This is my second Talking Points Memo link today, but I like it. Josh Marshall points out the absurdity under which Clinton and Stephanopoulos seem to be operating:

Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing…. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we’ve gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they’re floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates.

It’s an expansive rationale under which Gibson and Stephanopoulos may have failed their civic responsibility by not pressing the point of whether Obama is a hereditary Muslim or his mother had a predilection for dark-skinned socialists.

As I’ve noted it’s pretty nauseating and disillusioning that Sen. Clinton has now also convinced herself that she’s providing a service by mounting her own Swift Boat campaign.

It’s ridiculous. What was it that Tom Lehrer said about Henry Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973? “It was at that moment that satire died.” Well, we keep finding new ways to kill it. This is why “The Daily Show” is funnier than SNL’s “Weekend Update”: because news clips today are comedy in themselves. You don’t need to add anything. Reality is its own joke.

I really wish the media would stop letting the Republicans define the narrative frame. It’s got to stop.