What Digby Said -- Almost

Digby has a post up on a response Howard Kurtz made to one of her comments. Now, granted Kurtz is pathetic, but this comment is lame even for him:

The excerpt ended with this from my post:

"The press, therefore, will go to great lengths to protect the people who give them what they crave, most of whom happen to be Republicans since character smears are their very special talent. There was a reason why Rove and Libby used 'the wife sent him on a boondoggle' line. Stories about Edwards and his hair and Hillary and her cold, calculating cleavage are the coin of the realm. Why we see so little of the same kind of feeding frenzies on the other side isn't hard to fathom. Nobody is spoon-feeding them to the press with just the kind of cutesy meanness they prefer."

His comment, in its entirety, was this:

I agree that leakers often get to set the story line, but I also know that Democrats are not unfamiliar with the practice. (Remember the Bush DUI leak just before the 2000 election?) And those who leaked information about domestic surveillance, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons also had an impact.

Can everyone see what's wrong with that picture? I knew that you could.

Digby goes on to argue that the Democrats do not do the "same thing" in leaking little character smears. Which is true enough, mostly since the press ignores this sort of thing unless it comes from someone in power, which the Democrats are not, no matter the results of the last election. Well, that's their own damned fault.

But I think one thing that's drawn in bold relief by this is that the political operatives, the oppo researchers, the administration attack poodles, and the press itself have become so completely trivial that they don't see the difference between Abu Ghraib and John Edwards' haircuts. It's another aspect of the Rove Legacy: it's all about the next election, and information about American atrocities and war crimes is to be suppressed for the same reasons that one leakes "news" about Edwards' haircuts to one's favorite assassin: damage at election time. There's no moral issue involved in corruption, torture, war under false pretenses -- it's only that it could damage your prospects at the polls.

That's the real tragedy.