Peggy Noonan on torture and the IRS

I've mostly been avoiding politics on the facebook. But--I've had too much time sitting around in waiting rooms lately. I've been trying to place my thoughts in context about this IRS thing and I finally figured out what was bothering me. Here's Peggy Noonan in 2004 exonerating Rumsfeld for Abu Ghraib and here she is today pinning the IRS scandal directly on Obama. And therein lies my distaste for the political handling of this.

In 2004 the Vice President issues a memo which leads damn-near directly to US troops breaking Geneva Conventions and torturing Iraqi prisoners and in the end--we put the entire blame on a Private.  This time around a fairly low level IRS worker makes some poor decisions regarding how to systematically sort through thousands of applications and it is supposedly clearly the President's fault? How is that explained other than by having two different standards by which to judge?