Via Mediaite, there are only two possibilities here. One: Such is the denial and obfuscation at MSNBC over Scandalmania that Republicans are now being blamed for not building a time machine and exposing Obama’s scandals before anyone (except the IRS) knew for sure there was a scandal. I hope that’s what Finney’s suggesting here, just because I like the idea that it’s somehow Romney’s fault, not Obama’s, for not being aggressive enough in revealing wrongdoing by Obama’s administration.

Two: She’s referring to the fact that Issa and his committee knew last year that the IG was investigating tea-party complaints, even though (a) they couldn’t know for sure at the time what the results of the investigation would be and the IG took care to make sure they didn’t find out before November, and (b) if Issa or Romney had taken Finney’s advice here and accused Obama and the IRS last year of targeting tea partiers without any hard proof, they would have been capital-D Destroyed by the media for it. Right? Imagine Romney walking out to a presser last October, a few points down in the polls, and declaring that he had it on good authority that the Treasury Department would find that the IRS had targeted Obama’s political opponents for extra scrutiny and that he … couldn’t actually prove a word of it. But he had sources! Just like the sources Harry Reid supposedly had showing that Romney hadn’t paid income tax in 10 years or whatever. How would our fair and newly credulous press have reacted to that claim four weeks or so out from an election, with Precious’s sweet ass on the line? How would, say, MSNBC and Karen Finney have greeted that claim? The surreal punchline to this clip is that tea partiers did complain, long and loudly, months before the election, and apart from a few outlets the media paid them no mind. The New York Times actually published a now-infamous editorial congratulating the IRS for taking a hard look at them. In fact, if the White House had pushed back hard after the news first broke two weeks ago and argued that special IRS scrutiny of conservative nonprofits was proper under the circumstances, it’s a lead-pipe cinch that there’d still be plenty of media people defending the agency today. No wonder Scandalmania’s destroying their ratings.