As good as he often is, Keith is still part of the MSM, and at times (e.g., when the media, including NBC, need to be taken to the woodshed), he has been useless. This would have been an opportunity to prove his non-partisan bones, and he blew it.

This, I think, is the essential point that Keith and other apologists miss:

I don't blame Obama for wanting to put some distance between himself and the DFHs. Were I in his place I would indeed tack to the center. He should take us for granted. And he could have done it without significantly eroding his support among the (smarter) DFHs.

What I do blame him for is for putting real distance between himself and the Constitution.

There is policy (Social Security, universal health care, tax policy etc.), which you can horsetrade. And then there is bedrock principle, which you should not. Or, at least, there should be. Yesterday I learned that you can fit every Senator who feels that way in a single minivan. And the presumptive Democratic nominee ain't one of them.

The reason the Dems don’t stand up for the principles of the party is that the grownups in charge don’t share those ideals. That may be true on the GOP side as well, but the big difference between us and them is that our true believers aren’t trying to institutionalize self-interest.

And as we have just seen, it doesn’t matter if OBummer is one of the power-hungry windsocks, or merely willing to sell his principles to purchase their support, because there really isn’t a difference, is there?

1. It is obvious that someone on the "Countdown" staff reads this blog, as well as other DFH news sources. An awful lot of things that end up on the nightly Keith obviously come from the blogosphere rather than the rest of the MSM. These are GOOD things.

2. Getting Glenn on Countdown would be a great outcome. If Countdown fails to do so because of Glenn's criticism, that is frankly pathetic. I know Keith has said he abhors the shoutfests that Tweety and others engender, but you can have people on with divergent viewpoints without ending up there.

3. As was mentioned earlier in the thread, I think the fact that big telco greased the skids with campaign contributions doesn't (fully) explain the depth and breadth of the FISA outrage. I think what best explains it is the fact that Reid, Pelosi, Rockefeller and a few others were read into the program, and share the blame. THAT is the story that most needs further discussion, IMHO. I think Obama probably extracted something useful from each in exchange for his sellout, but it was still a sellout.

4. Oddly, TV personality Olbermann is hanging his hat on an abstract, lawyerly point (criminal liability is a theoretical possibility), while lawyer Greenwald makes the political and psychological point that this legal loophole will almost certainly have no practical application.

5. I give Glenn props for being an equal-opportunity scold. And, though Keith is head and shoulders above anyone else in the MSM, I do think he went too easy on Obama on this one. Obama adopted the same stupid frame we have all been railing against for years. Glenn called him on it; Keith didn't, at least not in the same unequivocal language he usually wields so well.

Like Glenn, I have a Jewish surname. Like Glenn, I am horrified by the Neocon game. I am a child of Holocaust survivors, but my worldview is not dominated by concern for Israel. (I seem to recall that Glenn has talked about this before, but also relevant to this discussion is the fact that the Neocon belligerence is not so popular in Israel either.)

The punditocracy now seems to be driven almost entirely by two things: guilt over Vietnam-era draft dodging, and fear at being seen as insufficiently beholden to Likud politics. Guilt and fear: the defining characteristics of our tough guys.

I would suggest that the Lieberman/Kristol excesses be countered by a grouping of prominent Jewish-surnamed counterweights, but would the press pay heed? Shimon Peres himself could repudiate the Necons and these sycophants would ignore it.

Dealing with the infinite hypocrisy expressed by the proponents of this horrible bill is a Sisyphean task, but I am struck by another aspect besides the many Glenn has flayed.

The root Villager rhetorical argument (the one they resort to when we trump them on facts and logic) seems in essence to be, "you lefties just want the terrorists to win!"

Remember when Bush said this before a joint session of Congress just after 9/11?

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

If the terrorists hate our freedoms, then doesn't the warrantless wiretapping bill give them a huge victory?

This is the central deceit that causes the war in Iraq to continue despite most Americans' wanting it to end for quite some time (because "only the Left" wants an end to war while "the Center" wants to say until we win). It's why crimes committed by the Washington elite go uninvestigated and unpunished (due to the lie that only "the Left" favors investigations and punishment while ).

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It seems to me that the subservience, insularity and myopia of the contemporary press are truly unprecedented, as is their stubborn refusal to look at their dysfunction and the price we have all paid for it. If Liason and her ilk had been around thirty five years ago, Nixon would have served out his term.