I think The Washington Posts' most annoying right-wing, neocon blogger drank one too many shots of revisionist history KoolAid before appearing on Fox News Sunday and pretending that George W. Bush "demanded a level of accountability and candor" during the Plame investigation that President Obama has not during this IRS drummed up "scandal."
Just because no one took the Fifth, doesn't mean that they didn't lie and it hardly equates to anyone who was involved in that fiasco being either candid or held accountable for their actions.
Maybe Rubin could do a little reading here, and here, and here to refresh her memory about the Plame affair and whether Karl Rove told the truth to the grand jury.
And I hate to break it to Rubin, but Lois Lerner, the Bush appointee who took the Fifth when asked to testify before Issa's committee, is not one of President Obama's "people."
Transcript below the fold.
WALLACE: Let's turn -- just this is an embarrassment of riches here for a Sunday talk show to the IRS case. According to a new poll, 76 percent now think that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate whether the IRS targeted conservative groups, and the IRS missed the deadline that they had on Friday to respond to a series of questions from the Senate Finance Committee. Jennifer, this scandal clearly has legs.
JENNIFER RUBIN, THE WASHINGTON POST: Absolutely. The average American does not like the IRS to begin with, and the notion that this should be used to attack political opponents and more than that, to go and then audit donors, just smacks of political bullying and corruption, everything that Republicans said was coming with this administration. I do think that in the case of the IRS there's an additional problem, which is no one pretends to know anything about anything. The president claims he was kept out of the loop by his White House counsel. The people at the IRS can't tell us who started this. So it looks as bad as it seems. It looks even worse than it seems, because everyone seems to be ducking, failing to take responsibility.
As far as an independent prosecutors, conservatives have a love/hate relationship with the idea. On one hand, these people have in the past gotten out of hand and run amok. In addition, once the independent prosecutor gets involved, these things tend to go undercover for a period of time. I think the Republicans benefit by having this out in the open. I think the question is whether the president is ever going to order his people to cooperate. Lois Lerner took the Fifth and was then put on ...
WALLACE: She is the head of the tax exempt division at the IRS.
RUBIN: Right. But he has not sent out an order as George Bush did, in the Valerie Plame decision, I do not want anyone in this administration to refuse to cooperate. That cost some people in his administration dearly. But no one took the Fifth in that case. Karl Rove testified, Scooter Libby testified. He demanded a level of accountability and candor that this president has not. And I think that whole hide the ball mentality, and the president's unwillingness to push his people forward to give a complete story is going to hurt him as well.
