Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

The American Street watches Tony Snow beg and plead, "No sauce for the gander, please!":

Tony Is No Snow White: Poor Tony Snow. He just can't shut up about how people started saying bad things about him once it was suggested that he was in the running to replace Scott McClellan as the White House Press Secretary:

Helpful correspondents have told me where to go, what to use to fill various orifices, which pack animal I most closely resemble and my next-world destination. Sages from afar have ascertained that I'm a... BushBot, a puppet, a force of evil in the modern world, a White House mouthpiece-toady-stenographer merely seeking a change of station (and major cut in pay) and a toothy, well-coifed [sic] mediocrity....

We're already getting weary of the insult industry and the accompanying insinuation that one must view people with contrary views not only as political opponents, but as invading microbes, suitable for swift and complete destruction.

Tony [Snow] evidently has forgotten that he once said:

I mean, I love old fashioned eye-gouging, hair pulling, sucker-punching, full-contact politics.

And that he called Harry Reid "inane" and a "moonbat." The same Tony Snow who "Big Creep." Hillary Clinton, according to Tony, is a "race baiter." Tony's words for Ted Turner: "bigot" and "fool." Being called a "toothy, well-coiffed mediocrity" seems pretty tame in comparison. Apparently Tony tires of the "insult industry" only when he's on the receiving end.

This attitude that we-are-journalists-and-have-special-rules is remarkably common. One of the strangest moments I've had in the past year was trying to be polite listening to Time's Michael Duffy--he of the let's-mislead-our-readers-brigade--explaining to me that while everything I said to him was on the record until I went off, everything he said to me was off the record until he went on. Why? Because he was a journalist.