As Fox News puts it, “a string of embarrassing episodes for the Obama administration that the president didn’t seem to know about until the public did” is making a number of folks wonder about the quality, or the mendacity, of the staff with whom President Barack Obama has surrounded himself.

I have a different question.  Call me cynical, but on what basis do we conclude that Obama actually didn’t know in advance about IRS abuses of conservative groups, NSA overreaches, the likelihood of disaster for his Obamacare rollout, the risk to and the threat against his State Department’s Benghazi consulate, his DoJ’s search-and-seizure of press phone records, …?

Why do we believe that Obama didn’t know full well about these problems?  Besides his own claim that all he does is read the newspapers, I mean?

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius—she of the previous party engagement excuse for declining to testify last week about Obamacare’s rollout failure—now is suggesting, with an absolutely straight face (say what you will about the lady; she’s a consummate actress), that Republicans, with their efforts to interfere with the infliction of Obamacare, contributed to Healthcare.gov’s failed rollout.

That’s because, you see, it was Republicans who were overseeing the writing and testing of all that bad code—both on the front end, where we can’t get in easily, and on the back end that manages data transfer to the insurers, claim processing and payment, and so on.

In an ideal world, there would have been a lot more testing, but we did not have the luxury of that.  And the law said the go-time was Oct. 1.  And frankly, a political atmosphere where the majority party, at least in the House, was determined to stop this anyway they possibly could…was not an ideal atmosphere.

[Emphasis added.]  Here’s her confession that her choices were politically made.  Aside from her decision to press with “the law said 1 Oct,” she had three years of development and testing available to her.  Her decision to dispense with adequate testing, and her decision to hew to a date on a calendar for rollout were purely political ones.

Evil Republicans.  Shiny.  Shut up.