But before I go...

One big, multi-part question.

Stroll around the lefty blogs, Mathew Gross, Bottle of Blog>, TPM, Hullabaloo, etc. and ask yourself, is this a different universe? Do the emplyees of newspapers and TV news just eat gray mush all the time? Is that why there is no sense of the magnitude or very close proximity of political uproar?

Or is it something else? Do the reporters know what's going on any more? Certainly Andrea Mitchell, wife of Alan Greenspan, has an inkling (follow the TPM link), but what about the writers at major daily newspapers? What about the folks producing news segments for the networks? Because it's either that they don't know or they just don't want to talk about it.

More than any of the other stuff (at least at the moment) this makes me worried. This silence portends denial of a serious sort, the kind that can progress to dangerous, stultifing depths. Once this kind of denial starts to become really ingrained (like, a year or two ago), it becomes hard to change it. Where is the great catalyst that shakes the media rubes from their torpor? And what if there isn't one big shock but maybe a series of small bumps? The kind of bumps one might feel as an oligarchic semi-democracy goes off-road, veering slowly toward the swamps of despotism? How would the docile, sleep-walking media cover it?

Just a question.