GSA also blew a chunk of taxpayer money on a big conference/party, you’ll remember, but the $800,000 they spent is a drop in the bucket compared to the $4 million wasted by the IRS on its gala in Anaheim three years ago. And that $4 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the $50 million that the IRS flushed on conferences from 2010 to 2012. But the $4 million event deserves special attention, not just because the number’s so large but because, per CNN, America’s tax-enforcement branch apparently … doesn’t have all the receipts for it. Really. Watch to the end of the clip to see Cooper make a good point, too: This particular conference was held around the time they first started targeting tea partiers in the nonprofits division. While they were demanding reams of information from small groups, most of which have budgets under $25,000 a year, they were farting out millions of dollars you gave them with no serious attempt to account for how it was spent.

I asked on Twitter this morning, in honor of Susan Rice’s promotion to NSA and Victoria Nuland’s impending promotion to Assistant Secretary of State, whether anyone — anyone — has been held accountable yet for any of the scandals on Obama’s watch. Lois Lerner and one of the Benghazi scapegoats are on “administrative leave,” a.k.a. paid vacation, but haven’t been fired, thanks in part to union rules that make it difficult for the feds to can crappy employees. Steve Miller resigned as IRS commissioner, but he famously had just a few weeks left in his term when he did. Has anyone else been punished? Has Obama demanded a resignation from anyone inside the White House itself to prove his displeasure? He won’t boot Eric Holder over the DOJ leak dragnets either, despite the fact that some Democrats (including Democrats in the White House) also think he should go. What you’re seeing here, between the promotion/retention of malfeasors and incompetents and the IRS showering itself with cash with no serious effort made at keeping track of it, is the feds’ contempt for citizens who empowered them unleashed. There’s barely even a pretense of accountability; you’d think the IRS would have scrupulously tracked what it was spending money on so that, if challenged on its profligacy, it would at least be able to show that it was following the same basic record-keeping rules it applies to taxpayers. The fact that it didn’t means it’s unconcerned with even the appearance of responsible stewardship. The indulgence is bad enough but the double standard vis-a-vis the public is statism in its decadent phase. Time for a complete agency overhaul.