WNET.org president Neal Shapiro did not rule out the possibility of future synergies between Newsweek and Need to Know.

"We haven't talked about anything specific," he said. "But I think all kinds of natural synergies may happen."

Shapiro said he is not concerned that Stewart and Meacham, who has been a frequent guest on Charlie Rose as well as MSNBC's Morning Joe, will bring ideological baggage to the program.

"They are both are incredibly smart. And I think, given their intellect, neither are people you can pigeonhole left or right. I think they have a history of asking probing questions on all sides."

"Given their intellect" they can't be placed on the left or the right? Yeah, smart people are all centrists, I guess. And by "probing," Shapiro must mean something like treating sources with "charity and dignity and respect."

I'm also looking forward to public television giving us Newsweek synergies. It's hard to think of a better use of PBS resources than providing another platform for commercial journalism.  Maybe if we're really lucky we'll get some Mac Margolis on Need to Know.

Thomas blames, among other things, "our 'got mine' culture of entitlement," adding:

Politicians, never known for their bravery, precisely represent the people. Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards. They cannot bring themselves to raise taxes on the middle class or cut Social Security and medical benefits for the elderly. They'd get clobbered at the polls. So any day of reckoning gets put off, and put off again, and the debts pile up.

Now that's the problem--the middle class needs to pay more taxes, and everyone should get less from Social Security. These are very familar "hard truths" you hear from corporate pundits. Thomas goes on to finger "the college hookup culture," and suggests that Obama should give in to Republican demands on "tort reform" in order to make progress on healthcare--an offer Obama has actually already made, with no discernible response from Republicans.

The blame-the-people narrative was echoed in Jon Meacham's editor's note, where he advised that we should "own up to the reality that Washington is not an abstraction but a mirror. Our political life is a reflection of who we are, no matter how unattractive we may find the image looking back at us. Washington is an expression, not a thwarting, of the will of the people."

It's odd for journalists to conclude that Washington politics is a perfect expression of Americans' political views. If it were, one would have to think that Congressional approval ratings would be somewhat higher, and that political outcomes would be very different. The public consistently favors higher taxes for the wealthy, for example--but don't hold your breath waiting for pundits to take up that cause.

Meacham goes on to illustrate this misguided notion by comparing Obama's healthcare reform drive with George W. Bush's push to privatize Social Security. The two are apparently similar in that they were both about reforming the system, and Americans prefer the status quo. It's hard to know what to say about that, though one could point out that the threat to the country's fiscal well-being posed by the rising costs of healthcare are  significantly greater than anything having to do with Social Security.

Meacham also warns readers not to idealize the past, though, since urgent political problems weren't solved back then either:

The first report predicting a crisis in Social Security was released 35 years ago, but the fabled bipartisanship of ages past produced only incremental fixes. If more had been accomplished, it would not be an issue today.

That crisis was handled with tax increases that created a multi-trillion dollar surplus for Social Security. The only reason Social Security remains "an issue today" is due to journalists like Meacham making it one, usually by misleading people about the program's imminent collapse.

If I taught at the Kennedy School, I would take these two speeches as ur-text of partisan rhetoric. I think it was a brilliant tactical night, one of the most brilliant in the age of television. These were two concise, rather devastating rhetorical hits at John Kerry. And there was just--they did not miss a base. They did not miss anything that they could hit.

The remarkable thing about those two speeches was their breathtaking dishonesty. (See "If Only They Had Invented the Internet," FAIR Media Advisory, 9/3/04.) Those were the speeches in which Miller and Cheney claimed that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was opposed to all U.S. weapon systems, had promised to give the U.N. a veto over U.S. military action, and so on--all blatant falsehoods.  If you saw that non-stop parade of lies as "brilliant," then maybe it's not so surprising that you would be looking forward to Dick Cheney running for president.