Turns out it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to “delegitimize” a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters. In between, the Obama administration found time to relentlessly persecute government whistleblowers and publicly harass and condemn a private American citizen for expressing his constitutionally protected speech in the form of an anti-Islam YouTube video.

Where were the media when all this began happening? With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.

When Pfeiffer acknowledged that the scandals were worthy of consideration after all, he sought primarily to distance the president from them. This led to the risible sight of a senior adviser to the commander-in-chief simultaneously insisting that his boss doesn’t have time for these scandals on the grounds that he has a government to run (the perennial refuge of leaders under siege) and promising earnestly that the president doesn’t know about anything that goes on in that government from whose operation he must not be distracted.

Look, Pfeiffer told CNN, switching tack violently once again, “What would be an actual real scandal in Washington would be if the president had been involved or had interfered in an IRS investigation.” Somewhere, Schrödinger smiled.