The midweek edition of the Morning Jolt features a big roundup of the coming storm of Obamacare, further evidence that the IRS isn’t good at math, and this point about what happens when a very comfortable administration suddenly finds that its old spin and excuses don’t work anymore:

BOOM: The Implosion of the Obama Excuses for the Scandal Parade

Just how bad has it gotten for the Obama administration?

Not even his old spokesman Robert Gibbs can say his boss is handling this stuff well.

Former Obama White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs — now an MSNBC contributor — explained to Andrea Mitchell this afternoon that President Obama made White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s job more difficult due to his passive response to the scandals surrounding his administration

Carney would have had an easier time defending the president, suggested Gibbs, if the President had spoken out on the IRS scandal over the weekend.

“The problem is this — the tenor of this briefing would be different if the president had spoken about this on Saturday or Sunday and not on Monday,” Gibbs explained shortly after Carney struggled to answer reporters questions in the White House Press Briefing.

Gibbs added that President Obama sounded like he was “losing patience” with the issue “which is what I do with my 9-year-old.”

Gibbs explained that Obama should have used “more vivid” language and proposed a tough commission to look at the issue while waiting for the Inspector General to release his report on the scandal.

Well, at least Obama still has Mr. Leg-Tingle himself, Chris Matthews, who — wait, what?

Matthews: President Obama has got to stop taking advice from sycophants who keep telling him he’s right and only they can be trusted. He needs to act. He needs to fire people. He needs to grab control of his presidency. He needs to surround himself with people who are ready to fight on every front, because the three problems he faces now, Benghazi, the IRS and the FBI are less likely to be two problems by this time next week than there are to be four and counting. Why? Because, as I said, it’s not just that he’s under attack. It’s that he’s vulnerable. And that is obvious to everyone this side of the White House gates.

Who’s going to denounce the president next, Joe Biden?

What we saw in Tuesday’s White House press briefing, where the press corps appeared ready to break out the pitchforks and torches and go French Revolution on Jay Carney’s dishonest tush, is what happens when a very comfortable, very confident administration suddenly finds that none of the traditional scandal defenses work.

Dennis Miller: “Carney blows more smoke than a Rastafarian’s death rattle.”

Tuesday afternoon, Ace of Spades came up with the idea of a scandal-excuse prediction game in the form of an NFL-style draft, and Twitchy collected some of the best.

Ace began with, “low level employees”, took “Obama gives a historic speech” in the second round (overrated, I would argue that player peaked a few years ago and has really seen less playing time in recent years) and concluded the third round with a very versatile selection who gets a lot of playing time, “Some procedures may need review/Procedures have let us down again.” My first-round selection was the offspring of the Hall of Famer that everyone remembers from the breakout 1998 season, “The real story here is the shadowy network behind our critics making these baseless accusations.” In the second round I went with a player who has been on the field almost constantly since the start of the 2009 season, “If you look back to the Bush administration . . .”

It’s easy to predict these because anyone who has followed the news during more than one scandal has seen them before. There is a playbook in these sorts of matters: It wasn’t me, it was that other figure/local office over there. I was out of the loop. I was in the loop, but the concerns were never adequately communicated, in violation of established procedures. I knew about it, but I didn’t approve of it. There’s an ongoing review, I can’t comment. All of this happened a long time ago, you’re obsessed with ancient history. This is a distraction from the real business of the country. Finally, don’t you understand that my political enemies are behind this?

All of the above lines are meant to get you to focus on something besides what happened, who’s responsible, and who should be held accountable. All of this is mean to persuade us that their decisions and actions aren’t the problem; the problem is with us, for asking questions about it.

To hell with that.

“In my defense, you guys always swallowed these lines before.”

The final Morning Jolt of the week features trouble in Syria, Kerry getting static from Russia, an argument against the immigration bill from an unexpected source, more worries from . . . but the lead item is the morning’s breaking news:

BREAKING: Jay Carney Lied About the Benghazi Talking Points

Breaking this morning, from ABC News’ Jonathan Karl:

When it became clear last fall that the CIA’s now discredited Benghazi talking points were flawed, the White House said repeatedly the documents were put together almost entirely by the intelligence community, but White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

That would appear to directly contradict what White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said about the talking points in November.

“Those talking points originated from the intelligence community. They reflect the IC’s best assessments of what they thought had happened,” Carney told reporters at the White House press briefing on November 28, 2012. “The White House and the State Department have made clear that the single adjustment that was made to those talking points by either of those two institutions were changing the word ‘consulate’ to ‘diplomatic facility’ because ‘consulate’ was inaccurate.”

Here’s the kicker:

In an email to officials at the White House and the intelligence agencies, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland took issue with including that information because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned . . .”

Hey, why would they want to accurately inform the public if it might result in criticism from Congress, right?

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt features discussion of today’s 9/11 Anniversary, a note of caution about polling at this point, and then….

The Great Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012

One way or another, the nation will generate issues for the presidential candidates to talk about. Who had “a teacher’s strike in Chicago” as one of the big issues in early September?

I heard from one regular who thought this whole dispute in Chicago is being organized so that the Munificent Sun-King can fly in from Washington and calm the waters and bring everyone together in agreement “for the children.” Rush was theorizing along the same lines:

RUSH:  Last week I asked a stupid question, and it took me a couple of hours on Friday to figure it out.  I’ve been hoping I wouldn’t forget it all weekend.  And here we are, and I remember what it was.  The stupid question I asked was: “Why are the teachers in Chicago going on strike?”  The answer is very simple:  So Obama can solve it as a campaign issue.  That’s why they’re on strike.  It won’t be long before we hear Moochelle say that he’s up late at night on the campaign trail practically crying, reading letters from students in Chicago upset they can’t go to school.

The schools are open in Chicago for lunch and breakfast.  Teachers aren’t there.  Rahm Emanuel’s kids are at their $25,000-a-year private school.  The Chicago teachers have been offered a 16% raise.  How’s that compared to your raise at your job?  And they turned it down over some pension stuff.  You watch. Rahm Emanuel himself is the guy who said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”  We know that the unions, Obama and Rahm Emanuel, the Democrats, are in bed with each other.  So this, to me, I think it’s a perfect setup.

RUSH: This school teacher strike in Chicago? Let’s just see how long this thing goes on, and let’s see how it gets solved. Anybody want to bet against me that Obama’s the one that gets credit for this, in a few short days? Anybody want to bet that there might be a little bit of violence and finally Obama will have to move in and do something? He and Rahm will figure this out so they get credit for solving it. Because, I tell you: There is no union that is gonna go on strike right now for the express purpose of harming Barack Obama.

True enough, but I’ll cite Robert Heinlein on this: “You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.” We know from Wisconsin that unions are capable of taking enormously unpopular, short-sighted, self-destructive actions that disregard the advice of their allies. Some leader within the Chicago unions probably calculated that Rahm Emanuel and every other Democrat in public life would never defy the will of a major union two months before a presidential election. Ordinarily, they would be right.

Here’s the problem with the “Obama swoops in to save the day” theory: Everyone involved already has egg on their faces, mostly on the metaphorical visages of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the teachers’ unions. Under the conspiracy theory, all of these groups would have to be willing to take a tough PR hit from a multi-day strike. A bit of a hurdle, but possible.

But when you see stories like this one…

Parents didn’t know what to expect when they dropped off their children Monday at one of the city’s 144 schools that remained open as part of the district’s strike contingency plan. Some had to cross raucous picket lines where teachers were chanting about a fair contracts or banging drums and tambourines.

You start to wonder if some of the teachers are burying themselves in the part. This is going to stir up a lot of bad blood between parents and teachers, and that seems like a high long-term cost for the Chicago parties to play in order to help Obama play hero.

Finally, if Obama’s going to swoop in and play the hero… he can’t delay too long. At least for now, Obama is punting on this one, or at least he’s having Jay Carney do so on his behalf.

Q Thanks, Jay. A couple of topics, please. I’m wondering what the President’s reaction is to the teacher strike in Chicago, assuming he’s had a chance to follow that story, and whether he has any reaction to both the strike and how his former Chief of Staff is handling it.

MR. CARNEY: Well, I’m sure he’s aware of it — I know he’s aware of it, but I haven’t spoken with him about it, so I can’t speak for his reaction. I can tell you that as a — more broadly, that our principal concern is for the students, and his principal concern is for the students and families who are affected by the situation. And we hope that both sides are able to come together to settle this quickly and in the best interest of Chicago’s students. But beyond that, I haven’t got a specific reaction from the President.

Q Is it fair to characterize the White House as sort of neutral in this dispute?

MR. CARNEY: Well, we certainly haven’t expressed an opinion on how it should be resolved. We’re urging the sides to resolve it.

Q This has been — there are some reports that there were some Chicagoans that have brought this to the President’s attention, this coming showdown before. Can you talk –

MR. CARNEY: Not that I’m aware of. I mean, I’m not with him every moment of the day, but I — not in my presence, but I don’t know.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Wednesday: “We do not believe that there is a threat there of a double-dip recession.”

Meanwhile, an Obama supporter in Chicago Wednesday:

Leo Henton, 52, a Boeing engineer from Seattle who was on vacation with his wife, Cynthia, said that Obama was realistic in the face of stiff Republican opposition to raising taxes and cut the best deal he could.

“My opinion is that the deal is for 10 years and there’s a trigger,” said Henton, who was third in line. “We’re in a recession right now, or what sure looks like a recession to me. The heavy cuts will not come in for another two years. He did the wise thing in terms of the deal.”

I suppose they could both be right if we never really emerged from the first recession, a conclusion that the persistently high unemployment rate would seem to support.

White House press secretary Jay Carney argues, with a straight face, that leadership means waiting for House and Senate negotiators to come up with a plan:

TAPPER: OK. The House is passing something that many observers feel would never pass the Senate and the president has said he would veto. The Senate is passing — the McConnell-Reid plan, it’s not clear that that could pass the House. The Gang of Seven plan, it’s not clear that that could pass the House. Would this not be an opportune time for a president to lead and say, this —

CARNEY: Leadership is not proposing a plan for the sake of having it voted up or down, and likely voted down because it is — look, you know how this town works and how Congress works. If an individual, whether Democrat or Republican leader, steps forward and says, this is my plan and solely my plan, it makes it a lot harder for that plan to be the basis for a bipartisan compromise. The way to reach a bipartisan compromise is in bipartisan negotiations where a plan emerges that is the product of that negotiation and is supported by Republicans and Democrats and then presented. Otherwise, your chances of actually achieving something diminish greatly.

It’s good to know that the Obama doctrine applies to both domestic and foreign policy:

Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the president’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.”

— Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, May 2 issue