The sideshow on glass houses and the people who live in them:
Atrios brings up a very important point when he suggests that these journalists, having turned themselves into celebrities rather than principled purveyors of information to the public, can no longer claim the territory of disinterested parties who should be kept out of the limelight. These guys aren’t just bylines anymore, they are players, and they are players who have created the environment under which players get the spotlight when they are even so much as suspected of screwing up. But we all know that if Fund were a liberal pundit, he’d be getting hammered by the So-Called Liberal Media (SCLM) all over the airwaves. The new rule is that it’s open season on all Democrats and all liberals, but we’re supposed to pretend that the Republicans are “good” people and therefore not deserving of the same contemptuous treatment. MWO has made the point about Fund in the past precisely because this double-standard, which has actually infested the public discourse in a big way (e.g., Gore forgets who he was with on one trip to a fire site and he’s a “liar”, Bush lies about everything up to and including his own policies and he’s an “honest, plainspoken” guy), has so corrupted the way even liberals perceive their own fellow-travellers. It needs to be counteracted, especially when the sins of the right are so much more profound than those on the left. There is nothing wrong with expressing our disgust when a guy like Fund goes all moralistic over a few blow-jobs and then turns out to be a worse man than those he attacks (just as we should be repelled when serial adulterer-divorcer Newt Gingrich pretends to sufficient purity to throw the first stone).
And, most of all, it’s a good idea to remind people that if they are accusing us of something, they’re doing it. Make them live in the glass house they built.