These moves come as the New York Times in January reported that IRS officials are now defying a 1976 court order and refusing to disclose information about the audit rates of big corporations and the rich. It's ultimate secrecy for the Big Money interests, regardless of the law, and not even the very basic right to minimum privacy for ordinary Americans.

MEDIA MANIPULATION—On both the corruption scandals and on privacy issues, major pundits continue to distort development in ways that lay bare a sheer contempt for the truth. That, or they are guilty of such journalistic idiocy as to publicly indict the profession on malpractice charges.

Take Hardball's Chris Matthews. He tried to claim that the bribery scandal surrounding "Duke" Cunningham is not "part of any Republican culture of corruption. . . . [He] was sort of a lone wolf in that department." Matthews then said the corruption issue was "not going to be part of a larger story of Washington this year." Matthews, of course, never acknowledged his own personal stake in downplaying the situation. As the Hollywood Reporter noted back in 2003, Matthews joined Fox News's Tony Snow and Brit Hume in headlining a major fundraiser for one of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff's charities that is at the center of the corruption problem. The lower the profile of the Abramoff scandal, the less Matthews is exposed to scrutiny.

But it didn't stop there. A few days later, Matthews claimed that DeLay "really lives basically like a regular middle-class person. He doesn't live well at all." Incredibly, he made this comment just weeks after the Associated Press published a blockbuster exposé of DeLay's royal lifestyle:

"As Tom DeLay became a king of campaign fund-raising, he lived like one, too. He visited cliff-top Caribbean resorts, golf courses designed by PGA champions and four-star restaurants, all courtesy of donors who bankrolled his political money empire. Over the past six years, the former House majority leader and his associates have visited places of luxury most Americans have never seen, often getting there aboard corporate jets arranged by lobbyists and other special interests. Public documents reviewed by the Associated Press tell the story: At least 48 visits to golf clubs and resorts; 100 flights aboard company planes; 200 stays at hotels, many world-class; and 500 meals at restaurants, some averaging nearly $200 for a dinner for two."

That might seem like middle class to the D.C. cocktail-party sensibilities of someone like Matthews, but it sure isn't middle class to, well, America's middle class.

For its part, Time magazine did its best to portray the Bush administration as isolated from the lobbying scandal. The magazine's proof? Bush supposedly "does not like to have contributors or local officials in his cars, planes or holding rooms unless they are there for a good reason, and he sometimes questions his underlings sharply if someone he considers extraneous is admitted." Readers are expected to swallow this virtuous image as truth—and, presumably, to forget that in just the first 10 months of Bush's first term, "GOP fundraiser Jack Abramoff and his lobbying team logged nearly 200 contacts with the new administration," according to a May 2005 story by the Associated Press.

The same out-of-touch rhetoric came from Time's Joe Klein in his comments on Bush's warrantless wiretaps. Klein led off his January 8 piece by attacking Democrats for being critical of Bush's illegal actions, accusing them of "civil-liberties fetishism [that] is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality—spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders." Klein wants us to believe that such spying isn't taking place today—even though the New York Times in 2005 reported that the FBI "has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups" (NBC News later confirmed that the Pentagon was engaging in this activity as well).

But that distortion is nothing compared with the end of Klein's piece. He claimed that "a strong majority would favor the NSA program" illegally ordered by President Bush. And then, in a final crescendo of dishonesty, he asserted that in criticizing the president's actions, "Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year."

Klein published his piece one day after the Associated Press released a poll showing "a majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists." In criticizing the administration for not getting warrants, as required by law, Democrats were standing with 56 percent of the public. By contrast, ABC News reported that just 27 percent of the public supported the Republicans' intervention in the Schiavo affair. And by the way, as Klein now righteously attacks the GOP over its stand on Terri Schiavo, it might be remembered that Klein published a column a month after that ABC poll, in which he claimed that Democrats shoul "give careful consideration to what thoughtful conservatives are saying" about the Schiavo case.)

The American Prospect's Greg Sargent summed up Klein quite well. "Dropping an obligatory snide generalization—or an outright distortion—about liberal Dems into his columns seems to be an occupational requirement for him these days," he wrote. "These omissions and distortions are beginning to suggest a pattern which borders, at best, on professional negligence, and at worst, on rank dishonesty."