I write in Politico today about administration officials and Democrats blaming Cincinnati for the IRS scandal:

They have all made Cincinnati a byword for scandal. By their account, there’s no explaining Cincinnatians. They are a strange and foreign people, noted for their bristling hostility to the tea party and their cussed resistance to direction or oversight from above. It’s a wonder the IRS is even able to maintain an office in Cincinnati, given the inherent recklessness of workers in that remote southern Ohio city.
The Cincinnati explanation has many virtues. It serves to minimize the scandal by blaming it on what sounds like a bureaucratic backwater, and it throws lower-level employees – rather than their supervisors – under the bus. Most important, the Cincinnati IRS office is about 505 miles from the White House, 504.2 more miles than the IRS headquarters at 1111 Constitution Ave. N.W.