
With White House scandals dominating each news cycle, President Obama's newly minted media critics may prefer to ignore their own culpability in creating this unfolding debacle.

Because of the looming conflict with Iran, Sen. Chuck Hagel's nomination to be secretary of defense has attracted wide attention. Yet Senate Republicans may have a chance to advance their own national security agenda by zeroing in on John O. Brennan, President Obama's choice for CIA director.

We now move to the most critical part of the election campaign: Inquiring about the character of President Obama as well as the media that instinctively defends him against all challenges, foreign and domestic.

Nasty old colonels normally appear before Congress only to answer for past misdeeds. But I testified last week on Stuxnet and the White House leaks because of personal experience with something people in Washington often prefer to forget: The New York Times spies, lies and routinely distorts the truth.

"No new ideas." That was the most prominent of the criticisms of Sarah Palin's speech at MSNBC's too-cool-for-school "Morning Joe" on Monday. The more general critique of former Gov. Palin's future was that while she certainly had star power, she could never speak to more than a fraction of even Republicans. The proof of the latter point was made with the evidence that many important Washington Republicans could never support her for more than cheerleader to her marginal people.