It’s almost difficult to remember what it was like, in that long era before the veil dropped during the second term of President George W. Bush, back when we actually had to debate whether the mainstream news media was biased.  It’s almost as if the MSM decided that the charade wasn’t worth maintaining back when that picture of Bush walking with a copy of Bernie Goldberg’s book, Bias, made the rounds.

After the vitriol and lies intended to destroy the Bush presidency and the cult-like madness and cover-ups to promote the Obama presidency, can there be any real doubt that, on the whole, mainstream journalists are, as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit frequently states, Democrat operatives with bylines?

Seth Mandel suggests that media bias is central to the perhaps-destined-to-be-successful strategy of the IRS to cover up its unconstitutional, tyrannical targeting of conservative activists to help ensure the reelection of Obama:

If the latest revelations about the IRS are correct, then its officials have approached the abuse-of-power scandal with a clear strategy, pretty much from the beginning. They have been betting that, since their illegal targeting campaign against those who disagree with President Obama has had the backing of Democrats in Congress, they needed only a media strategy, not a political one. And that media strategy appears to have been: conceal or destroy potential (and actual) evidence, and assume that this activity will be less damaging than whatever is in the files they’ve worked to hide.

It’s a direct challenge to the media, in other words.

It’s not a direct challenge.  It’s an echo, a commiseration, evidence of solidarity.  After all, if the news media were willing to throw away any plausible ability to defend its objectivity in order to bring about the era of hopenchange, why should the IRS (or the rest of the federal bureaucracy) be any different?

It may be that the only two opportunities for the United States to avoid dissolution and/or nation-rending violence are for the American people finally to stop paying attention to News Media Incorporated or for those professional journalists and editors to take it as a learning experience that they were played for saps to promote a thuggish regime that embodies everything the standard liberal narrative warned against beneath a very thin veneer of the platitudes that liberals like to believe they believe in.