One of the points I was trying to make in this post last night was that the Newsweek story really might not be playing out the way the howling right-wing mob expects it to.

The mob assumed the press, like a battered wife, would blame itself; Newsweek has done what it's supposed to do, and other press outlets have followed suit. But the pieces I linked last night show that not everyone is with the program.

Add to that the repeated media reminders that Koran-desecration stories aren't new -- see the middle of this New York Times story and, now, the lead of this Washington Post story -- and you've got a surprising amount of resistance. Oh, and some of the editorials have been positively scathing; see the L.A. Times ("The United States has already been convicted in the court of world opinion for its treatment of its prisoners, and that's the administration's fault, not Newsweek's") and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ("This behavior seems so Nixonian, except that the current crew is much better at the press-intimidation game than William Safire and Vice President Spiro Agnew were").

Righties will whine that these are "far left" newspapers. (The Freepers call Minneapolis's paper the Red Star Tribune.) But was there anything this full-throated when Howell Raines and Dan Rather and Eason Jordan were under attack?

I think this one is different. I'm not sure the mob is going to get a scalp this time.

I can't quite figure out why. Is it because Bush is solidly below 50% in the polls and because he and the congressional Republicans have so clearly gone over the line on such issues as Terri Schiavo and Social Security? Is it because the mob this time isn't led by bloggers, but by the White House? Or is it because the rest of the press thought Raines and Rather and Jordan genuinely screwed up, but the Newsweek story is the plain truth -- and only the tip of an iceberg every war reporter knows is genuine?