Was there any evidence that certain (legitimate) outlets were "shunned"?

Who gets to decide which outlets are "legitimate", anyway? The question implies that some media (bloggers come to mind) should automatically be excluded from asking a question because of their background alone.

On the contrary: Stupid questions, if they are asked by anyone (including "legitimate outlets" like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) should be met with derision. Intelligent questions, similarly, should be entertained, even when they're asked by "illegitimate" outlets like the "dot-coms and odd balls" that Ari Fleischer dismissed to "Siberia".

In other words, the very phrasing of your question almost answers it: if you're breaking the people at a press conference into legitimate and illegitimate questioners, you've already taken a giant step toward excluding questions from the "sphere of deviance", as Glenn described it recently. And as the past eight years have proven, those are EXACTLY the questions that most need to be asked.

Should someone really ask a stupid question ("Mr. President, what is your plan for dealing with the moon men?"), I don't think there will be any great penalty to society, other than Obama having to roll his eyes for a moment.

Mr. Greenwald is being a little unfair. Small "c" conservatives who opposed Bush were banished from the Party, so of course "Conservatives" supported Bush slavishly. Anyone who didn't was not allowed to call himself or herself a conservative any more. In other words, Mr. Greenwald is describing a semantic truism.

Finding critics of Bush from the right is not difficult, but you can't look among the traditional "Conservative" or Republican organs, because those were largely purged of opposition. Ironically, the American Conservative magazine remained a strong (though perhaps intermittent) critic of Bush, as did large swaths of the Libertarian, Reform, and Constitution Parties. Antiwar.com was always fiercely anti-Bush and unapologetically laizzes-faire.

Do they not count as conservatives anymore, just because the Republican Party says so? I'd hate to give the Republicans that kind of control over the political discourse.

We seem to be seeing the same tarring of the word "conservative" (prudent, skeptical of change) that was once applied to "liberal" (free thinking).

I, for one, consider myself a civil libertarian and am strongly economically conservative, but I despised Bush (on economic, civil liberties, AND national security grounds) and never struggled to find similar views expressed on the Internet and in print.

"How did Ron Paul ultimately do in the primaries? That will tell you how large the faction of disenchanted-with-Bush-conservatives was."

That's an artful point, but you're conflating two effects: Agreement/disagreement with a politician and perceived electoral pragmatism.

After all, how did Dennis Kucinich do? As the only Democratic candidate who campaigned on an "Arrest and prosecute Bush" platform, does his dismal failure in the primaries mean the majority of Democrats don't want accountability for Bush?

Perhaps in part it does, but there's also the strong factor of "perceived chance to win"; people want to pick a winner, and if they aren't given a winner they agree with, they'll often pick the media anointed "winner" they disagree with the least.

Using Ron Paul's electoral count as a linear measurement of conservative disaffection with Bush neglects that effect, and I think it's a significant effect indeed.

I know many, many people who expressed support for Nader in 2000, but couldn't bring themselves to "waste their vote" on him. Does that mean the sentiment didn't exist?

That being said, I agree that the anti-Bush conservative faction was small. I'll reiterate, though, that most people who self-identify as conservative really mean "Republican", having long ago stopped giving any thought to what a word like "conservative" means. As I said earlier, it has been made into a political short hand for party alliance, much like "liberal" was. I think, when you say that "self-identified conservatives supported Bush" you're observing a semantic effect, more than a political one.

Your LARGER point, that the liberal community is more willing to challenge Obama openly than the conservative movement was willing to challenge Bush, is probably true. At least, I certainly HOPE it's true.

I just finished reading Mr. Greenwald's white paper, and I look forward to the CATO discussion tomorrow.

If anyone else has read it (or if GG himself is reading), I have a question about Figure 11 (page 18).

The chart shows that Portugal has a roughly consistent rate of "cannabis deaths", fluctuating around 25 per year, but peaking above 50 in 2006. Cannabis deaths? How does that physically happen?

I see the footnote saying that "death" is defined as a toxicological exam discovering a trace of the listed drug, presumably during the autopsy, but the presence of pot on the chart suggests that there's not necessarily any causation here.

Cigarettes kill hundreds of thousands of people a year, but detecting nicotine in the blood of a man who was hit by lightning doesn't implicate smoking in his death (hmm, unless he went outside to smoke during a thunderstorm).

Indeed, none of the death rates seemed to show any effect from the decriminalization except for heroin. Is it necessarily fair to call the deaths on those charts "drug related" (your words), when they really just show that the dead person had recently used a drug, which may or may not have factored in his death?

I would be more interested to see the rate of deaths due to fights over drug money or drug turf, which in my opinion are more literally "drug related". There was very little discussion of the Portuguese black market in your paper (except for charts showing declining prosecutions for trafficking).

Will some of these points come out in tomorrow's talk?

...and proof that irony is not dead. If the blogging work ever dries up, you could have a rich second career at The Onion.

Ah, that really made my afternoon.