A good point:

Underestimation explains the success of many politicians. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush come to mind. Overestimation is the mother of failure, and it may help explain President Obama’s sagging popularity right now.

Yes, though the sagging popularity will also lower future expectations.

…and the CIA:

1. Given that you were aware of the conduct for which CIA interrogators are now being investigated and possibly prosecuted, and you at least tacitly approved of such conduct, will you ask President Obama to pardon the interrogators?

2. Since you were aware of what the CIA interrogators were doing yet remained silent, are you at all complicit in their conduct?

Speaker Pelosi, assuming that you reject the IG’s report (and Leon Panetta’s assertion that the CIA told congress the truth in 2002) please respond to the following:

1. When you discovered that you were lied to in September 2002, did you confront Director Tenet? If not, why not?

2. Were the CIA personnel who lied to you in September 2002 fired and prosecuted? If not, why not?

3. When you discovered that you were lied to in September 2002 did you insist upon Congressional hearings? If not, why not?

There are more. But don’t expect the press to ask them. They’re only a watchdog when it’s a Republican in office. With Dems, they’re lapdogs.

Just in case you were wondering why they have trouble getting audiences, or at least large educated, intelligent ones.

How nuts do you have to be to think that Oswald and Sirhan were “right wingers”?

…or is it just a lover’s spat?

…a large element of the Obama-press rift is attributable to disappointment and frustration. The media is not simply covering Obama’s sinking ship of state, they are panicking about it.

But there are other factors at work. For starters, Obama isn’t very nice to the media. It may sound petty, but his obvious and frequent contempt for what they do must be irksome to reporters who fancy themselves to be indispensable elements in the Obama revolution. He spits his disdain for the “24-hour news cycle.” The press is told to buzz off — there is no news to be had on his Martha’s Vineyard vacation (before the eye-popping decision to name a special prosecutor to go after CIA operatives). And for all the promises to be “transparent,” this White House, and Robert Gibbs specifically, seems to be one of the least forthcoming in recent memory.

In short, the Obama team has shown the media little respect — and the press corps has begun to bristle at the high-handed treatment.

I’ll take it seriously when I start seeing some serious questions from the WH press corps (you know, on things like this, or this (who needs Chavez when we have the US State Department?)), and actually doing analysis of the legislation and reporting on the issues, instead of the horse race. Like the Obama White House itself, they too remain in campaign mode.

Thomas Lifson:

An unpleasant smell attends the Department of Justice decision to not prosecute New Mexico Governor (and Obama ally) Bill Richardson. Fresh on the heels of the Department declining to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation, while appointing a special prosecutor for CIA interrogators, the appearance of a politicized Justice Department is being created.

It’s not like this wasn’t perfectly predictable. Given his history, the Republican Senators that went along with the Holder nomination should be ashamed. They betrayed those who voted for them to prevent such things.

I won’t say that Rathergate was a low point for the so-called news media — I think that they perigeed, if not cratered in, in last year’s campaign’s non-stop fellation of the Obama machine, but it was pretty bad. But up until now, it was possible, just barely, to generously assume that Mapes (and Dan Rather) were merely hyperpartisan idiots. Now, however, it seems that they (or at least she — perhaps he remains a mere idiot) were lying:

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots. For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.” Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

But that didn’t fit the narrative, so it had to be tossed out. And of course, they will still be heralded as brave martyrs, in their brave attempts to speak truth to the power of the Evil Rovian Right-Wing propaganda machine, and there will continue to be insufficient curiosity among their former colleagues to exhume the matter any further.

And there is, of course, nothing to logically preclude us from believing that she remains a moron as well as a deceptive slanderer. In fact, the evidence for both is pretty compelling.