Halberstam's death brings to mind a timely anecdote involving another true journalist - I.F. Stone. Stone once told Halberstam that the Washington Post was an exciting paper to read because "you never know on what page you would find a page-one story."

As for the comparison of Drudge with Walter Cronkite, it is bogus. Drudge and his ilk urge death and destruction from behind a computer keyboard while carefully avoiding danger themselves. Cronkite covered World War II from the front lines. He went ashore on D-Day, with men being killed all around him, flew bombing missions over Germany, and parachuted with the l0lst Airborne. He was a real and courageous reporter, invited to CBS by Edward R. Murrow, not a cowardly chickenhawk.

There are now just 4 components left to what used to be called the Republican Party, which has been eaten away on the inside and is a brittle shell waiting to crumble.

1. The trough feeders - people benefiting from the corruption or preferences they receive. Halliburton types, tax phobics and the main stream media are examples. They have the money and power but are a small percentage of the whole. These people are greedy and self-serving but not inherently loyal; they will abandon ship when they conclude the party is over and their energy and money is better spent elsewhere. This is already underway.

2. The cult-loyal christianists - they are the core of the core and will never let go unless their leaders tell them to. But their delusional thinking, which feeds on and escalates with the deference and attention they receive, only gets worse. They will drag down the party with them if their excesses are continually brought to public notice.

3. The angry ones and discipline-cravers - they are the foreign policy adventurers, immigration kooks, war-mongers, treason-cryers, etc. They are a very vocal constituency, run the right-wing media, and there are lots of them. With the cult-loyal christianists, they probably do comprise 20% of the electorate. They are in the process now of melting down; you can see they are starting to run scared and their time-honored tricks, smears, etc. no longer get the expected results. Some will keep pushing the same buttons forever, dazed and believing that if they push just one more time, well then they will work.

4. There are 10% of the voters under the illusion that this is still the Republican Party of Eisenhower or even Goldwater, and they are loyal to it. They are mainly older people who are essentially out of touch with today's reality. Half of this group will eventually flake off (or in many cases, die of old age).

Everyone else is gone and no longer paying attention to whatever these people say or scream.

Artist Dennis Sever used to say that what defined an era was not the things in it, but what was in the space between the things. The air has been sour for years now, yet recently there is truth aloft and the space between the things has begun to feel changed. Are we on the verge of a something important? Let's hope so.

In one of the Marx Brothers movies, Chico urges Harpo to "get tough." Harpo responds with a show of phony toughness. Then Chico says, "get tougher," and Harpo does the same thing, only with more animation. "Get even tougher." Harpo does the same thing with yet greater animation. And so it went. What we are seeing today with the extreme right noisemakers is a similar phenomenon.

For over two decades, the extreme right has led so-called journalists around by the nose-ring. Their characterizations, their swift-boating, their lies and smears have always drawn media attention and worked their wonders. Strikingly and rather unexpectedly, the corruption, incompetence, stupidity and sheer evil of their icons have broken through the media silence and reached the American public, which is sick of the Republicans and no longer paying attention to their noise.

The noisemakers, like chimps in a lab, have only been taught one thing - how to push the same vacuous lie/smear buttons. They do not know how to shift gears but only know how to write or blather about haircuts. They will keep pushing the same buttons, each time somehow expecting results, without regard to whether anyone outside their own choir is listening. In fact, expect them to push the same old buttons ever harder and with ever greater determination the fewer people care or pay attention. They have been "tough" and are now "getting tougher". Soon they will get "even tougher" and then "even even tougher".

I.F. Stone liked to say that there are two words journalists needed to remember - "governments lie." This meant that the role of journalists, if they wanted to attain to anything higher than official propaganda shill, was to dig for the truth like miners dug for gold and bring it gleaming to the public. Although journalists as a group never fully met these high expectations in any era, until about 1980 it was still the widely accepted standard within journalism that dedication to truth was the criteria by which journalists were properly judged. People in the field acknowledged that even if they could not pursue it themselves. Someone who simply passed on government propaganda, who reported what he was told, was not a journalist - he was a reporter.

Today the actual journalists are mainly publishing blogs like this, while the major media and the entertainment personalities they employ have left journalism and willingly assumed the mantle of reporters. They truly see their role as reporting on what they are told. The idea of investigating stories to pursue truth does not even occur to them, indeed is antithetical to their job - the job of being reporters rather than journalists. That is why they are indignant that anyone even suggests that they are failing in that job.

"Oh what a falling off was there..."