In a puzzling issuance of high self-praise, the infamous former IRS director Lois Lerner has stated that she is definitively not worse than the anthropophagic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Congratulations! This came in a recent interview with Politico:

Lerner said she tunes out the news reports centered on her. “I probably would have lost my mind if I had read it all, because your reaction when this happens is, ‘Wait a minute, let me explain to you what happened,’” she said.

Instead, her husband — who looks more tired than Lerner herself — sifts through the scandal headlines, sometimes tearing out stories about her in the paper so she won’t see them.

Miles also receives the bulk of hate mail and death threats at work. A July threat was so bad that federal agents had to protect Lerner at her home. Some have threatened their two daughters; even her 86-year-old mother-in-law in Ohio has gotten hate calls.

Among the hate mail, Lerner’s “favorite” is one that says she’ll “go down in history as the worst person ever in the United States.”

“I just thought, ‘Boy, worse than Jeffrey Dahmer?’” she asks, her face crinkling up, eyebrows pinching together in disbelief.

I’m sure that is her favorite. It’s probably one of the few that actually exaggerated things a bit. But on the other hand, the IRS scandal has likely centered on Lerner only because Lerner was offered as the sacrificial victim. The fact is that we don’t know whether the White House was directly involved in targeting conservative groups for audits, and the worst thing Lerner did was hide evidence. She may not have been doing much more than following orders beyond that.

So as much as I would like to say that Lois Lerner is the devil, and the real culprit for IRS mismanagement and abuse has been tagged and bagged and dealt with accordingly, I have no confidence that is the case. Lois Lerner is a red herring, people. Would you expect anything else from the weapons of mass distraction we like to call “the news”?