The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers, a “PostPartisan” columnist, has been thinking lately: What if the recent closing of a WWII memorial in Washington, D.C., prompted by the federal shutdown, were somehow connected to those baseless allegations that the Obama administration sicced IRS agents on its political opponents?

There are similarities between how the Obama administration used the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to target its political enemies before the 2012 election and how it is using the World War II Memorial as a stage to discredit Republicans in the battle over the budget.

Not quite. The notion that Obama lieutenants leveraged the Internal Revenue Service to punish opponents is not true. And if Rogers doesn’t want to read the mouth-breathers at The New York Times, he can read his own paper, which came to the same conclusion.

Then again, it’s not even clear what premium, if any, Rogers places on empirical reality. He writes:

It’s clear that officials at the IRS thought of themselves as political agents who should use their office in furtherance of the president’s political goals. Maybe they had direct instructions from the White House or the Obama reelection team, maybe not.

Political agents! Direct instructions! Or, maybe not. Who knows?

[Photo credit: Associated Press]