I'm giving myself an imaginary Good Citizenship medal today because I actually got up and watched some of those Sunday morning shows where our nation's policies are supposedly set. I want to have gotten something out of it, and a nonexistent medal looks to be about it.

I'll admit that I was sort of looking forward to seeing David Brooks, Mr. "Conservative Voice So Reasonable That He Squats on the Op-Ed Page of The LIberal New York Times", defend his defense of the Libby pardon in the same room as people who've shared the Earth with him lo these past several years. For much of that time, Mr. Reasonable's official position on Impeachment Year '98 has been that while he doesn't think we ought to be impeaching people over their sex lives--Brooks can sometimes almost appear French in his depraved reasonableness--Bill Clinton committed perjury, which is a crime, and unlike your hippie types, Brooks is too good a man to ever think that shutting the country down for a year is too far to go in the pursuit of someone who has committed a crime. I have trouble connecting that cherished position to Brooks's continuing to say that the whole prosecution of Libby was a sham of a mockery of a travesty of a farce even though, as he conceded on the TV show, the guy was, you know, "guilty." Meet the Press has its own twist on the rountable format; even though the panelists are there together in the same room, the host takes them on one by one, so they don't get a chance to alert Brooks to possible holes in his argument by asking him, "What are you, nuts?" I do hope that at least the technicians had to edit out the choking laughter and fart noises.

Brooks reeled off the standard lies about how Libby has been disgraced and his career ruined and expressed the standard concern for his "family"--has anybody seen this remarkable family that melts the hearts of people who would normally argue that one of the best reasons for executing criminals is to stop them from breeding? Are the kids dipped in Swiss milk chocolate or what? Basically though, he seemed to think that LIbby shouldn't be punished because it would gladden the hearts of the wrong sort of person. In his op-ed, he referred to them--oh, hell, to us--as "howlers", as in "the howlers will howl" if Libby were pardoned but we'd howl anyway, as we "entered howling." It's not that much of a surprise that Brooks thinks that people who are upset that the White House conducted a smear campaign to silence a whistleblower with a serious case and exposed a covert intelligence agent in the process ought to just get over it, as Judge Scalia always advises on the subject of the 2000 election. But I was unprepared for his implicit judgement that while people who feel that way are a mad, slavering horde, the people who rigged Impeachment Year 1998 must have been meek-mannered sophists whispering sweet nothings in the ear of Lady Justice. I have to imagine that a mind and a moral compass that selective with regard to the facts must be a handy thing for a columnist to have, but I can imagine situations where it would get you in trouble. Here's hoping that Brooks knows enough to let his wife do the talking whenever he's approached by a cop with a breathalizer.

Over on Face the Nation, a small collection of journalists and journalist-flavored meat products were pointing out all the reasons that Hillary Clinton won't last till noon. She's been raking in the cash, leading in the polls, attracting whose crowds and radiating terrific energy--girl, just go home and bake some cookies, please! David Yepsen, a fellow from The Des Moines Register, taking the bait dangled at him by a host whose name I kept failing to catch, agreed that it might have been a sign of desperation that Hillary had Bill out there stumping for her "so early." I think we can all agree that he would have thought it was just as much a sign of desperation if she'd given Bill a plane ticket to Antarctica and a blow-up doll and told him to stay out of camera range until a year from this November. At one point the host described the Clinton campaign as "a political Rorshach test: if you like 'em, it's magic, and if you don't like 'em, this week was like watching a tired old act." That was honest of him, but he seemed to be citing it mainly to account for how either Clinton could appear in public and not be pelted with rotten vegetables.

I'm not ready to declare anyone a shoe-in or even a clear front-runner at this ridiculously early stage in the race; we are, after all, about six months away from the point where, in the 2004 race, the press started insisting that Howard Dean had it all sewn up. Still, with Hillary-hating at perhaps its lowest ebb ever (and probably more prevalent in hard-left circles than anywhere else), the media's devotion to it, and their constant insisting that her campaign song might as well be "Many Rivers to Cross," is beginning to seem not just stubborn but ungallant. At least it has its basis in sincere personal distaste. I'm not sure what to make of the media's continuing to do stories about the supposedly surprising failure of John McCain's campaign to catch fire, stories that are ludicrous on their face because they seem to assume that there was some point in our lifetimes where McCain stood as least as good a chance of somehow becoming president as, say, Ron Paul, or even Les Paul. (I'd say that he was never worse than neck and neck with RuPaul.) I used to think it was kind of sweet of the media to act as if McCain, who they like, had a snowball's chance in hell, but now it just seems mean. He's going to have to pay back some of that money, you know, and he'll never get back the wasted hours that he could have have spent with his family or building ships in bottles. We all know how this breaks down, right? By attacking the religious right and publically disagreeing with President Bush, McCain guranteed that he would never be able to get any more than a ragged handfuls of Republicans to vote for him. Then, having courted the very people whose minds were set in stone against him by giving in on things like torture and trying to kiss up to the religious right (by sucking up to the abandoned, discredited, dying Jerry Falwell--a pretty good example of how endearingly bad McCain is at pandering), he guaranteed that no one outside the ranks of the Republican hardcore would ever vote for him either. It's as elementary as political math gets, but the folks on Face the Nation nattered on about McCain's presidential viability as if it were something that had at one point existed. How dumb are they? Where do they get their information? What country do they think they're living in? Do they all routinely vote for Nader every four years?