An Arrogance of Power

I'll let David Ignatius of the Washington Post write the opening paragraph for me, with just a couple of minor changes:

There is a temptation that seeps into the souls of even the most righteous politicians journalists and leads them to bend the rules, and eventually the truth, to suit the political needs of the moment. That arrogance of power is on display with the Bush administration American mainstream media.

Ignatius is writing, of course, about the MSM's hysterical behavior in the aftermath of Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident, though he thinks he's writing about the incident itself.

This is a press corps suffering a collective psychotic break, completely out of control; willing to do anything to reach its frustrated political goals.

Hugh Hewitt sums it up nicely:

The MSM is unhinged, a victim of its Bush hatred, which includes of course hatred of Cheney. The idea that failure to tell the White House press corps of a hunting accident for 14 hours is in anyway similar to leaving a woman to die in a submerged car while fleeing the scene or the cover-up of Watergate is just nuts.

This is part of the reason:

Congress appeared ready to launch an investigation into the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program last week, but an all-out White House lobbying campaign has dramatically slowed the effort and may kill it, key Republican and Democratic sources said yesterday.

The latest effort to bring down a Republican administration is stalling (and don't believe this "White House lobbying" bilge; it's stalling because Democrats can read public opinion polls). The mainstream press has been trying to make George Bush go away since 2000, when they failed to corrupt the vote quite enough to get Gore elected. And the election of 2004 was like putting a cattle prod to a bull's nutsack as far as American journalism was concerned.

The people, in their arrogance, have spoken. And old media hacks like David Ignatius don't like what they've said.

Also posted at The Jawa Report and Vince Aut Morire.