The blame game.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Internal Revenue Service tax exemptions - Brief article

Who should be accountable in this case? More than any other official, Douglas Shulman, who was appointed by George W. Bush and was the head of the IRS during the entire period in question, should have been responsible for avoiding these predictable problems. And those of his subordinates who came up with the outrageous questions, like the ones about religious belief and practices, should be held accountable too.

But accountability should not end with Shulman and a few IRS employees. The White House, Congress, and the media all need to be accountable for preventing the predictable. What they have usually done instead is to act only after a predictable problem has led to a scandal or disaster. Barack Obama says that Robert Gates told him shortly after he took office that "someone, somewhere in the government was screwing up every day." Yet despite that warning, Obama has too often seen his job not as preventing problems but as fixing them only...