Even if nothing comes of the IRS or James Rosen/AP snooping scandals; even if Holder keeps his job and nobody is fired in the bureaucracy, there may still be a political silver lining for the Republicans: removing the target on the Tea Party.
Conspiracies aside (such as the RINOs were in cahoots with the president to use the IRS to destroy their common enemy) it's going to be very hard for the administration to go on the wapath against the Tea Party from here through 2014. Any time they get the urge to call them 'tea baggers' (as Obama did in May of 2010, right when the targeting started), or 'terrorists' (as Biden did in 2011 before a debt ceiling vote), or accuse them of trying to destroy democracy or spread racism (the spitting incident during the Obamacare vote) they'll have to pause and consider how that might sound in the aftermath of IRS-gate. Republicans will be sitting on the ready to say "see, there they go again, we better check the IRS to see who got audited". That's a pretty good card to have.
Look, everyone knows Obama is going nowhere. There's no appetite in the national press to get rid of their Nobel Prize-winning trailblazing hero, one, because they don't want to be called racists by their elite friends and two, because they are hoping for the same change. It seems half of them are married to administration insiders anyway. So that's already becoming a dead end. The GOP may have to take what they can get but that's a pretty decent get.
AN ASIDE....
If anyone needs confirmation of the above theory that none of these scandals are going anywhere watch the White House daily press briefing today. The only controversial item broached was trying to get Jay Carney to respond to Issa calling him a liar. One Holder question, no followups. Pure milquetoast. Even Fox News is hard to figure, sending in Wendell Goler to ask puffy non-sensical questions, as if they are afraid. Why not send Rosen in there, guns blazing, while he's got some political capital?
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