Pot, kettle, hello? If Dems wanted to find someone to attack Chris Christie's credibility for claiming he didn't know what was going on in his administration, couldn't they have found someone less vulnerable than Robert Gibbs? After all, Gibbs served as spox for Barack Obama, the man who has made an art form out of claiming he only found out about his admin's latest scandal when he read about it in the paper.

But there was Gibbs leading with his chin on Morning Joe today, asking "how many times can [Christie] play the card of 'I had no idea this was going on in my own office?" Joe Scarborough was only too happy to oblige Gibbs with a haymaker to his rhetorical jaw: "Robert, it's getting to the point he is starting to sound like Barack Obama." View the amusing video after the jump.

On Saturday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted how the New York Times had made a critical change to a story about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's possible knowledge of lane closures in the area of the George Washington Bridge. The initial story was that a Port Authority official "has evidence" in the matter. A short time later, that claim was watered down to a far more speculative "evidence exists."

The erroneous "has evidence" version of the story quickly went viral on Friday afternoon, and is what many news readers likely still believe — especially because there is still no indication at Zernike's story that any change from the original was made. Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan has a problem with that — as she should. There also appears to be an undercurrent of frustration at the Times that what comes off as a "gotcha" strategy didn't stick to Christie (HT James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web; bolds are mine throughout this post):

Two possible presidential candidates.  Although there's no evidence of it on the record, some have accused the first of closing bridge-access lanes for political purposes.  The other failed to respond to pleas for help, four Americans died in Benghazi, and her response was a petulant "what difference does it make?"

So where do those two candidates stand as we look to 2016?  In the case of Chris Christie, his candidacy is "over" and he "doesn't belong in the conversation."  Hillary Clinton?  Her biggest problem is fighting an air of "inevitability." Such was the collective wisdom of today's Morning Joe panel. But to what degree have the fates and status of the two candidates been shaped by the MSM?  Where would Hillary be, for example, if she were a former Republican Secretary of State with the Benghazi catastrophe on her record? View the video after the jump.

New York magazine interviewed Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels about his show and political humor. Michaels seemed to suggest that Republicans can take a joke, and Democrats can't. Or perhaps Republicans are used to being mocked by Manhattan liberals, and Democrats expect to be pampered.

The magazine’s Lane Brown asked: "Are there any basic rules for what works and what doesn’t politically?"

Longtime readers here may recall that yours truly and others have written about liberties New York Times reporter Kate Zernike has taken with the truth, especially in her reporting on the Tea Party movement. Her penchant for inventing baseless stories about alleged racism in the movement once caused the late Andrew Breitbart to label her "a despicable human being."

Breitbart might well have the same reaction to the hours-later revision made at Zernike's Times story Friday about Chris Christie. Several alert bloggers and tweeters noted that her story about Christie's knowledge of shut lanes on the George Washington Bridge conveniently went from solid to speculative without any indication that any changes had been made.