Leaks, leaks, leaks

The talk shows and the dextro-sphere are convulsed with outrage about the most recent outings of troop movements and covert anti-terrorist nation security operations. Michelle Malkin has a set of bitter photo-shopped commentary here, for example.

Hugh Hewitt is the fairest of the talk radio hosts, in that he doesn't run an echo chamber. He gets the other side on for quantity airtime, and isn't so concerned as some are to be seen as tossing the opposition over the top rope. So the transcripts of his interviews with the journalists and the exasperated officials would be a good first stop for the curious.

There's not much to add to all the donner and blitzen being called down on the news media. They are overwhelmingly liberal, astoundingly arrogant (this I know from personal experience, which needn't detain us here), and you can be forgiven for thinking, some days, that they don't hate George Bush because they oppose the war; they oppose the war because they hate George Bush. I'll just pass along an unconscious slip of the tongue I caught the NYT in, from their morning-after editorial on the '04 election. It explains a lot:

"We have had enough of the rancor for a while, and our greatest hope now is that Mr. Bush will set out to earn the right to be seen as leader by all the nation."

Sooo... Winning the electoral vote by a clear margin, winning the popular vote with the most votes ever won in an American election, winning a popular majority for the first time since 1988, expanding the GOP's hold on both houses of Congress for the first time since McKinley--none of that was good enough in our system of democracy to "earn the right" to be seen as leader. It needed some certain je ne sais quois to get progressives to assent to lose the BUSHITLER!!!! signs. And for the national press to quit trying to overturn the results of the election.