KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: Or there's another possibility. There's a possibility that these kinds of attacks have always been there, but they were never posted in public space before. … But perhaps we didn't have any way of seeing them.

Perhaps the comments that you're reprising from public space elsewhere, largely on cable or on talk radio, were actually out there but we only had network evening news as a way of getting access to the political world. And they never would have gotten into that forum. So it's possible that nothing has changed except our access to a window on a part of a world. And that we haven't found a way to create boundaries around it and say within it, "Don't you want to have a different kind of discourse here? Do you really want to conventionalize this?"

I plead guilty to wanting to “conventionalize” free speech.

Now what, my friends? Do we really want to risk seeing someone like Tom Brokaw be confirmed as the Deputy Director of the FCC Bureau of Media Fairness? Do we want to risk putting a President in place that wants the federal government to dictate the appropriate “boundaries” for political speech?

We better get a ticket on the McCain train unless we want to get slaughtered by the good Congresswoman from New York—while Bill Moyers gloats with approval.