Darrell Issa, John Boehner not "taking the bait" with current White House scandals.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) This is not going to end up being a windmill joust against Barack Obama. Much to the Democrats’ secret displeasure.

GOP leaders will help coordinate various House investigations into controversies involving the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the State Department.

But the key Republican lawmaker with jurisdiction on all these matters said that a rerun of the Clinton-era probes won’t occur.

“These are all different agencies of government. This administration owns the failures, but not necessarily the direct blame … we’re looking at each individual case so it’s very different than what you view historically as a target where it [was] always about President Clinton. This isn’t about President Obama,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Hill.

Of course it’s not. It’s about the proper application of pain. Fully deserved pain, I hasten to add: the national Democratic party broke its tacit deal with the national Republican party (and more importantly, the United States of America) in 2008 by nominating and electing a man woefully unsuited for leading the country; worse, the new President brought along with him a political crew trained in Chicago’s profoundly poisonous (yet resolutely second-string) political environment. As I said on Twitter a couple of days ago, what has resulted since then has not been a flaw in the system; it is the system, and we’re going to have to be pretty vigorous about cleaning out the rot.

The trick, of course, is to not over-focus on the man at the top. It’s the President’s political appointees and (mostly union) allies in the bureaucracies that have to go, of course: Barack Obama will be walking out the door on January 20, 2017 any which way*. As for hastening Obama’s Walk of Shame: the major problem with impeachment is that it leads inexorably to “Joe Biden? President of the United States? Good God!” – remember, in the 1990s Al Gore was not yet widely considered to be quite mad – which means that an unsuccessful impeachment attempt would be worse than both a successful impeachment attempt, and no impeachment attempt at all. In fact, the goal here is not to make it personal, period. Speaker John Boehner put it pretty well, I think: “Asked at a Thursday press conference if he still trusts the president, Boehner responded, “It’s not about trusting someone. Our job here is to get to the truth, and we’re going to get to the truth. And I know what you’re up to. I’m not taking the bait.””

I know, I know: you’re personally offended by this White House. So am I. You want the whole sorry lot of them to, as Robert Ludlum vividly put it once, to end up cleaning urinals in Cairo. So do I. You’d like this to be over, because there’s three and a half more years of fecklessness scheduled from this administration. I fully share in that profound and comprehensive disgust. But there is an ancient saying of my people that applies, here: