Journamalism

So, let me get this straight. Our media elite in Washington don't want Democrats making resolutions calling for a timetable to leave Iraq. And they don't want nasty investigations into the firing of U.S. attorneys, whether the Attorney General lied about his role in it, and what, precisely was Karl Rove's role. Instead, they want Democrats to focus on "serious issues?"

Here are several of our media elites from our nation's most influential journalistic outlets -- including from Time, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, and NBC News -- all sitting around on the Chris Matthews Show giggling for three and a half minutes straight about the silly U.S. attorneys scandal. The whole thing is just a fun game for them, and it's absurd to them that anyone could take things like this seriously.

And what is most notable is that they express outrage at one part, and one part only, of this whole story -- namely, they are furious over the fact that the foolish, unfair Democrats would even dare to try to force Karl Rove to testify. Why, firing U.S. attorneys and lying to Congress and the country about it is all fair game, but that -- trying to get Rove to answer questions -- is really beyond the pale. Just watch how the people who have done so much damage to our country think and behave:

My God. These people are depraved. And pretty clueless. Do they really believe that voters turned out last Congress so that we could get more hearings on satellite radio?

There once was a time when journalists would be falling all over themselves to get at this story, which reaches to the freakin' Oval Office. A scandal in which the White House, hearkening back to the days of Richard Nixon, is accused of using the full weight and power of the law to affect political races. But to these arbiters of what's news, this is just so much blah, blah, blah, forced down America's threat by smelly bloggers.

The overriding goal of most of our national media elites is to preserve the prevailing Republican power system that rules Washington because of how beneficial that system is to them. As a result, they admire and want to protect those who rule that system, and thus reflexively view scandals which entail accusations of true corruption by our political leaders -- and especially unpleasant formal investigations and threats of criminal prosecution -- as frivolous and inherently false and unfair.

They will always lash out at those who prosecute the scandal but defend as unfair victims those who are accused of the wrongdoing. Look at how angry Time's Richard Stengel is about the Democrats' desire to make Rove testify: "I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove because it is so bad for them" (emphasis in original). What if Rove really engaged in serious wrongdoing? Stengel, like virtually all of his Beltway media colleagues, really couldn't care less.

I am so uninterested in what Richard Stengel has to say about what Democrats in Congress should, or should not do.

UPDATED to fix some balky syntax.