Oh please - updated (2X)

Michael Calderone at Politico talks of the press corps:

"Our job is to hold him [Obama] to account," Whitaker said, adding that he thinks "we're going to have to get tougher."

Excuse the fuck out of me. NOW you've decided to hold a president accountable?

Or, as John Aravosis more politely puts it:

Actually, we needed all of you two wars, an economy, and a Constitution ago.

Presidents SHOULD be held accountable and the media should do a fair chunk of it, checking facts, calling bullshit when it's being slung, etc. But where were their gonads over the past eight years?

Asshats.

It had better be substantive, fact-checked accountability or I hope Obama kicks them where they should have had nuts during the Bush disaster.

UPDATE:

Digby has some comments on this:

Eight years of relentless harassment and character assassination, during which time the village media felt that Clinton and then Gore were "getting away with too much" because none of the endless GOP generated scandals ever came to anything, and so they had to take him down. Then, in order to "prove" they weren't just childish scandal mongers after destroying Al Gore, they went the other way and laid on their backs and let Bush walk all over them as he oversaw the destruction of the country. Now, in order to once again "prove" they aren't lapdogs, they are going to pick up right where they left off eight years ago, asking endless questions about inconsequential nonsense and breathlessly speculating about what the inconsequential nonsense might mean until a whole lot of people think there must be something to it or these people wouldn't be talking about it so much.

It's a coincidence, I'm sure, that they only feel the need to make sure that politicians don't "get away with" anything when the politician is a Democrat and they only need to prove they aren't reflexively hostile when it's a Republican. I'm also sure that ill-informed bloggers speculating as to whether or not that might actually be a reflection of the political values of the political establishment would be wrong, so I'll refrain from doing it.

UPDATE 2:

I think it's time to use the header I almost used when I first put this post up. It's from my header collection used in my daily clipping archive (which I don't post).

They really are corporate tools with very few exceptions.

Margaret, in a comment, commends Glenn Greenwald's article (found here). A few paragraphs therefrom:

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday -- which documents that "former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" and "that Rumsfeld's actions were 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo and 'influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques ... in Afghanistan and Iraq'" -- raises an obvious and glaring question: how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution? The culpability which the Report assigns for these war crimes is vast in scope and unambiguous:

...

This Report was issued on Thursday. Not a single mention was made of it on any of the Sunday news talk shows, with the sole exception being when John McCain told George Stephanopoulos that it was "not his job" to opine on whether criminal prosecutions were warranted for the Bush officials whose policies led to these crimes. What really matters, explained McCain, was not that we get caught up in the past, but instead, that we ensure this never happens again -- yet, like everyone else who makes this argument, he offered no explanation as to how we could possibly ensure that "it never happens again" if we simultaneously announce that our political leaders will be immunized, not prosecuted, when they commit war crimes. Doesn't that mindset, rather obviously, substantially increase the likelihood -- if not render inevitable -- that such behavior will occur again? Other than that brief exchange, this Senate Report was a non-entity on the Sunday shows.

...

The media fixation on the ultimately irrelevant Blagojevich scandal, juxtaposed with their steadfast ignoring of the Senate report documenting systematic U.S. war crimes, is perfectly reflective of how our political establishment thinks. Blagojevich's laughable scheme is transformed into a national fixation and made into the target of collective hate sessions, while the systematic, ongoing sale of the legislative process to corporations and their lobbyists are overlooked as the normal course of business. Lynndie England is uniformly scorned and imprisoned while George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are headed off to lives of luxury, great wealth, respect, and immunity from the consequences for their far more serious crimes. And the courageous and principled career Justice Department lawyer who blew the whistle on Bush's illegal spying programs -- Thomas Tamm -- continues to have his life destroyed, while the countless high-level government officials, lawyers and judges who also knew about it and did nothing about it are rewarded and honored, and those who committed the actual crimes are protected and immunized.

At the end of his post, Greenwald has links to other articles on implications of the Senate report.

As Willie Loman's wife once said, "Attention must be paid."
--the BB