The piling on has begun. Last week Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz broke a front page story about CBS anchor Dan Rather's speech at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in Texas. Considering that Rather is, as Kurtz puts it, "the longest-serving and most outspoken of the major network news anchors," this has, of course, thrown the right into a tizzy about liberal media bias. It certainly doesn't hurt that those who have long claimed Rather transparently favors Democrats now get to skywrite "I told you so."

The media bashing is starting to get unnerving. Apparently it's not just conservative mudslingers like Michelle Malkin: Yesterday the Los Angeles Times reported that though the public antagonism hasn't yet attained Vietnam-era levels, "'treasonous' and 'traitor' are words aimed at the news media with increasing frequency these days." Each time newspaper correspondents file I-was-there pieces from the ground in Afghanistan, it seems, they get angry letters threatening that they're putting U.S. troops at risk.