Reputation's Reputation

Somehow or other, reputation seems to have gotten a bad reputation.

Women, in particular, have been told that they should do as they wish, follow their bliss, act on their desires… and not care what anyone thinks of them.

These days, anyone who tells a young woman to be careful about her reputation will quickly be shouted down.

In a world where everyone is supposed to be seeking the elusive state called mental health, the therapy culture has declared that you can only get there by overcoming repression, overcoming shame and letting it all hang out.

Reputation is for saps, we are told. You cannot let loose with all your deepest feelings and worry what other people think of you.

The truth is, any human relationship will be damaged by being too open and too honest. A good reputation will contribute mightily to your success, both in your personal relationships and on the job.

No one wants to associate with someone who is disreputable, who cannot be trusted and whose word is not his bond.

Thus, it is with tongue firmly in cheek that Alison Green lists some of the best ways to ruin your professional reputation.

Since your professional reputation is one of your most valuable assets, you ought to be working to enhance it. Thus, her advice is well worth heeding. I will right-side it.

I will compress Green’s list, to begin with the most important one: keep your word.

When you say you will do something, do it.

When you say you will do something and it becomes inconvenient to do it, do it.

When you say you will do something and it becomes impossible to do it, do it anyway.

Obviously, there are occasions when it is impossible to keep your word, but you should not be thinking of the exceptions. You should be telling yourself that when you commit, you do it.

If you accept a job offer, you do not have the option of backing out of it.

If your actions should always follow fast upon your words, it is also bad to speak untruths. Lying damages your professional reputation.

If you recommend someone for a job when you know that the person is unqualified, you are lying. When you offer a recommendation, don’t think in terms of doing a favor for a friend. Act as though your reputation is on the line. It is.

And Green points that you must also avoid drama. Despite what the therapy culture has been drumming into your ears, you do better to keep your emotions to yourself.

Green explains:

It's normal to occasionally get frustrated, but you're crossing a line if you're yelling, slamming doors or snapping at people. It only takes one incident like this to get a reputation as the angry guy with whom no one wants to work, and that's a label that's very hard to shake.

Obviously, the same applies to emails. Do not, Green says, use email to express your feelings openly and honestly:

Whether it's jotting off an angry response to a new policy at work or sending a bitter reply after you get rejected for a job, angry letter bombs are hard to live down. You'll look like someone who doesn't know how to address concerns calmly and professionally, and most people will respond by giving you a wide berth.

Au Revoir to La France

In case you were asking yourself how all that socialism was working out for France, Time Magazine has the answer.

It’s been a year since the French, in their great wisdom, voted for the candidate who promised to raise taxes on the rich, to regulate businesses to death and to continue all of the generous welfare programs.

It hasn't been working out very well. The French are leaving their native land in droves, seeking freedom and opportunity elsewhere:

In fact, the sense that the world beyond France might hold a lot more promise for French people than home does has so intensified that in recent months two weekly magazines, L’Express and Le Figaro — both fiercely conservative critics of the Socialist government — featured the same cover headline: “Why they are leaving France.” L’Express added the subtitle: “It’s not just the rich!” as though the editors were amazed that regular folk would opt to try their luck elsewhere and forgo cherished French benefits like minimum five weeks’ annual paid leave, decent public health care and free schooling. The magazines cite the 300,000 French estimated to be living in London, and the 200,000 French residents of Belgium, a 25% rise since 2010, according to Le Figaro. Each magazine interviews young go-getters who’ve upped sticks for New York City, Dubai, Shanghai and elsewhere for better pay, more-rapid promotion and a chance to make their mark — things that those profiled say are all-but impossible under a sclerotic French system. Alexandre Perrot, 30, featured in Le Figaro, moved to New York City a year ago and works for a business-intelligence company, is quoted as saying that France’s system “does not value or stimulate active youth.”

If there’s anyone who still needs convincing that France is in a dyspeptic funk, a flurry of statistics last week showed just how serious the situation is. The statistics suggested that the problem might not be due only to Europe’s economic crisis, as Hollande argued during his press conference on May 16. On May 14,Pew Research published a poll saying that “no European country is becoming more dispirited and disillusioned faster than France,” with 91% of those surveyed by the organization saying that the economy was doing badly and 67% ranking Hollande as doing “a lousy job.” The next day, May 15, France’s official statistics agency INSEE announced that the country had entered its third recession in four years, with unemployment rising more than 11% since Hollande came to power. And on Friday came a new poll by Gallup, showing that only 16% of French youth were optimistic about their future, the lowest rate in the E.U. Compare that with Spain’s youth, 49% of whom felt optimistic about their future, even though their country’s unemployment rate is double that of France.

Who Thought What about the Arab Spring

It’s been more than two years since the Arab Spring broke out in Tunisia.

Thus, it seems reasonable to assess the outcome.

No one is better placed than columnist David Goldman. From the onset I have relied on Goldman and he has not disappointed. Nearly everyone else has.

From the New York Times columnists who camped out in Tahrir Square to breathe the air of a new democracy to the neo-conservatives who were cheering on the sidelines, the foreign policy establishment reached a quick consensus on the Arab Spring. They thought it was a good and great historical moment.

Goldman demurred at the time. Today, he believes that the Arab Spring has turned into a catastrophe:

Errors by the party in power can get America into trouble; real catastrophes require consensus.

Rarely have both parties been as unanimous about a development overseas as they have in their shared enthusiasm for the so-called Arab Spring during the first months of 2011. Republicans vied with the Obama Administration in their zeal for the ouster of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak and in championing the subsequent NATO intervention against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Both parties saw themselves as having been vindicated by events. The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.

“Revolutions are sweeping the Middle East and everyone is a convert to George W. Bush’s freedom agenda,” Charles Krauthammer observed in February 2011. “Now that revolution has spread from Tunisia to Oman,” Krauthammer added, “the [Obama] administration is rushing to keep up with the new dispensation, repeating the fundamental tenet of the Bush Doctrine that Arabs are no exception to the universal thirst for dignity and freedom.” And William Kristol exulted, “Helping the Arab Spring through to fruition might contribute to an American Spring, one of renewed pride in our country and confidence in the cause of liberty.”

They were all wrong.

As was expected, here and elsewhere, the Clinton-Obama foreign policy team was not up to the task. And yet, many of those who supported it should have known better.

For its part, the public was happy to be misled by media accounts. After all, the conduct of foreign policy requires a domestic political consensus.

Goldman explains:

The American public fell in love with the young democracy activists who floated across the surface of the Arab revolts like benzene bubbles on the Nile. More precisely, Americans fell in love with their own image, in the persons of hip young Egyptians who reminded them of Americans. Conservatives and liberals alike competed to lionize Google sales manager Wael Ghonim. Caroline Kennedy gave him the JFK Profiles in Courage Award in May 2011. He made Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. 

Americans are a generous people. We believe that everyone can be just like us. We reject the notion that every place is not like America.

Thus, we fail to understand the reality of other countries. In the process we misjudge what has made America.

In Goldman’s words:

The national consensus behind the Arab Spring peaked with the Libyan venture. Elliot Abrams was in a sense right: To intimate that democracy might not apply to Arabs seems to violate America’s first principle, that people of all background have the same opportunity for success—in the United States. It seems un-American to think differently. Isn’t America a multi-ethnic melting pot where all religions and ethnicities have learned to get along? That is a fallacy of composition, to be sure: Americans are brands plucked out of the fire of failed cultures, the few who fled the tragic failings of their own culture to make a fresh start. The only tragic thing about America is the incapacity of Americans to comprehend the tragedy of other peoples. To pronounce judgment on other cultures as unfit for modernity, as Abrams wrote, seems “a mockery of American ideals.”

Those who inhabit a world filled with lofty ideals ignored the economic realities. Goldman has always kept us informed about them:

The toppling of Hosni Mubarak and the uprising against Syria’s Basher Assad occurred after the non-oil-producing Arab countries had lurched into a dangerous economic decline. Egypt, dependent on imports for half its caloric consumption, faced a sharp rise in food prices while the prices of cotton and other exports languished. Asia’s insatiable demand for feed grains had priced the Arab poor out of the market: Chinese pigs were fed before Egyptian peasants, whose labor was practically worthless. Almost half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate, and its university graduates are unqualified for the global market (unlike Tunisians, who staff the help desks of French software firms). Out of cash, Egypt faces chronic food and fuel shortages and presently is on life support through emergency loans from its neighbors. The insoluble economic crisis makes any form of political stabilization unlikely.

Syria’s economic position is, if possible, even worse. Yemen is not only out of money, but nearly out of water. Large portions of the Arab world have languished so long in backwardness that they are beyond repair. After the dust of the popular revolts dissipated, we are left with banana republics, but without the bananas.

The lesson of the foreign policy catastrophe that was the Arab Spring is, Goldman asserts, that America is, in fact, exceptional:

But if large parts of the Muslim world reject what seemed to be an historic opportunity to create democratic governments and instead dissolve into a chaotic regime of permanent warfare, we might conclude that there really is something different about America—that our democracy is the product of a unique set of precedents, the melding of the idea of covenant brought here by radical Protestants, the traditions of Anglo-Saxon democracy, and the far-reaching wisdom of our founders. To present-day Americans, that is an unnerving thought. We do not wish upon ourselves that sort of responsibility. We eschew our debts to deep traditions. We want to reinvent ourselves at will, to shop for new identities, to play at the cultural cutting-edge.

What these events might teach us, rather, is that America really is exceptional and that there is no contradiction in cultivating our democracy at home while acting elsewhere in tough-minded pursuit of our security interests.

Michael Kinsley on the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

According to Michael Kinsley no one ever imagined the idea of gay marriage until 1989. From then on, this idea has taken over the minds of Americans with stunning rapidity.

Kinsley concludes that there can only be one reason why gay marriage has never existed: no one ever thought of it before.

Kinsley explains:

One reason the idea of gay marriage, or “marriage equality,” spread so fast is that it seems obvious once you think about it. It was a genuinely new idea when it first appeared in this publication in 1989. As was not the case with civil rights for African Americans, feminism, or for that matter gay rights themselves, there was no long history of opposition to be overcome. The challenge was simply getting people to think about it a bit.

Think about what, exactly?

Kinsley says that the issue was: “… a right (to marry someone you love) that every other American already enjoys.”

As I have been wont to point out, throughout most of human history most people did not marry someone they loved. The idea is more novelty than human universal. Most cultures do not have elaborate courtship and dating rituals. They arrange marriages for the good of the community, not for the affections of the individuals involved.

It is surely a good thing that spouses come to love each other, but that is not the same as saying that you should marry someone you love. If marriage were an expression of love, then surely someone would have thought of allowing same-sex couples to participate. If no one thought it, then perhaps Kinsley's premise is wrong: marriage is not an expression of love.

In truth, marriage is an arranged alliance between two families for the purpose who producing new members who belong to both families, and who thus, in their flesh symbolize community unity.

One would do well to consult Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book: The Elementary Structures of Kinship.

If that is what marriage has always been, it makes sense that no one ever imagined gay marriage.

In Kinsley’s rosy scenario gay marriage was an idea whose time had come. The idea has gone viral because once people started to think about it, it seemed perfectly obvious.

If Kinsley is correct then why do gay activists demonize and stigmatize anyone who does not assent to it. Are they saying that all human beings throughout all of human history up until 1989 had constructed the institution of marriage to discriminate against homosexuals?

To Kinsley, proponents of gay marriage have tried to deprive their opponents of the right to free expression. It is not, shall we say, a sign of great confidence in the rightness of their position.

He is especially concerned that John Hopkins Professor Dr. Ben Carson was forced to withdraw as commencement speaker by the Johns Hopkins Medical School because he had publicly rejected the notion that the union of two individuals of the same gender should be called a marriage.

Kinsley is puzzled by the fact that those who have won the debate and are fast on the way to make gay marriage the law of the land have not been more magnanimous in victory.

In his words:

Behind the First Amendment is the notion that good ideas have a natural buoyancy that bad ideas do not. In fact, the very short (as these things go) debate about marriage equality demonstrates this. Denying Carson the right to speak was not just unprincipled. It was unnecessary. The proponents of marriage equality have not just won. They have routed the opposition. It’s a moment to be gracious, not vindictive.

But, did the proponents of gay marriage rout the opposition because their ideas were right and true, or was it because they made it a civil rights issue and tarred all their opponents as bigots?

Keep in mind, as Kinsley intimates, that the idea of freeing yourself from oppression is as old as time. Whether it is freedom from enslavement or from abuse, the idea is not a human novelty.

Gay marriage, however, dates to 1989.

Surely, homosexuals have suffered oppression and abuse and have even been murdered for their sexual preference. In some parts of the world it is happening today. Everyone favors laws that punish such persecution severely.

Yet, that is not the point. The question is whether acceptance of gay marriage will solve these problems. And whether demonizing anyone who disagrees with it is productive or symptomatic.

Kinsley is especially appalled that the achievements of a great pediatric neurosurgeon should be erased because he does not agree with gay rights activists on a single issue:

All [Carson] did was say on television that he opposes same-sex marriage—an idea that even its biggest current supporters had never even heard of a couple of decades ago. Does that automatically make you a homophobe and cast you into the outer darkness? It shouldn’t. But in some American subcultures—Hollywood, academia, Democratic politics—it apparently does. You may favor raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, but if you don’t support gay marriage, you’re out of the club.

Kinsley adds that it is wrong to say that someone who does not support affirmative action, for example, is ipso facto, a racist. Finally, Kinsley takes out after the leftist thought police for trying to repress free expression and to impose political correct opinions on the populace.

He does not call it political correctness, but the description fits:

… to make support for marriage equality the test of right thinking on gay issues is absurd. In fact, the very idea of a “test of right thinking on gay issues” or any other kind of issues, is absurd. Gays, who know a thing or two about repression, ought to be the last people to want to destroy someone’s career because they disagree. In their moment of triumph, why can’t they laugh off nutty comments like Carson’s, rather than sending in the drones to take him out?

There is, Kinsley continues, no special virtue in taking offense. It is good that he has the courage to call out people who mostly agree with him for playing “the great game of umbrage.” He is correct to add that this game has been destructive to the great national political debate.

In Kinsley’s words:

The dean calls Carson’s remarks “hurtful.” They weren’t hurtful to him, unless he’s hopelessly oversensitive. The dean was just making a move in the great game of umbrage that has clogged American politics, where points are awarded for taking offense at something the other guy said. No one, when confronted with some opponent’s faux pas, or some stray remark that can be misrepresented as a faux pas, ever reacts anymore with: “Who cares?” Instead, it’s: “I am deeply, deeply offended by this person’s remarks. She should drop out of the race immediately, or quit her job, and move into a nunnery to contemplate her sins. And we certainly can’t let her speak at commencement because ...”

So it goes in a culture that tries to ensnare everyone in a narrative of sin, guilt and penance. If you believe that once we all cleanse ourselves of our sins we will magically know how to solve the debt problem and the unemployment problem… raise you hand.

What, Me Govern

When you’ve lost Andy Borowitz….

Andy Borowitz writes satirical columns for The New Yorker. His point of view is reliably liberal.

Thus, it is noteworthy when he takes on President Obama:

President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Obama should recall the immortal words of his guru, Saul Alinsky: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

Obama might be able to weather Congressional investigations and attacks by pundits and commentators. How well will he hold up when he starts looking ridiculous to those who support him the most?

Knowing When to Quit

It’s a great ethical issue. How do you know when to walk away from a losing investment and when to hold on tight?

It's easy to mock people who refuse to take a loss, but contrarian investment strategy suggests that you ought to buy more when the general consensus and your instincts are telling you to sell.

How do you know when the relationship in which you have invested your time and energy and prestige is not going to work out?

Is there a magic formula that will tell you when you relationship has nowhere to go but down? How do you know that a little more effort will turn things around?

No one framed the issue better than Kenny Rogers in his song, “The Gambler:”

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

Now Ev'ry gambler knows that the secret to survivin'
Is knowin' what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
'Cause ev'ry hand's a winner and ev'ry hand's a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.

If you are playing poker, Rogers says, you can know what to do by reading opponent’s face. If you are good at the game you can read his eyes and know whether he is bluffing or not.

Of course, if you opponent is also a great poker player the “tells” will be less obvious and might even be deceptive.

Heidi Grant Halvorson addresses these questions in The Atlantic. She focuses on people who tend to hold on to a losing hand too long.

It’s a complex issue. Sometimes, it’s right to take a loss. Sometimes it’s right to persevere. Perseverance can be a sign of good character. Bull-headed optimism that ignores reality is not.

Sometimes the extra investment will bring you an outsized reward. Sometimes you will be throwing good money after bad.

Psychologists tend to assume that there is a right decision and that if our minds were properly rational we would naturally be inclined to make it. Often, there is no clear right or wrong thing to do, so we balance levels of risk against possible rewards.

Halvorson offers the example of a company that is building a new type of airplane. They have advanced their project to the point where they are almost ready to complete the prototype. They only need to invest a little more money in the final stage.

But then, they discover that a competitor has completed its own prototype of an airplane that does what theirs can do, at a lower cost and more effectively.

In that case, there is no ambiguity. Continuing the ill-conceived project is throwing good money after bad. It does not take very much discernment to know what to do.

In most situations, the answer is anything but clear. Let’s say that you have invested several years in a relationship. It is a good relationship. You are hoping that it will become a marriage. Your friends and family like the two of you as a couple. You might even be living together. Now, your paramour is not sure about marriage; he or she is asking for more time.

Should you stay or go? Should you invest more in a good relationship or end it and go looking for someone who is less hesitant about marrying you?

One might also ask whether the crisis can be managed more effectively if we understand that there are options besides staying and going.

Economists and psychologists who have studied these issues have focused on the self-defeating behaviors that occur when people refuse to take a loss.

If you need to see the bet or to fold you know that if you fold your hand you will have lost. If you see the bet, you might win and you might lose.

Which is better the certainty of defeat or the possibility of victory?

Of course, if you know that you will definitely lose, wagering more on the hand is foolish. If you don’t know to a certainty, it becomes less foolish.

When economists and psychologists say that we refuse to quit because we hate to take a loss, they ignore the fact that there is more virtue in perseverance than in quitting. The former has a better reputation than the latter.

Halvorson explains some of the reasons we might use to rationalize not quitting when we should quit:

We may throw good money after bad or waste time in a dead-end relationship because we haven't come up with an alternative; or because we don't want to admit to our friends and family, or to ourselves, that we were wrong. But the most likely culprit is this innate, overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.

Sunk costs are the investments that you've put into something that you can't get back out. They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate, or waiting for your commitment-phobic boyfriend to propose. They are the thousands of dollars you spent on redecorating your living room, only to find that you hate living in it. Once you've realized that you probably won't succeed, or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn't matter how much time and effort you've already put into something. If your job or your boyfriend have taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn't make sense to let them use up the years you've got left. An ugly living room is an ugly living room, no matter how much money you spent making it so.

This is easy if the decision is that clear. But, how do you know that you are in a dead-end relationship? How do you know that nothing can save it?

Psychologists from Northwestern University have offered a useful suggestion here. Instead of fretting about the loss involved in quitting, try looking at the potential profit.

If you are tempted to throw some more money into the pot because you cannot accept to have lost your “investment” think of what else you might do with that extra money. Think in terms of potential gain, not certain loss.

Halvorson explains:

Recent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui demonstrates an effective way to be sure you are making the best decisions when things go awry: focus on what you have to gain by moving on, rather than what you have to lose. When people think about goals in terms of potential gain, that's a "promotion focus," which makes them more comfortable making mistakes and accepting losses. When people adopt a "prevention focus," they think about goals in terms of what they could lose if they don't succeed, so they become more sensitive to sunk costs. This is the focus people usually adopt, if unconsciously, when deciding whether or not to walk away. It usually tells us not to walk away, even when we should.

So, it’s easier to take a smaller loss when you compare it to what you might gain by using using the investment otherwise. It might also be easier to take a small loss when you believe that you are facing a larger loss.

Then again, people who double down on losing hands are also thinking of potential gain. They believe that they can win the pot.

Bread and Circuses

For now, most Americans do not seem to be especially moved by the Obama administration’s serial abuses of power. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are appalled at the way the IRS interfered in the last election, but that seems to be as far as it goes.

It’s very difficult to sell a scandal when the economy seems to be improving and the stock market has been on an inexorable advance.

In 1998 Republicans discovered to their chagrin that when the economy is strong most citizens would rather not disrupt it by changing political leaders.

One might argue that the stock market is being kept a float on a sea of liquidity and that one day the liquidity will dry up. Then, the markets will decline and unhappy days will be here again.

Until then, everyone knows that the Dow is at a record high. Everyone knows that the deficit is contracting. Optimism reigns. Contrarian thinkers see it as a dire warning, but they are, by definition, a small minority. For most people the news coming from the markets has been good.

At the same time, unconscionably large numbers of Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have quit looking for work. If you think that this cohort would be sufficiently upset about its future prospects to hold the administration to account, you would be wrong.

Today’s unemployed are well-fed and well-entertained. They even have health insurance.

In a stroke of political genius the Obama administration has kept them afloat with food stamps and extended unemployment benefits. This group of potentially disaffected voters has been bought off. Its members see the drama surrounding the scandals as entertainment.

The administration has consolidated its power by offering what the Roman satirist Juvenal called “bread and circuses.”

Writing in 100 A. D., Juvenal described a Rome that was facing a moral decline:

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses 

Juvenal’s Rome had succumbed to temptation and devalued work in favor of leisure. In so doing Romans took leave of their civic responsibility. They resemble a populace that votes for its own entitlements in favor of job opportunities.

Formerly, being unemployed meant bearing a stigma. No more. Those who seem to be permanently unemployed are almost an entitled aristocracy. They do not have titles, but they feel and act as though they, by the accident of their birth, are entitled to live off the government.

Surely, it’s false pride, but for many people false pride is better than no pride.

They have confused leisure for happiness and are pursuing it with gusto. They are happy to vote for the candidates who give them the most while demanding the least.

Seeming to lack a sense of civic responsibility, they vote more for what is best for them, less for what is best for the country. 

They do not much care about whether a president abuses his power to attack his enemies, because they are benefiting from his power.

Of course, they do not believe that they bear any responsibility for their condition. Like their favorite president, or perhaps emulating their favorite president, they are happy to shift the blame.

When it comes to moral responsibility, Barack Obama is in a class by himself. His IRS has been caught persecuting Republican groups. His IRS has been caught persecuting Republican donors. It was all done to benefit his re-election campaign. What good is power if you cannot use it to persecute your enemies?

Barack Obama and his merry band of moral eunuchs are insisting that he bears no responsibility because he did not give any direct orders to the IRS.

In itself, this confuses criminal liability with moral responsibility. True enough, if people acted in your name on their own initiative without your consent or knowledge, you are not criminally liable. But, if they are working for you then you do bear moral responsibility. You should be mortified at what has happened.

Peggy Noonan provides the moral backdrop:

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

Let’s not forget, these actions by “rogue” IRS agents helped the Obama election campaign. Isn’t President Obama ashamed that his re-election victory has now been tainted by an abuse of IRS power?

If he isn’t, he should be. He should not continue to regale us with his fake outrage, but he does owe the nation an apology for the behavior of his IRS.