Much of the liberal intelligentsia (including those in the Obama administration) have, to their credit, condemned the IRS targeting of conservative groups — or at the very least, have not sought to defend it. Perhaps that’s because all of the early attempts at justifying, excusing, minimizing, insulating, and explaining away the practice came up so short.

It was just Cincinnati.

This was one of the earliest attempts to minimize the bigness of this deal, one cooked into the IRS’s own statements and apologies. It is also one of the lamest.

It’s true that much of the targeting took place at the IRS’s Cincinnati offices, but that’s because that’s where the IRS’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division is headquartered.

If I punched you in the face, you wouldn’t take much comfort in my blaming only my hand. Besides, there were other offices involved — according to the Washington Post, at least two in California and one in D.C.

It was just “rogue,” “front line” people.

Similarly, the IRS’s 501(c) honcho, Lois Lerner, along with administration officials and their defenders in the media, emphasized that these were “front line” employees, not senior managers or political appointees. Just Wednesday, acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller claimed he had identified two “rogue” employees responsible for the bulk of the targeting. But the coordination between offices, and the involvement of Washington, cast doubt on the idea that this was a two-man job. Lerner became aware of the targeting, at the very latest, in 2011, and the IRS commisioner and his deputy learned about it in May of 2012. But none saw fit to go public with that knowledge, even though there were during this time well-documented complaints of excess scrutiny that were emanating from tea-party groups. Miller may have even lied about the targeting operation in response to congressional inquiries.

There was no political motivation.

Lerner has also claimed that there was no political bias involved in the decision to put conservative groups through the ringer. She would not elaborate on how she knows this except to say, “That is not how we do things.” This might be easier to swallow if hers hadn’t been the same division that last year illegally leaked tax information about Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS to George Soros’s ProPublica.

The IRS was “going where the action was.”

Both Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum have made the argument that, though it went about it sloppily, the IRS was trying to solve a legitimate problem: how to flag improper applications amid an explosion of applicants. They chose conservative linguistic markers, according to Klein, because there had been an increase in tea-party-themed applicants, and “like Willie Sutton robbing banks, [IRS auditors] were going where the action was.” The problem with that is it sounds a lot like the kind of profiling folks like Klein and Drum typically abhor in criminal investigations. And in a way, it’s worse, since the IRS has not presented any evidence, or any ex ante reason besides pure political bias, to think conservative groups were more likely to file unqualified applications than any other kind of group. As Megan McArdle rightly argues, the way to figure out where to focus your energy when you see a massive surge in applications is to take a random sample. The whole issue here is that the IRS took a decidedly non-random one.

The Tea Party deserves extra scrutiny.

As we move from mere disclaiming to full-throated defenses of what the IRS did, the most common point you hear made is that lots of conservative groups really are masked electioneers and don’t deserve 501(c)(4) status. Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker asks: “Did the I.R.S. actually do anything wrong? . . . Particularly leading up to the 2012 elections, many conservative organizations, nominally 501(c)(4)s, were all but explicitly political in their work.” Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson writes that “what the IRS was doing was, at long last, bringing scrutiny to under-scrutinized groups that are classified under the tax code as ‘social welfare’ organizations but are basically engaged in partisan politics.”

In addition to the problem of there being no evidence that conservative groups are more guilty of this than other groups, these arguments are critically wrong on the facts – 501(c)(4)s can electioneer, and even endorse candidates. From the IRS’s own guidelines: “An exempt IRC 501(c)(4) organization may intervene in political campaigns as long as its primary activity is the promotion of social welfare.” As Josh Barro points out, promoting social welfare is so broadly construed that it can easily accommodate explicitly political action of various kinds (everything from promoting animal rights to lobbying for tax reform). Maybe these rules are too broad and vague, but that’s for Congress to fix, and they’re not broad and vague in a way that enables conservatives to take some special advantage of them.

The Tea Party deserves extra scrutiny . . . because it’s racist.

This claim wouldn’t even be worth debunking if it weren’t the chairman emeritus of the NAACP making it.

“I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the Tea Party,” Julian Bond told MSNBC. “I mean, here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who tried as best they can to harm President Obama . . . They are the Taliban wing of American politics and we all ought to be a little worried about them.”

Maybe this isn’t worth debunking after all, but since I’ve already started typing I’ll note that 1) advocating IRS scrutiny of groups criticizing the current president doesn’t strike me as the best standard for a man who claims his own group was scrutinized by the IRS for being critical of the last president, and 2) If the IRS were interested in weeding out racist 501(c)(4) applications (even if such a thing were legal, which it still wouldn’t be), they might have searched for—wait for it—evidence of racism as opposed to evidence of conservatism. Unless merely being conservative implies (overt!) racism, which is not the sort of thing an apolitical IRS would think, is it?

The IRS has always been used as a political weapon.

This might be the oddest defense, even the preceding one included. Wonkblog writes about the persecution of a radical lesbian collective in the Seventies. Salon says Dubya’s IRS went after Greenpeace in the Aughts. Mother Jones catalogues how FDR, Ike, JFK, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and especially Tricky Dick probably used the IRS to take their enemies down a peg. This is supposed to be a mitigating factor, is it?

Lost in the “business as usual” defense is any hint of awareness about why the IRS would be such an attractive vehicle for persecution and punishment. Namely that, as long as you have a welfare state as hungry and a tax code as byzantine as ours, you’ll need a 100,000-strong organization of collectors to administer it. And they will require the kind of capricious and privacy-shredding powers that would chill us if exercised by a better-armed wing of the state (imagine the DHS asking you, under penalty of perjury, what kind of books you read), but that are exercised by the IRS as a matter of course.

— Daniel Foster is news editor of National Review Online.