Your Liberal Media

We've just come through a week where the Attorney General outright lied to Congress, where Senate leaders called for a special prosecutor to investigate him on charges of perjury, where even the New York Times has called for Abu G's impeachment if the Solicitor General fails to appoint a special prosecutor, where two members of the executive branch have been found in contempt of Congress, where Iraq appears to be slipping into a deep political crisis and a potential fracturing, to the extent that Nouri al-Maliki may be ready to demand Gen. Petraeus' ouster, where new evidence shows that Pat Tillman may have been killed for his political views, where this morning's paper brings us news of massive data mining on a scale that has yet to be disclosed:

To put this into perspective, remember that the White House has been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn't been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow.

...with all of this stuff going on, Meet the Press had on this panel of the punditocracy...

NBC's "Meet the Press'' - Dan Balz and Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd of NBC News, Ron Brownstein of The Los Angeles Times and John Harwood of CNBC.

...and spent at least the first half-hour on the Hillary/Obama spat. Now, I've written about that too, but clearly it's not the only thing that's happened this week. Tim Russert opened the report with "what a week this has been!!!" and he looked almost ready to fall off his chair, hyperventilating at the prospect of getting to talk about Hillary for the next 18 months.

These are the least serious people in America, who are passing themselves off as the most serious people.

UPDATE: I also saw this Cokie Roberts/David Gergen exchange where Cokie, the ultimate concern troll, warns against Democrats moving leftward because "that is going to be a biiiiig problem for them 'just like it was in Vietnam.'" This is typical bias from the Washington Elites, who live in a total bubble and have no idea what the mood in the nation is like. Fareed Zakaria, who must get out more, first of all corrected that "way to the left" is not where any of the likely 2008 Democratic nominees are, and furthermore, distance from Mr. 28% Bush is unbelievably popular in the country. Digby says it best:

Roberts and Gergen are exalted Village elders. Roberts is supposedly a representative of "Democratic centrists" and Gergen a representative of "Republican centrists" but they are both really representatives of the establishment that represents the interests and prejudices of The Village. "The people" are abstract concepts they use in various ways to bolster their central argument that power is best left in the hands of "sensible" elders like themselves. When the people "speak" they are either "Real Americans" asserting their desire that sensible elders lead us out of the wilderness or dirty hippies who want to take the country into perdition.

If we do nothing else, we should ensure that the Democratic candidates pay no attention to these gasbags. That's not to say they shouldn't pay attention to the actual press narratives and the stereotypes that will inevitably emerge. But the punditocrisy should be shunned and ignored. They are promoting their own interests and those interests are always hostile to Democrats, who by dint of their more diverse coalition of Americans, are simply not as willing to bow down to the establishment. They are effectively agents of the Republican party simply because that is the party of authoritarian followers who will put their trust in the elite village elders. Democrats will never win by catering to them. Indeed, it is in our best interest to treat them as the hostile force they are --- it certainly didn't help to try to appease them with "centrism" as the last 20 years have proven in spades. Look at what they and the Republicans have done.