Eric, you have some good observations here, but I differ with you on what is important and what is not. Here is my perspective:

1) Barbra Streisand: Not important.
2) Bush's National Guard Service: Important.
3) CBS Memos: Not important.

Everyone admits that it is silly and narcissistic for Ms. Streisand to be issuing pronouncements like these in the form of press releases. In fact, the Streisand Memos are the subject of a very funny comedy routine on Air America radio.

Still, in a Democracy, for a citizen to be a-political is to avoid a very important social responsibility. So, I laud Ms. Streisand for airing her views, even if some of her statements are giggly stuff.

I object to the term ankle-biter, because it seems to imply that only the opinions of the powerful matter (the neck-biters?), while those of everyday citizens are relegated to the status of mites and chiggers.

Bush's National Guard service record is important. His service history allows voters to better evaluate his character. Did he fulfill the letter of the law? No documentary evidence available yet establishes that he did not. Did he fulfill the intent of the law? Participants and bystanders say that he did not.

I think this much is clear.

Should the media devote attention to this story? I think so. The media should also devote attention to John Kerry's service record. Should coverage of this story override coverage of Bush's actual record in office? I do not believe it should. In my mind, the public would be well-served by the media carefully surveying the presidential record of the last four years in such a way that media audiences have access to the facts.

Finally, the CBS memo story is not important. Calls for Dan Rather's resignation are laughable. I think the story damages the Bush campaign by highlighting the National Guard issue and it damages the process as a whole by allowing erroneous information to be repeated constantly in the media -- and with the way the media works now, who cares if it is accompanied by denials?

Meanwhile, CNN's news broadcasts are full of the most outrageous, demonstrably fictional statements ever to appear in a mainstream news show. If Dan Rather should resign, Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff need to hand in their badges, too. They are just as guilty of sensationalism and partisan action as Dan Rather.

I guess if all newscasters had to resign for bias, we would only be left with blogs.

The spectacle of "artist" after artist bemoaning the curtailing of speech and the silencing of dissent long ago descended into self-parody. If you're going to make such claims, you ought to at least be able to point to an example of someone actually being silenced or even seriously inconvenienced by government action. In Britain, Germany, and other "free" European countries, Michael Moore, to take the most notorious example, would be subject to much stricter libel laws at the very least. (Not that I favor the adoption of such laws.) In the US, he operates completely unfettered, making the most outrageous -- and indeed malicious -- allegations against those in power, and apparently Moore hasn't suffered so much as a vigorous IRS audit (surely he'd have told us about it).

A group of notable writers recently staged an event declaring a "state of emergency" because the Patriot Act was stripping us of our freedoms, etc., and even had the gall to recite poetry written by dissidents in communist Poland, as if that had even the remotest relevance to the current state of freedom in the US. To date, not one of the participants has reported being questioned, detained, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, or otherwise intimidated by government agents or even tailed by suspicious men in black suits. More about that here.

Now a couple of points about the "binks" comment. First, "Still, in a Democracy, for a citizen to be a-political is to avoid a very important social responsibility."

Uh, no. To be apolitical is to exercise one of the many freedoms available to you. In fact, I suggest that the freedom to be political is only so robust as the freedom to be apolitical. Just witness the experience in communist and other coercive regimes, where every facet of life was/is effectively politicized. Also, being political requires a certain investment of time and energy. I'm perfectly happy for, say, a brilliant biochemist to devote all his/her time and energy to developing a cure for something at the expense of paying attention to politics (not that excellence biochemistry necessarily precludes political involvement/observation/whatever). As with financial markets, it probably takes a relatively small proportion of the population to drive a political system toward some kind of "efficiency" (in the informational sense). The Soviet Union and other commmunist countries bragged of 99% voter turnout, but that system was neither efficient nor free.

Second, "Bush's National Guard service record is important. His service history allows voters to better evaluate his character."

Maybe it allows them to better evaluate his character as a callow young man, but what value is that, except to biographers? The mature Bush has acknowledged a certain amount of dissoluteness in his past. By all accounts, he transformed himself and now conducts himself in a much different manner. Even if all the worst TANG allegations against him were true, there's no carryover. If the worst allegations against him as president are true, he is guilty of corruption or incompetence, but there's no indication he has neglected the form and function of the office -- in other words, his literal duty -- as would have been the case with the TANG story (where neither outright corruption nor incompetence is alleged). On the contrary, love him or hate him, he has built a reputation for a businesslike approach to the presidency (not all that surprising for an MBA).

But with John Kerry we have an entirely different case. His Vietnam-era conduct may tell us little about his later character, but his political exploitation and reinterpretation of that history tell a very consistent story about the man, from his antiwar activism through his "seared in my memory" speech on the senate floor through his "reporting for duty" campaign theme. And the story it tells is not a flattering one.

Roger, thanks for your response and for the wisdom it contains.

Wow, comments like these are posts in themselves. Bink, we may be left with blogs (or at least blog-style journalism) because big media journalism is a throwback to the monopolism necessarily created by the outdated limited bandwidth concept and the FCC (the Big Three, and the media titans which that system created).

Matt Welch had an interesting piece in October's Reason Magazine along similar lines.

Thank you both!

Very nice site!