Noonan: Stonewalling IRS Corruption and Abuse

"'I don't know'. 'I don't remember'. 'I'm not familiar with that detail'. 'It's not my precise area'. 'I'm not familiar with that letter'.  These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate," writes Peggy Noonan in the WSJ, who argues that "if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken."

That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.

So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?

Noonan recounts the story of Catherine Engelbrecht—a nice woman, a citizen, an American.