Emphasis on "Estate"

Hullabaloo has an excellent post and series of links (including this) that serves to remind us of just how swift a current we're paddling against these days:

If politicians and the press want to know why they get no respect from the people, this is why. They openly defend dirty politics, pooh-pooh our outrage against it, and then expect us to look up to them...

The elite press corps see the Nixonian dirty politics that have completely distorted our political discourse over the last 30 years as social currency. Swift-boating and McCain's black daughter and Linda Trip's tapes and Al Gore's suits are entertainment to them and the dissemination of this entertainment buys them access for what they think are their "serious" stories. We are told to just "get over" partisan impeachments, stolen elections and even lying about nuclear weapons.

Richard Cohen and his ilk believed that dirty politics are what Washington "does" the way that Hollywood makes movies or Detroit makes cars while the rest of us rubes maintained the strange belief that Washington is supposed to serve the people. That's the heart of this crisis in journalism. The elite press corps have completely missed the biggest political story of the last quarter century because they were having so much fun laughing and cavorting with their Republican sources that they failed to see that a powerful, criminal political machine was built upon the "trivial" acts of character assassination they found so amusing.

Definitely check out the entire post if you've got the time. The additional link is also worth a look--to summarize, Greenwald notes the irony of WaPo reporters in a tizzy about the leaking of an internal discussion board and the mounting of what is, for all practical purposes, a defense of a journalistic equivalent of "executive privilege" (note: I've mentioned this before, but I'll note again that my first real understanding of the term "executive privilege came from something written by Hunter Thompson--paraphrasing here, he considered it the last vestige of "divine right of kings" in US politics, and rightly condemned it).

They've got to have the conscience of a hammerhead shark just to be able to look at themselves in the mirror each morning.