The trick is the realize that US politics today is essentially two groups of people who live in almost entirely separate realities that happen to spatially overlap. Public officials are in the odd state of being observed by members of both realities, but only acting and affected by one of them. The result is that their behavior looks
super fucking weird to the other.
It's like watching someone navigate a glass maze that you can't see. The whole time you're wondering why they're taking such a circuitous path. They look like a crazy person to you, but it's because they're avoiding obstacles you can't see.
The reason we have two separate realities is that most of "reality" at the political level comes to voters by way of media. Almost none of us have directly witnessed, say George Floyd protests, abortions, industrial pollution, inner city gang violence, etc. Instead, we learn of these things through the news and social media.
But those in the US have become increasingly polarized. The picture of the world you get from watching Fox News or your Facebook feed if you have conservative friends shows an entirely different world than what someone watching CNN and the politics subreddit sees.
For politicians, winning elections is central. It is the source of all of their power. They know that the way to win elections is to get people on their side to show up and vote. Losing votes from the other side is essentially irrelevant — they weren't going to vote for them anyway. Politicians are fighting apathy, not the opposing party.
So almost all of their public behavior serves to make them appear good to their camp when viewed through that camp's media lens. The way it appears to the other side doesn't matter one bit because it won't significantly affect elections.
Once you understand this, Parson's behavior makes perfect sense. He got caught looking like a dumbass leaking SSNs so he has to do ("do" in the sense of some visible political behavior, not in the sense of solving the actual problem) something. If he frames it as the liberal press are evil hackers, then Fox News is happy to carry that narrative for him. His voters will see that narrative, be satisfied that it fits their worldview, and continue to support him.
The fact that his narrative is nonsense doesn't matter. No one likely to vote for him will ever see that, and those that do see it weren't going to vote for him either. Actually fixing the problem also isn't particularly relevant. Conservative media just wants him to win so won't run bad press if he doesn't fix it, so there's little incentive.
Every year, the US looks more like China Mieville's "The City and the City".