When Is It Right To Punch a Reporter?

The question is meant only half-facetiously, of course. Under the current rules of engagement between the media and politicians, it is never right to punch a reporter. Treat him or her with contempt, dripping condescension, sarcasm, obfuscation, hostility, Heep-ish like servility or even a couple of drinks, but up til now, no punching.

Then along came Bob Etheridge, Congressman from North Carolina, and a new era of hostilities — not only between our august “public servants” and the press, but between the New Mandarin Class and the folks they were ostensibly elected to “serve.”

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Of course, Etheridge has issued a classic non-apology apology, the usual suspects (hello, MSNBC) immediately tried to change the subject from the utterly indefensible actions of a minor Congressman to the propriety of two citizens asking the question: “Do you fully support the Obama agenda?”

So poisonous have our politics become, and so corrupt the media that reports on them, that this rather innocuous query has become in part the focus of the story. What did the kid mean by that? What were his motives in asking such a question? How dare he be “aggressive,” instead of averting his eyes as one of America’s bonzes strolled by? And just who the hell is he, anyway?

And for that act of lese-majeste, a college student was grabbed on a public street and, in full of You Tube, assaulted by a sitting member of the U.S. Congress.

What does this tell you about the overweening sense of entitlement that infects Washington? And what does it say about a servile “professional media” that it so wedded to the “narrative” of its own devising — Hope and Change — that it cannot function any longer as an honest broker of information, but now overtly proclaims its dedication to its Washington overlords?