Bill Schneider noted the line of defeats on CNN, but put all the blame on the "far right" conservatives. In one sense, the media have stayed remarkably consistent: Ever since Barry Goldwater in 1964, they've consistently preached that conservatism always puts Republicans on the brink of disaster (even after the Reagan landslides and the short-lived "revolution" of 1994). They've consistently whined that the moderates are maligned and neglected -- and they've never considered that these "moderates" are often self-impressed careerists who preen over how much more reasonable they are than the "fringe" and who aren't exactly specialists in "party unity." But that's why the media love them -- they give them a pretty much permanent narrative of GOP "fratricide."

These reporters didn't seem to notice why Specter was losing and Toomey was winning: Specter cravenly rejected his party to vote with the Democrats on the most massive "stimulus" spending bill in American history, extravagantly laden with pork, wind beneath the bureaucracy's wings. And this supposed sage, this symbol of reasoned reflection and Washington probity, voted for this nightmare -- like everyone else -- without even taking the time to read the bill.

Specter took every dollar and every vote that Republicans have given him over almost 30 years in federal office and flushed it down the toilet. He was not a profile in courage. He was a profile in clout without a conscience.

Even reporters like Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post noticed that the national media, in print and on TV, avoided discussing whether Specter's defection to the Democrats displayed disloyalty to all the Republicans who supported him against Toomey five years ago. Over and over again, the party apparatus has supported liberal Republican incumbents from Specter to Chafee to Jeffords with far more loyalty than these men ever offered with their votes at the Capitol.

This story, like so many others, establish with an abundance of evidence that the "objective" national media is merely part of the liberal Democratic fold. Join them, and you are welcomed with bouquets of praise. Fight their machine, and they will bear down on you with all the tar and feathers they can muster.