Why can’t an incident be judged on its own set of circumstances?

I was listening to the panel on “Morning Joe” discussing the Chris Christie news conference. It’s not as if I haven’t already heard endless hours of opinions from the talking heads but I thought something might have transpired overnight. No, this discussion was about his demeanor and whether this incident will hurt his chances in 2016.

It wasn’t long into the discussion when Joe Scarborough said that Chris Christie handled the news conference better than President Obama handled the IRS investigation. How are these two incidents  even remotely related?

I thought Governor Christie took care of business early in the press conference by saying that he was not involved and he fired people high up in his administration who were responsible. The rest of the news conference was about Chris Christie. The governor will not survive if he is caught in a lie.

A lot of people think that the IRS investigation was about the president using the Internal Revenue Service to go after his enemies. That was never the case, so when President Obama said he was not aware of what was going on in Cincinnati Ohio, he was telling the truth. You can’t compare a bridge closing by close knit senior staff members in the governor’s office to a processing procedure in Cincinnati. People like Joe Scarborough think the president micromanages every aspect of our government, so he can blame him for everything. It’s that’s the case, the president should be held responsible for what a few rogue Secret Service agents did in Columbia. Mr. Scarborough thinks the president sets the tone and culture for his administration. Joe does not have the same set of standards for the governor of New Jersey.

It’s a different culture these days where every incident is compared to another one to try to minimize the damage. Chris Matthews recalls that after the 1983 Beirut barracks attack which killed 241 Americans, Tip O’Neill called the Democrats to the House Chamber to tell them that they would have to answer to him, if they tried to blame President Reagan just for political gain. Yesterday, Chris Matthews was interviewing a representative from New York who said the Democrats have no shame in going after Governor Christi after Benghazi. Huh?

It’s the same way for the Duck Dynasty and Melissa Harris Perry incidents where liberalism and conservatism took the blame for inappropriate comments. After reading Ruben Navarrette’s column this morning, I’m convinced that the media sees the world through a liberal versus conservative lens. I didn’t see very many liberals come to the defense of Melissa Harris Perry or Alec Baldwin because their comments were their own and not representative of many liberals. Many liberals argued that Martin Bashir should not have been let go (involuntary resignation) because Fox's hosts use that language every day. Liberal did not say it was Martin’s constitution right to say inappropriate things without suffering the consequences. It’s my opinion that the liberals were saying to MSNBC “don’t disarm us.” It reminds me of a former coworker who could get away with saying outrageous things because our boss would just shake his head and say, “that’s just Jack being Jack.” That was his way of saying that he expected a lot more from us.

It’s also like when we were asking our daughter about her recent grades and pretty soon we were talking about a different subject that happened five years ago.