The most effective defense society has from being absorbed into or destroyed by violent political movements such as the one I believe your opinions are representative of, ultimately is the written word. When criminals assume control of institutions, be they in media, business or government offices it is important to be able to separate the mass of conscientious citizenry who participate in the democratic process and seek to be informed, from those like yourself who exhibit no sense of history or social responsibility, seek to remain willfully ignorant, and fundamentally don’t give a damn.You insist upon clinging to the notion that history is a continuous military engagement between absolute good and abject evil. In such an imaginary landscape there is no place for civilization or law. For you war and prisons are the principle stage props of this world and to the exclusion of all else this bizzarre function is the only legitimate business of government.

You ask stupidly, “What was Nixon’s “crime”? I’m sure I personally have no idea.” What a telling confession of obliviousness, is this disclosure.

Nixon’s crimes are as well known as they are notorious. The ultimate corruption of American public life was ushered into being by Richard Nixon.

Eminent Historian Gary Wills explores the genesis of modern republican ideology in a probing 1969 biography of this possibly criminally insane president and the legacy of his administration entitled appropriately, Nixon Agonistes.

The Washington Post’s 1972-73 reporting on the Watergate Scandal and cover-up as well as its 1974 publishing of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers along with a trenchant commentary in both cases was an important examination of the history of deception and political corruption that finally came to a head with Nixon’s resignation. The press in general and the Washington Post in particular played a critical role in prompting a popular reexamination of the tragic consequences of political deception and public apathy in permitting the mass murder of over a million Vietnamese and those responsible like Nixon LBJ and Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara all eluding prosecution. The undoing of the debauched Nixon administration came not from the work of WaPo’s Bernstein and Woodward by any means. The incitement of an outraged citizenry was what prompted the launching of a bipartisan congressional investigation led by the unassuming and grand fatherly Senator Sam Ervin. If Republicans expected Ervin, the aging constitutional scholar to be too infirm and befuddled to wage an enquiry of the scope and complexity necessary to derail Nixon’s sophisticated gunsels under oath, Sam Ervin and his panel certainly proved to be a disappointment. The result was a 6 month investigation between Feb. and July 1973. CBS, NBC ABC and NPR simultaneously broadcast 319 hours of testimony exposing the inner workings of the depraved conspiracy that resulted in dozens of criminal indictments and finally forced Nixon’s resignation.

The historical importance of a free press and the work of journalists like Froomkin at the Washington Post in the present day, is to prompt an informed citizenry to demand that the crimes, deceptions and corruptions of the Bush era be made the object of a publicly aired investigation and prosecuted in the hope that such abuses and dangerous ideological extremists can be exposed and thereby be prevented from gaining power over our history in the future.

By chance I caught a 2007 John Pilger speech in which Pilger cites a joke about a group of Soviet journalists commenting on US media. Their question: "How do you Americans do it?! All journalists give same opinion. In Soviet Union, we have to send them to gulag to get them to all agree."

I think there is a broader issue concerning the very notion of disagreeing and being the odd man out, the outlier, the thorn -- being non-conformist -- in American culture. All the raving about American "tolerance" and "democracy" is actually a kind of nervous self-reassurance that we haven't become the mind-numblingly narrow society we in fact are. This society does not tolerate dissent. Dissent is just plain unfashionable, uncool, and now 'un-American'.

David Gregory is far from alone in thinking that it is "not journalists' job" to challenge authority. Elizabeth Bumiller (if I remember correctly) of The New York Times said something very similar a couple of years ago. The Times, remember, sat on several stories that challenged Bush orthodoxy until the truth began to leak out elsewhere. Years ago, during the Reagan hallucination, news of Iran-Contra broke abroad, in the Middle East, not in the United States. Journalists have been this way since the post-Watergate realignment.

But journalists are just average folks, like most college-educated Americans, they have been taught to think like everyone else. And like anyone who watches American television, they have learned Our Age's Greatest Doublethink: You Are Most Different When You Are the Same. Conformity is Individuality.

This could be a predictable by-product of a profit-driven, self-serving, money-grubbing ethos. We are trained to believe that conforming is non-conformist. "Just Do It."

More importantly, Big Brother in the US has been honed, refined, mastered to a degree far beyond the imagination of George Orwell or anyone who lived prior to the mass media technology of today. Marketing of cultural garbage has bled into marketing of political conformity. Obama is a perfect example. Rhetorical tip of the hat during the presidential campaign. Now an utterly mainstream president.

Look at the protests in Iran. That simply would not happen here. It didn't. People think it un-American. How ironic! Iranians are being 'American' by doing something Americans wouldn't dream of doing here!

Look at the uproar in the almost-unreported expenses scandals in Britain. Here such kickbacks to politicians are institutionalized and formalized. People pay lipservice objections and little more.

Consider how quickly Americans have acquiesced in the multi-trillion dollar kickback to Wall Street -- at our expense!

'Journalists' -- out to serve their own interests no more or less so than anyone else -- are just part of the phenomenon. Journalism as a whole is wrapped up in mythology about "speaking truth to power" thanks to decades, even centuries, old events. The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, Thomas Paine.

None of these would happen today or even be tolerated in the mainstream.

This is a country in a fundamentally protectionist, defensive frame of mind. A very predictable outcome for an empire in severe decline. Protect, hold on to what you have, suspect, even fear difference, dissent. Send people to school, in this case "Journalism School" or "Schools of Government" (but most importantly undergraduate "school") to learn the Arts of Conformism. The leading school in the land is, no surprise, among the most conformist. No wonder that Obama picks most of his 'team of rivals' from Harvard.

This is a fundamentally, religiously conformist society. Hammer done the nail sticking out. Sand the floor to perfect polish. Smooth it all. Uniform hamburgers, uniform sneakers, uniform entertainment. Uniform people.