Will the Manhattan-Beltway media elite cover for President Obama throughout 2012?

Of course they will. The only question is whether they will even be self-aware about the blocking they are doing for the president.

The most egregious examples will be the protections given the president's astonishing failures abroad. Mitt Romney, for example, last week quite rightly accused the president of "adopting an appeasement strategy" towards the dictators of Iran and Syria, arguing to the Republican Jewish Coalition that Obama "has bowed to foreign dictators," and adding that "when the opportunity arose to defend freedom, he’s either been late to the game or failed to show up at all."

The president responds by citing the killing of Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda terrorists. As CNN anchor John King readily acknowledged to me on my radio show yesterday, this was an enormous non-sequitur from the president but, King continued, all politicians use non-sequiturs.

(For the benefit of the Pittsburgh Steeler fans, appeasement is a state-to-state policy in which one state --say Great Britain or the U.S.-- refuses to confront the growing aggressiveness of another state --say Germany or Iran-- but instead offers concessions and resolutions. "Appeasement" is not a refusal to track down and kill terrorists.)

The president also gets treated to softball interviews, such as that we saw on Sunday night from the formerly ferocious team at 60 Minutes, which was the journalistic equivalent of Justin Verlander throwing underhand to Albert Pujols when the new Angel comes to Detroit in 2012.

This rolling-over for a weak leader by his admirers in the press has a pedigree.

Throughout the run-up to the outbreak of war in 1939, the Times of London and the BBC did everything they could to support the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain. Times' editor Geoffrey Dawson led the charge to protect the umbrella carrying Chamberlain from Winston Churchill's charges, and part of the blame for England's unpreparedness and the massive loss of life it caused rests squarely on the Fourth Estate's refusal to press Chamberlain much less to credit Churchill through the latter's wilderness years.