Why the IRS "Scandal" is Not Obama's Watergate

From The Guardian: 

On the Watergate investigation:

The senators were, after all, working with a raft of indisputable material, including the January 1973 convictions of former President Nixon aides G Gordon Liddy and James W McCord, Jr. on charges of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in connection with the June 1972 Watergate break-in, and the April 1973 resignation and firing of other top White House staffers. The senators could afford to be methodical: there had been criminal activity, authorized and carried out at the highest level of the administration, and no amount of grandstanding would further dramatize those already damning facts. The committee set out to establish, in Senator Howard Baker's notorious words, "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

On the Internal Revenue Service incident:

But here's the critical fact: there's been no finding of criminal activity in the Obama administration, and the FBI's opening of a criminal investigation of the IRS should lay to rest accusations that the administration has failed to take the matter seriously. 

As Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story, pointed out, there is no evidence the president ordered, much less knew about, the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups' tax-exempt applications. The Treasury Department's Inspector General report concluded that despite the fact that IRS personnel had used "inappropriate criteria" to identify which applications to subject to additional review, personnel told the IG that "the criteria were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS". 

Until such time as there is concrete that President Barack Obama orchestrated or had knowledge of what happened with the IRS, calling it his Watergate is a misleading attempt by his political enemies to stir up hatred against him. Yet again, here is an example of the right making claims without the facts to back them up. How predictable.