“My question isn’t about who’s going to resign, my question is who’s going to jail over this scandal?”

— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by the Washington Post.

John Avlon: “For journalists, privacy concerns and the Patriot Act just got personal. In two brutal press conferences Tuesday afternoon, the Obama administration caught both barrels from a newly aggressive press corps.”

President Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs “criticized his former boss for what he called a late and ‘exceedingly passive’ response to the controversy surrounding the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) targeting of conservative groups,” The Hill reports.

Said Gibbs: “The problem is this – the tenor of this briefing would be different if the president had spoken about this on Saturday or Sunday and not on Monday. And if the president had spoken on Monday, less about losing patience on this, which is what I do with my 9-year-old, and used far more vivid language.”

Dana Milbank calls Obama the “disinterested president.”

First Read: “The Benghazi/IRS/AP stories over the past week have had this additional impact for the Obama White House: They’ve sidetracked the other issues that President Obama has wanted to discuss. (Frankly, they’ve also sidetracked us in media, too.) Last Thursday, Obama was in Austin, TX to talk about the economy; on Friday, he was selling implementation of his health-care law; on Monday night, the president traveled to fundraisers in New York, where expressed his desire to still work with Republicans (even as he raised money for Democrats for the ’14 midterms); and today at 11:00 am ET, he delivers remarks at a national peace officers memorial. Oh, there was another piece of news from yesterday the White House would have enjoyed to tout — the budget deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is estimated to fall to its lowest level since 2008.”

“So is this a temporary distraction or the beginning of the end of
Obama’s second term? Remember the warning we issued months ago about
second terms. Legislatively, in the best of times, they last about 18
months. The last four presidents to win second terms saw their ability
to drive a legislative agenda get stopped in its tracks in 18 months or
less.”

Politico: “No contemporary American politician has benefited more from the power of good storytelling than Barack Obama. He vaulted from obscurity to the presidency on the power of narrative — invoking his biography and personal values to make a larger point about how he would lead the nation.”

“So presumably no one understands more vividly than Obama and his close aides just how toxic and potentially paralyzing his situation has become this spring, as four distinct ethical and policy controversies have simultaneously converged.”

“Obama’s critics now have a narrative — a way of connecting four discrete episodes to a larger point about this president’s leadership style and values. In other words, they didn’t merely happen on his watch but were in important ways caused by his watch.”