…which is no mean achievement. We know the Obama administration is full of museum-grade morons, but it’s rare you’ll ever see something as laughably idiotic as the show Harf put on yesterday…

A few pearls before swine here. To Miz Harf, the last thing you want to do is to put the State Department in the middle of the Bowe Bergdahl controversy when in fact the circumstances of his capture by the Taliban are to be determined by the Pentagon, not Foggy Bottom. The correct answer there is “accusations have been made, and the State Department will defer to the Department of Defense’s resolution of the Bergdahl affair. For now, we are very pleased that Sgt. Bergdahl is safe and out of enemy hands.”

But if you have to fall out of the stupid tree and hit every limb on the way down, you really don’t want to make it worse by directly calling out just about every one of Bergdahl’s squad mates who have come forth to say precisely the same thing – that he left a Forward Operating Base on the front lines of an active military conflict without his helmet, body armor and weapon, that he was critical of the Army and the war effort, that there is no question he deserted his post and that men died in the vain attempt to find and recover him after he deserted, in circumstances suggesting a heightened level of intelligence on the part of the enemy (possibly as a result of Bergdahl’s collaboration).

Marie Harf, who has no information of any quality whatsoever on the Bergdahl case from her perch as press flack at Foggy Bottom, presumes to challenge those men as liars?

Has she read this?

A Pentagon investigation concluded in 2010 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his unit, and after an initial flurry of searching the military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, according to a former senior defense official who was involved in the matter.

We’ve been explaining the Bergdahl scandal and how it will be handled within the template Tucker Carlson laid down, correctly, we think, last week with respect to the VA scandal. It’s a three-step formula. The first step is to profess ignorance of the scandal when it breaks and to promise an investigation. The second step is to distract the public from the scandal by starting an argument over promises of more free stuff for Democrat constituencies (or by starting an argument over race or sex) to rile up the Left’s base voters. And the third step is to find a way to blame the scandal on Republicans.

Harf’s idiocy yesterday is an attempt to take one for the team with respect to the first step. She’s professing ignorance of a well-known fact; that Bergdahl deserted his post. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has done the same thing. So has Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey. You already know about the execrable Susan Rice.

But while Hagel and Dempsey at least couched their denials in the form of respecting Bergdahl’s right to the presumption of innocence, Harf went even further toward an affirmative defense of his conduct in the same vein as Rice. The stupidity of that will only fuel this scandal rather than serve to tamp it down as other Step One actions have done in previous scandals.