"I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter."

◼ A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - Peggy Noonan/Wall St. Journal

These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it.

So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?

We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS.... We have learned that Lois Lerner lied when she claimed she had spontaneously admitted the targeting in a Q-and-A at a Washington meeting. It was part of a spin operation in which she'd planted the question with a friend....

We know that Lois Lerner this week announced she'd done nothing wrong, and then took the Fifth.

And we know Jay Leno, grown interestingly fearless, said of the new IRS commissioner, "They're called 'acting commissioner' because you have to act like the scandal doesn't involve the White House."

...An independent counsel, with all the powers of that office, is what we need.

Again, if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.