Dear Democrats,

I'm sorry you chose temporarily favorable media over honest media.

Now, the Obama honeymoon in the MSM could last a while. Maybe he'll thrill the Village with one rivalgasm after another, and everything will be just fine.

Or maybe not.

You had the chance to take the high road, but you decided that this was the kind of media you liked:

You cooed endlessly about St. Maddow. I happened upon this clip the other day, yet another example of flipping the bird at the facts and constructing a legend in their place:

Sarah Palin may not have deserved our votes (she didn't come close to earning mine), but truthy journalists like Maddow thought she didn't deserve honest reportage, either.

Though I'm not a praying man, I appreciate that Palin framed our nation's military decisions as needing to measure up to a standard of goodness, as opposed to being the de facto embodiment of God's will:

Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.

Not much different from the quote attributed to Lincoln: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side...."

But because Maddow doesn't like Palin, and because she's the Greatest Progressive Journalist Evah, she (like many in the leftysphere) can twist that quote to say that Palin insists that God hearts the Iraq War.

Some of the commentators, including Maddow, properly criticize Palin for, in the same speech, implying that the Heavenly Father wants a certain pipeline built:

I think God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get the gas line built, so pray for that.

But that line wasn't as much of a grabber as the Iraq statement she didn't make, so her Iraq statement was remade. Quoth Maddow:

A task that is from God. God's plan for Iraq, wow!

Unless msnbc is now in the business of scratching its collective head at all references to a fictitious deity, there's no "wow" about it. Palin asks us to hope and pray that what we're doing is on the side of the angels. But if you take out the words that indicate she's talking about striving and soul-searching that what we do is just, you can make a "wow" out of it. And it's just Sarah Palin, so who cares whether we're just telling the truth.

Just like it was just philandering good ole boy Bill Clinton and just stiff, boring Al Gore who didn't get honest media. Meet the new, lying, personality-preference-weighted media, same as the old.

Perhaps the worst legacy of the Clinton years is that the permanent changes we needed simply did not happen:

1. We elected a smart, charismatic guy with a lesser-evil agenda, but we did not succeed (or invest much in) repudiating the Reagan Revolution, and the language of greed-is-good jingoistic authoritarianism

2. We did not effectively expose the debasement of the modern media, and thus most Americans still believe what they hear from the talking heads

That, and a nation driven to the brink by kind of presidency that toxic frames and lying media unsurprisingly beget, that is what Barack Obama is inheriting.

I guess we'll just have to hope he remains likable enough that he won't end up under the wheels of that media and that those frames he felt it was gauche to stomp out when he had the chance won't keep him from, y'know, saving the country and the world.

Maybe there will be a plan, and it will be God's plan. You never know.