A lot of my time lately has been spent calling out the GOP for their shamelessness and lies over the past couple of months. I was pondering this fact this morning and came to a key realization about why this is: If citizen bloggers don’t do it, we don’t have much of chance that the national mainstream media will do it.

Weighing all the things in this world that deserve my opprobrium (e.g. Bush, Cheney, the current GOP leadership, the screen adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, Celine Dion, etc.), there is precious little that I hate more than the current state of most of the mainstream media today.

To take an example, I generally watch most of the Sunday morning talking head shows (I know, I’m a masochist). Guess how many times over the last few weeks these shows have entered into a serious discussion on, or even mentioned, the scathing new charges on torture revealed in the confidential report issued by the International Committee for the Red Cross back in 2005? ZERO. Although, to their credit, George Stephanopoulos and Bob Shieffer did spend some time discussing the new Obama pooch this morning…

The Bush White House and the GOP leadership in Congress over the last eight years turned the national media into a willing echo chamber that repeated whatever they said as a reasonable position, no matter how controverted they were by the evidence or by the easily researched facts that proved they were lying. If we didn’t have a media right now that is wholly uninterested with facts and supportable conclusions — and is instead still obsessed with a campaign-style disposition toward “reporting on the horse race” (e.g., “John Boehner said today that Democrats are, in fact, gay Martian invaders bent on corrupting our children. Some liberals in Congress say that this is not true.”) — people like me wouldn’t have to spend as much time fighting the obvious lies that are lapped up daily by the Washington Press Corps.