Is an incompetent SEC scapegoating Goldman?

The timing of the civil suit against Goldman is suspiciously convenient for an administration wanting to pass regulation of the financial industry. The President has categorically denied that he was involved with prompting this; does he have more than "plausible deniability?" Would his administration be above this?
We do have the "idea" that the SEC is independent. However, the SEC is embarrassed by its failure to catch either of the Ponzi schemes of Madoff or Stanford. Clearly, its employees have showed incompetence and arrogance in ignoring the Madoff case being laid out in detail for them over a decade. Has the SEC become more competent? The recent revelation that senior officials spent as much as 8-hour days surfing porn on SEC computers ( while opening the computers to spyware and other hacking )has not been an earnest of professionalism. Now we see that they have opened a civil suit against Goldman but might this not also be a manifestation of their incompetence, merely adding hyperaggressiveness to their usual folly. Remember that Goldman does not deal with retail "customers" but only with highly qualified, professional investors who certified that they are qualified to make their own judgements about their transactions. We are also told that Goldman did not tell purchasers of certain securities that the Paulson firm had shorted the same securities. There are two questions that come to mind: first, since when is a firm acting as a broker supposed to tell any party what the position is of another party, even assuming that they knew it ( although an individual rogue employee, like "the fabulous Fab" might have been so aware ); second, the Paulson firm at the time of the transaction in question did not have any special reputation as it later garnered for its successful transiting the financial meltdown by shorting it for profit. Every transaction, especially a "synthetic" one, has two parties to it, taking opposite sides. This blogger bets that Goldman will emerge from this imbroglio unscathed although it is such a big PR target that it might well settle the matter just to move on to other issues. It is already unusual for the SEC to have proceeded to a public case without giving Goldman the almost universally-common avenue of settling the matter before public disclosure.