Konw how sometimes, if you stall long enough, by the time you fess up to something bad, people don't pay as much attention as they might have? 

That is sort of what is happening with regard to the IRS' very belated admission that during the Obama administration it targeted conservative groups and made it difficult for them to obtain nonprofit status. That made it harder for these groups to get their ideas in circulation.

IRS official Lois Lerner blamed overzealous, lower echelon employees in the Cincinnati office before heading off into well-compensated retirement (after engaging some adventures with the Fifth Amendment). But now the IRS admits that, yep, they did target conservative groups.

The only reason the IRS admitted its actions is that plaintiffs who said they had been targeted kept pushing back in court. Fox News reports:  

“The IRS admits that its treatment of Plaintiffs during the tax-exempt determination process, including screening their applications based on their names or policy positions, subjecting those applications to heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays, and demanding some Plaintiffs’ information that TIGTA determined was unnecessary to the agency’s determination of their tax-exempt status, was wrong,” the IRS said in court documents. “For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology.”

Well, there's nothing like a sincere apology, is there?

The apology comes so late in the day that it hasn't gotten much attention. But it should.  Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform believes that the targeting had an effect on the 2012 presidential election.  

Beyond that, this was a vast federal bureaucracy secretly acting against citizens with whose views the bureaucrats (our employees) disagreed.