Thank God for Overreach

Power is said to corrupt and this attribute of power can make it somewhat self-limiting in a democracy.  Given his friendly media Obama had more room to overreach, more of a tendency to self-corrupt (FOX News and talk radio have sadly become ghettoized and de-legitimatized by the rest of the mainstream media).  But eventually he would 'overrun his coverage' and I think we're seeing that now.  The sad thing is that it didn't happen earlier in his presidency and thus limit his ability to damage the country via his policies.

Anyway, Jim Geraghty had the following to say and I have to admit to feeling some serious schadenfreude over the mainstream media's sudden shock at what they have wrought:

You know a scandal is bad when I can point you to the Huffington Post's summary, because it can't collect any more outrage than I can:

Journalists reacted with shock and outrage at the news that the Justice Department had secretly obtained months of phone records of Associated Press journalists.

The AP broke the news on Monday about what it called an "unprecedented intrusion" into its operation. It said that the DOJ had obtained detailed phone records from over 20 different lines, potentially monitoring hundreds of different journalists without notifying the organization. The wire service's president, Gary Pruitt, wrote a blistering letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, accusing the DOJ of violating the AP's constitutional rights.

Reporters and commentators outside the AP professed themselves to be equally angered. "The Nixon comparisons write themselves," BuzzFeed's Ben Smith tweeted. Margaret Sullivan, the public editor for the New York Times, called the story "disturbing." Washington Post editor Martin Baron called it "shocking." CNN's John King described it as "very chilling."

Speaking to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, a lawyer for the AP called the DOJ's actions "outrageous," saying they were "a dagger to the heart of AP's newsgathering activity."

BuzzFeed's Kate Nocera was perhaps more pithy, writing simply, "what in the f--k."

With corruption, it's never personal until it's.... personal.