Where have all the scandals gone?

Two months ago, you couldn't turn on the TV or read a paper (if you still read papers) without tripping over the latest scandal inside the Obama Administration. There was talk of impeachment, the curse of the second term, and, most outrageously, of Nixon. Now, they have all gone away. The reporting on Benghazi emails turned out to be flawed, and the IRS, we learn, was scrutinizing left- and right-wing groups more or less equally. What was sold as an ideological vendetta seems, as some cooler heads predicted, to be nothing more than a case of an overworked, underfunded bureaucracy looking for a shortcut. (If you want to blame the stampede on the herd mentality of the news industry, you have my blessing.) There is still the problem with the NSA, but Republicans who can usually be relied upon to savage Obama over every little contretemps have backed off for fear of looking weak on national security.

Over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait has a helpful summary of how the air went out of the balloon.