Jonah Goldberg: “[The IRS scandal] is one of the great public relations turnaround stories of all time. Liberal groups successfully spun the incident as a well-intentioned mistake by a government agency trying to deal with a deluge of new applications from right-wing crazies let loose by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. The ‘real’ story was – again – Republican overreach. Never mind that there was no evidence for such an ‘uptick’ in applications – Lerner’s word. Indeed, evidence suggests that Lerner went looking for that evidence as an excuse for abuses she had already undertaken. So now the IRS claims that a computer crash has irrevocably erased pertinent emails (an excuse I will remember when I am audited). National Review’s John Fund reports that the IRS manual says backups must exist. If emails – which exist on servers, clouds and elsewhere – can be destroyed this way, someone should tell the NSA that there’s a cheaper way to encrypt data.”