But with the easing of scandal fever on the Potomac, Republicans are back to fighting one another, and the week-long Senate clash between freshman Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. John McCain over the budget is exposing the yawning gulf within the party once again.

Now that the GOP-dominated House and Democratic-led Senate have passed very different budgets, McCain has tried to argue for the formation of a conference committee that would try to reconcile the two. That might be a thankless, impossible task nowadays, but it’s nonetheless the way Congress has always worked. Democrats agree with McCain, and so do most Republicans.

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Acting IRS director Stephen Miller walked the plank, even though there’s no evidence he had anything to do with the wrongful targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, and the commissioner of the agency's tax exempt and government entities division, Joseph Grant, is retiring early. I’m not defending either man; bad things happened on their watch and that’s what happens to people at the top. Yet the woman at the center of the scandal, Lois Lerner, the IRS director of exempt organizations, still has a job --  and that makes no sense.

I don’t like scapegoating, but Lerner seemed like a reasonable candidate to lose her job even before she delivered a tin-eared self-defense in front of Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee – and then pleaded the Fifth Amendment, exercising her constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination,

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Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

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Case in point: Its hilarious “D.C. turns on Obama” piece last week, which marked the crest of Scandalmania and also helped explain polls that show Americans trust President Obama’s version of events when it comes to the Benghazi and IRS controversies. I expected polls to show people believe the president on these issues, but I’ll admit I was surprised to see his approval rating actually ticked up a bit despite the constant drumbeat of scandal. But it did -- and that should force the media to look in the mirror, though it probably won’t.

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The dog whistle quote came via NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday from Peggy Noonan, who can no longer be taken seriously as a writer or pundit. When host David Gregory pressed her on the lack of evidence for her claims that the IRS scandal was worse than Watergate, Noonan insisted that the president “was giving a dog whistle to people who could launch this thing." The former Reagan-Bush speechwriter vividly summed up, in her thousand points of crazy style, where the IRS “scandal” went over the last few days: Obama didn’t need to order the tax agency to harass Tea Party groups (and his critics don’t need proof that he did so): his criticizing the group during the 2012 campaign, as well as blasting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, represented an implicit order to do so.

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Karl didn’t appear on CNN, but he gave Kurtz a statement which is brazen and baffling.

Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands.  I should have been clearer about the attribution.  We updated our story immediately.

-Jonathan Karl, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent

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The New York Times’ Peter Baker gave us a great gift Thursday morning when he described President Obama  fantasizing about “going Bulworth” in an otherwise-mundane piece about Obama’s current woes. Mired in two faux-scandals – Benghazi and the IRS – and less wounded, but still singed, by the the Department of Justice seizing phone records from the Associated Press in a national security leak probe, Obama is facing predictable criticism from enemies and well-meaning but fairly useless advice from friends about his “leadership,” and Baker rehashes it all.

But the “going Bulworth” revelation jumped out at me – as it did at a lot of folks, from everywhere on the political spectrum. Depending on your memory and your ideology, the 1998 movie -- starring Warren Beatty as an idealistic turned sellout Democratic senator who commits himself to telling the truth about money in politics, and lusting after Halle Berry, once he puts out a contract on his own life -- is a memorable satire of American politics.

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In fact, the only known 501(c)(4) applicant to have its status denied happens to be a progressive group: the Maine chapter of Emerge America, which trains Democratic women to run for office. Although the group did no electoral work, and didn’t participate in independent expenditure campaign activity either, its partisan status apparently disqualified it from being categorized as working for the “common good.”

Ironically, the national organization and its earlier chapters had gotten tax-exempt status by the IRS during the Bush administration in 2006. But it appears as though the Maine group’s rejection triggered a review of the entire organization, and Emerge America and all of its chapters had their tax-exempt status revoked. Emerge reincorporated with 527 status, which requires it to report its donors. You can read the IRS letters explaining its decisions at the bottom of this post.

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The Benghazi “scandal” lost velocity thanks to CNN’s Jake Tapper reporting that an email key to the notion that the White House doctored talking points to protect the State Department didn’t at all read the way ABC’s Jonathan Karl reported it. Karl quoted White House national security communications adviser Ben Rhodes’ email specifically saying the talking points should “reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department,” but the actual email obtained by Tapper didn’t mention the State Department at all. Karl ended the day with the shocking admission that while he’d reported on air that he’d “obtained” the emails in question, and wrote online that he’d “reviewed” them, in fact he’d only heard about them from the notes of a source – presumed to be a House GOP staffer.

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But CNN’s Jake Tapper reveals that Rhodes’ email didn’t mention the State Department, and doesn’t even seem to implicitly reference it. The email as published by Karl differs significantly from the original obtained by Tapper.

According to ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Rhodes weighed in after State Department’s Victoria Nuland, who expressed concerns about the way the talking points might hurt “my building's leadership.” ABC quotes Rhodes saying:

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I faced a similar anxiety: My mother died of breast cancer at 45; my grandmother was diagnosed at 48 and survived. Like Jolie, after I had a child, I became increasingly anxious about my own risk. There was no genetic testing 20 years ago, so I consulted a variety of doctors, including a genetic counselor. I was told I had an elevated risk of breast cancer, though it couldn’t be quantified (Jolie’s doctors estimated hers was 87 percent). At least one doctor recommended a double mastectomy. Another cautioned against it, noting that it can’t eliminate all risk of breast cancer (Jolie’s is now estimated at 5 percent). He railed at surgeons describing the breasts of women like me as “ticking time bombs” and advising unnecessary prophylactic mastectomies.

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“Remember when she said, ‘well who cares how this happened,’ in a rather emotional way?” McCain asked guest host Martha Raddatz. “A lot of people care.” It’s too bad Raddatz didn’t tell the senator that no, she didn’t remember that – because Clinton never said it.

Remarkably, I’ve seen no one follow up on McCain’s misstatement today either. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong.) Instead, reporters are breathlessly parsing each new GOP charge on Benghazi (while also decrying the very real abuse of the IRS overscrutinizing the tax-exempt status of conservative groups.) The National Journal’s Ron Fournier tweeted “Welcome to the 90s,” with no apparent irony or self-awareness about the role of the media in ginning up that decade of phony scandals that paralyzed our last popular second-term Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

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So was Chris Christie's lap band surgery; it’s obvious what that means. Joe Biden tells Rolling Stone he spends four to five hours a day with President Obama -- we all know why. The attempted rehabilitation of George W. Bush was all about the presidential ambitions of his brother Jeb. Sen. Marco Rubio’s immigration reform proposals are covered almost exclusively in terms of what they mean for his 2016 chances, not for U.S. immigration policy. And the White House schemes of freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, instead of being a laughable footnote in stories about his radicalism, are instead headline news everywhere.

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Maybe he knew the whole hero story line would come with an unhappy ending: Now we’ve learned, via the Smoking Gun, that Ramsey was charged with and served time for multiple domestic violence counts. He was also convicted and imprisoned on drug charges and receiving stolen property.

All of that is awful, particularly for his ex-wife and daughter. But it doesn’t change the fact that Ramsey was a hero when he helped Amanda Berry escape Monday night. It may make him even more admirable, if he had an inkling that his sudden fame might expose his troubled past.

Writing my piece about Cleveland's lost girls, I watched Ramsey's interview with Cooper twice just before the news about his past convictions broke. Even without that information, I found the encounter a little strange. For one thing, Ramsey insisted on saying Ariel Castro was “cool,” and not a “freak of nature.” He seemed to be reminding us that even monsters can appear decent, and even decent people can do bad things.

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Ramsey did what Cleveland authorities over a decade could not: He not only helped Berry get free, but he put himself in her shoes; he empathized enough to intervene in what he first assumed was a domestic violence dispute. (Breaking news from the Smoking Gun that Ramsey himself served prison time for domestic violence charges doesn't negate Ramsey's role in freeing Berry.)

We still don’t know how much police are culpable for failing to find Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. Multiple neighbors say they called 911 to report seeing women in distress; the police deny getting their calls. Confronted with those police claims, neighbor Israel Lugo told MSNBC: “It’s a bunch of BS.”

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“I’m a Republican. I like Chris Christie. I want him to run. I just want him to lose weight,” Mariano said. “I’m a physician more than I’m a Democrat or Republican. And I’m worried about this man dying in office.” The White House doctor under George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Mariano revealed that she helped Clinton lose 30 pounds, and suggested Christie could be helped, too.

“If he can overcome this disease, he deserves the White House,” the doctor later told the Newark Star-Ledger. “He’s a tough SOB. And all of us really like him because he’s refreshingly honest. He’s no BS-er. … I want him to lose weight so he can win the office.”

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National Republicans nominally abandoned Sanford after it became public that he was being sued by his ex-wife Jenny for violating a no-trespassing order at her home – to watch the Super Bowl with his son, he claimed – on top of that small matter of violating his oath of office as governor when he disappeared for five days to be with his Argentine mistress (now his fiancée) back in 2009, on the taxpayer’s dime.

Sanford fell 9 points behind Colbert-Busch in a PPP poll after the trespassing revelation (more on that possibly flawed poll later), but he’s a point ahead in the latest PPP survey, and could very well win.

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Chasing delusion and projection is easy. Dejection, not so much, especially when some of it seems to come from the president himself.

First the easy part: Obama is a real president, Michael Douglas wasn’t. LBJ had overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate; Obama’s party lost the House, and its Senate majority is meaningless because of the outrage of current filibuster rules. LBJ also dealt with reasonable Northeastern Republicans, who gave him overwhelming majorities for civil rights legislation when the Solid South began to secede from the Democratic Party largely over race. Obama, by contrast, has mainstream Republican leaders who are terrorized by their right flank and who declared their highest priority was blocking his reelection and his agenda; they failed at the first part but are doing a good job at the second.

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Time has the details, but the top line is:

When given a choice, 61 percent of Americans say they are more concerned about the government enacting new anti-terrorism policies that restrict civil liberties, compared to 31 percent who say they are more concerned about the government failing to enact strong new anti-terrorism policies.

Only 32 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. government can prevent all major attacks, down from an average of 40 percent in 2011 and 41 percent in 2006. And by contrast with polls taken in the wake of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, when only 23 percent of voters polled showed reluctance to give up civil liberties to protect terrorism, 49 percent said they were not willing to give up such rights, as opposed to 40 percent who were.

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Talking about how President Obama’s advisers dismissed the notion of a veto because the bill passed both the House and Senate with veto-proof majorities, I listed some progressives who voted for the bill, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Maxine Waters. I also included Rep. Barbara Lee, which was really surprising to me. Surprising, because I was wrong, and she didn’t cave.

My larger point stands: Although the White House blames the overwhelming congressional vote for its inaction, had the president made voting against the bill a priority for Democrats, the bill would likely still have passed, but not with a veto-proof majority. It only got 41 “no” votes, 29 of them Democrats. (Here's the final vote.) Now that the FAA’s been protected, we’ll likely see other carve-outs – but none will protect Head Start kids or Meals on Wheels recipients. Those of us who thought the August 2011 debt-ceiling "compromise" that led to the sequester deal was "a sugar-coated Satan sandwich" were right.

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