….. “I have a closed mind.”  Thus spake to universal derision Earl Landgrebe (R- outer Wingnuttia), infamous dingbat of the Watergate era, who still loved ol’ Nixon even in the face of the nearly unanimous national horror and outrage produced by the release of the White House tapes.  The famously conservative Chicago Tribune was so aghast that they fired up the presses and ran the transcripts in their entirety, in a bulging special edition, and even Barry Goldwater urged the disgraced and disgraceful President to resign.  The Washington Post, which had doggedly pursued the story from day one in an often lonely crusade, was finally vindicated for its years of hard work in bringing to light the shockingly heinous behavior that had become commonplace at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, although in that quaint era no deaths or diapering were as yet involved.  Those were the days, my friend.  And they’ve ended,  big time, as the media’s President for life, Dick Cheney, might say.

Today, our watchdogs of Democracy in the rapidly collapsing Fourth Estate have found, together, a new cause: the people’s right not to know.  The LA Times’ Tim Rutten has joined the thundering chorus of those in journalism who have now discovered that their real role is to protect the American people from unpleasant, confusing facts, particularly when it comes to the Bush administration’s torture program, borne of their rather curious belief that executive abuses of power and lawbreaking are just too “political” to wade into.  Even as their newspapers wither before their eyes, these cretinous moral midgets show us exactly why; those eating up the dwindling space in our emaciated press wouldn’t know a good story if it dropped on their swelled heads.

Rutten cites, as justification for sweeping the story of the century under the rug, the certifiably crazy comments of modern day Landgrebes like Dick Cheney and Rep. Peter King of New York as reason enough for covering up the wholesale torture and murder of human beings without ever reflecting on the fact that even without their continued indulgence of such nutcases, the great majority of Americans are still smart enough to know right from wrong, dumb from smart, and lies from the truth.  They’ve made their bed, and they’re inviting us all to get in.  Polls, and history, show they are wrong, but they nonetheless furiously type away.  Too divisive, they say, as their readers stampede for the exits.

It seems that the massive malpractice perpetrated by their profession during the Bush years, and the understandable desire they share with the torturers to be forgiven and forgotten, has turned them into an ink-stained cadre of Earl Landgrebes, who with their similarly discredited ideological soulmates like Roman Hruska, not incidentally, praised the uninformed among us as deserving representation, even, in Hruska’s case, on the Supreme Court.  Unsuccessfully, I might add.  Landgrebe was promptly turned out of office, and Hruska soon followed.

Know-nothingism has collided with the people’s right to know, and this time know-nothingism ought to have a chance, they all say.  And maybe it will, thanks to guys like Rutten, Ignatius, Sarasohn, Broder, and on and on.  Too bad they didn’t choose careers for which they were more suited, perhaps at Halliburton.  Too bad for the rest of us, that is.  Back during Watergate, people still read their rags, and now they don’t.  Coincidence?