The toady press and King George Bush the 2nd

And now Glenn Greenwald from "Lewis Libby owes his freedom to our corrupt political elite," published in Salon:

The political press — the function of which was envisioned by the Founders to investigate and hold accountable the most politically powerful — now fulfill the exact oppose purpose in our country. They are slavishly protective of our highest political officials, and adversarial only to those who investigate, oppose and seek to hold those officials accountable. Hence, in official Washington, the Real Villains are Patrick Fitzgerald, Ken Silverstein, Russ Feingold and his Censure resolution, Pat Leahy and his disruptive subpoenas — our Beltway elite reserves their venom for those who want to turn the lights on what our most powerful political officials are doing.

What kind of country do we expect to have when we have a ruling Washington class that believes that they and their fellow members of the Beltway elite constitute a separate class, one that resides above and beyond the law? That is plainly what they believe. And we now have exactly the country that one would expect would emerge from a political culture shaped by such a deeply insulated, corrupt and barren royal court.

In Federalist No. 70, Alexander Hamilton described the defining power of the King which made the British monarchy intolerably corrupt: “In England, the king is a perpetual magistrate; and it is a maxim which has obtained for the sake of the public peace, that he is unaccountable for his administration, and his person sacred.” Thomas Paine proclaimed in Common Sense “that so far as we approve of monarch, that in America THE LAW IS KING.” But little effort is required to see how far removed we now are from those basic principles.

The article is here. At least King George Bush the 1st was an honest man.