicans invited Democrats to include witnesses from the other side. The Democrats didn’t produce one. The McClatchy news service also looked for nonconservative targets. “Virtually no organizations perceived to be liberal or nonpartisan have come forward to say they were unfairly targeted,” it reported. Liberal groups told McClatchy “they thought the scrutiny they got was fair.”

Some sophisticated Democrats who’ve worked in executive agencies have suggested to me that the story is simpler than it seems—that the targeting wasn’t a political operation, an expression of political preference enforced by an increasingly partisan agency, its union and assorted higher-ups. A former senior White House official, and a very bright man, said this week he didn’t believe it was mischief but incompetence. But why did all the incompetent workers misunderstand their jobs and their mission in exactly the same way? Wouldn’t general incompetence suggest both liberal and conservative groups would be abused more or less equally, or in proportion to the number of their applications? Wouldn’t a lot of left-wing groups have been caught in the incompetence net? Wouldn’t we now be hearing honest and aggrieved statements from indignant progressives who expected better from their government?

Some person or persons made the decision to target, harass, delay and abuse. Some person or persons communicated the decision. Some persons executed them. Maybe we’re getting closer. John McKinnon and Dionne Searcey of The Wall Street Journal reported this week that IRS employees in the Cincinnati office—those are the ones that tax-exempt unit chief Lois Lerner accused of going rogue and attempted to throw under the bus—have told congressional investigators that agency officials in Washington helped direct the probe of the tea-party groups. Mr. McKinnon and Ms. Searcey reported that one of the workers told investigators an IRS lawyer in Washington, Carter Hull, “closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants.”

“The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment,” they wrote. There really is an air about the IRS that they think they are The Untouchables.

Some have said the IRS didn’t have enough money to do its job well. But a lack of money isn’t what makes you target political groups—a directive is what makes you do that. In any case, this week’s bombshell makes it clear the IRS, from 2010 to 2012, the years of prime targeting, did have money to improve its processes. During those years they spent $49 million on themselves—on conferences and gatherings, on $1,500 hotel rooms and self-esteem presentations. “Maliciously self-indulgent,” said Chairman Darrell Issa at Thursday’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings.

What a culture of entitlement, and what confusion it reveals about what motivates people. You want to increase the morale, cohesion and self-respect of IRS workers? Allow them to work in an agency that is famous for integrity, fairness and professionalism. That gives people spirit and guts, not “Star Trek” parody videos.

Finally, this week Russell George, the inspector general whose audit confirmed the targeting of conservative groups, mentioned, as we all do these days, Richard Nixon’s attempt to use the agency to target his enemies. But part of that Watergate story is that Nixon failed. Last week David Dykes of the Greenville (S.C.) News wrote of meeting with 93-year-old Johnnie Mac Walters, head of the IRS almost 40 years ago, in the Nixon era. Mr. Dykes quoted Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, who told him the IRS wouldn’t do what Nixon asked: “It didn’t happen, not because the White House didn’t want it to happen, but because people like Johnnie Walters said ‘no.’ ”

That was the IRS doing its job—attempting to be above politics, refusing to act as the muscle for a political agenda.

Man—those were the days.

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The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn’t fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it’s not their ox being gored, it’s those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.

Those who aren’t deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.

But this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president’s 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats.

Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. “In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown. ” An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, “Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?” Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook group called “Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States.” It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: “For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville.”

Wow. I guess that was target practice.

Here is the thing. The politicization of government employees wouldn’t have worried a lot of us 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. But since then, as a country, we have become, as individuals, less respectful of political differences and even of each other, as everything—all parts of American life—has become more political, more partisan, more divided and more aggressive.

There has got to be some way to break through this, to create new rules for the road in a situation like this.

Because people think the IRS has always, in various past cases, been used as a political tool, they think we’ll glide through this scandal too. We’ll muddle through, we’ll investigate, the IRS will right itself, no biggie.

But when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a “massive administrative state,” one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not.

Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.

Those who think this is just business as usual are ahistorical, and those who think nothing can be done, or nothing serious should be done, are suffering from Cynicism Poisoning.

The House wants to proceed with hearings and an investigation itself, and understandably. One reason is pride. “We are the ones who got the IRS to do the audit,” a congressman said the other night. Another is momentum: An independent counsel would take time and take some air out of the story. But Congress is operating within a lot of political swirls. The IRS certainly doesn’t seem to fear them—haven’t its leaders made that clear in their testimony so far? Congress itself is not highly regarded by the public. Didn’t I say that politely?

Some members have been scared into thinking that tough hearings will constitute “overreach.” But when you spend all your time fearing overreach, you can forget to reach at all. A defensive crouch isn’t a good posture from which to launch a probe. And some members fear that if they pursue and give time to something that is not an economic issue, it will be used against them. But stopping the revenue-gathering arm of the federal government from operating as a hopelessly politicized and aggressive entity is an economic issue. It has to do with basic American faith in, and compliance with, half of the spending/taxing apparatus of the federal government. How could that not be an economic issue?

There will be more hearings next week, and fair enough. But down the road an independent counsel is going to be needed because the House does not have all the prosecutorial powers an independent counsel would—the powers to empanel a grand jury, grant immunity to potential witnesses, find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, indict.

Another reason to want an independent counsel: There are obviously many good, fair-minded workers in the IRS, people of sterling character. They deserve to be asked about what they were forced to put up with, what they felt they had to bite their tongues about.

There may even be a few stories about people who stood up and said: “You know you’re targeting Americans because they hold political views you don’t like, right? You know that’s wrong, right? And I’m not going to do it.”

It would be worth an investigation that breaks open the IRS to find that person, and that moment. You have no idea how much better it would make us feel, how inspiring and comforting, too.

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn’t fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it’s not their ox being gored, it’s those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.

Those who aren’t deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.

An inability to make distinctions: “It’s always been like this.” “Presidents are always siccing the IRS on their enemies.” There’s truth in that. We’ve all heard the stories of the president who picked up the phone and said, “Look into this guy,” Richard Nixon most showily. He got clobbered for it. It was one of the articles of impeachment.

But this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president’s 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats.

Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. “In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown.” An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, “Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?” Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook group called “Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States.” It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: “For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville.”

Wow. I guess that was target practice.

Here is the thing. The politicization of government employees wouldn’t have worried a lot of us 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. But since then, as a country, we have become, as individuals, less respectful of political differences and even of each other, as everything—all parts of American life—has become more political, more partisan, more divided and more aggressive.

There has got to be some way to break through this, to create new rules for the road in a situation like this.

Because people think the IRS has always, in various past cases, been used as a political tool, they think we’ll glide through this scandal too. We’ll muddle through, we’ll investigate, the IRS will right itself, no biggie.

But when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a “massive administrative state,” one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not.

Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.

Those who think this is just business as usual are ahistorical, and those who think nothing can be done, or nothing serious should be done, are suffering from Cynicism Poisoning.

The House wants to proceed with hearings and an investigation itself, and understandably. One reason is pride. “We are the ones who got the IRS to do the audit,” a congressman said the other night. Another is momentum: An independent counsel would take time and take some air out of the story. But Congress is operating within a lot of political swirls. The IRS certainly doesn’t seem to fear them—haven’t its leaders made that clear in their testimony so far? Congress itself is not highly regarded by the public. Didn’t I say that politely?

Some members have been scared into thinking that tough hearings will constitute “overreach.” But when you spend all your time fearing overreach, you can forget to reach at all. A defensive crouch isn’t a good posture from which to launch a probe. And some members fear that if they pursue and give time to something that is not an economic issue, it will be used against them. But stopping the revenue-gathering arm of the federal government from operating as a hopelessly politicized and aggressive entity is an economic issue. It has to do with basic American faith in, and compliance with, half of the spending/taxing apparatus of the federal government. How could that not be an economic issue?

There will be more hearings next week, and fair enough. But down the road an independent counsel is going to be needed because the House does not have all the prosecutorial powers an independent counsel would—the powers to empanel a grand jury, grant immunity to potential witnesses, find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, indict.

Another reason to want an independent counsel: There are obviously many good, fair-minded workers in the IRS, people of sterling character. They deserve to be asked about what they were forced to put up with, what they felt they had to bite their tongues about.

There may even be a few stories about people who stood up and said: “You know you’re targeting Americans because they hold political views you don’t like, right? You know that’s wrong, right? And I’m not going to do it.”

It would be worth an investigation that breaks open the IRS to find that person, and that moment. You have no idea how much better it would make us feel, how inspiring and comforting, too.

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