Let's connect some dots, shall we?

If you were masochistic enough to tune into the Sunday shows this week, you might actually suspect that George W. Bush was still in office by the sheer magnitude of Bushies booked on every single Sunday news show. Each and every one of them eager to do damage control and insist that we're all so much safer thanks to their program of torturing people...even those whose only crime is flying commercial while being Muslim (a niggling little dark mark on the rendition and torture campaign that the media never ever brings up).

But if you listen between the lines of the conversation between Howie Kurtz and Brian Ross, it's clear that the media knows that what they did post-9/11 was enable the Bush administration to hype terror threats and report them dutifully to keep Americans frightened and complacent while they invaded and occupied two countries and ignored Bin Laden. It's interesting to me how now the media is reluctantly walking back that Bush administration talking point that Bin Laden was not involved operationally in al Qaeda that they used to justify not hunting him down. Yet they were only too happy to keep the entire country on high alert against terror attacks like the Sears Tower gang, to whom nobody should have given any credibility.

Brian Ross--who has a history of inaccurate "scoops"--blames " threat fatigue" and cynicism for the fact that the media doesn't breathlessly announce terror threats anymore, pointedly stopping short of accusing the Bush administration of politicizing terror. Both Kurtz and Ross conveniently ignore former DHS Director Tom Ridge admitting that they did politicize terror threats. The media were active, complicit agents of the Bush administration's attempts to keep Americans frightened.

And Howie Kurtz and Brian Ross know it and just like everyone else during those Bush years, refuse to accept responsibility for it.