As part of 92Y’s partnership with Salon.com, political writer Alex Pareene went through the various political scandals being covered wall-to-wall by the press.

On the IRS targeting conservative groups, Pareene sees no direct connection to President Obama:

“The White House and the President has very little to do with what an IRS field office is doing.”

He added,

On the other hand, it’s IRS scandal, it’s taxes, it’s the Tea Party…this is a scandal the Republicans are most excited about.

On the terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, Pareene points out the inconsistency between the media and political reaction to the Benghazi attacks versus 9/11, where the country “banded together” and “no one wanted to criticize the President for what were actually major intelligence lapses which led to the deaths of thousands of people instead of four people.”

Pareene thinks the Department of Justice hacking into Associated Press phone logs is indeed scandalous, but also brings up the other surveillance stories not being covered, like the NYPD and FBI surveilling the Muslim community as well as NSA phone tapping.

He concluded by examining short-hand comparisons being made between these scandals and the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down President Nixon, emphatically asserting:

We’re not anywhere near that. There’s not yet any evidence that anyone in the administration broke any laws at any point.