Eric Boehlert:

The casual contempt for Obama—an unheard of phenomenon for the press eight years ago when Bush arrived in the Beltway—has already become impossible for many within the media industry to hide.

Digby:

We are still living in bizarroworld. The entire media became hysterical, nearly speaking in tongues, at the prospect of going to war against someone who hadn't even attacked us. Now that we have a real crisis on our hands, they are so,very, very booored with it all. It's infuriating.

Jamison Foser, quoting Digby:

The blogger Digby recently mentioned to me that the media, after years of deference to President Bush, are about to lurch back toward the excessively critical approach they took toward President Clinton:

Just as they treated Bush with extraordinary respect in reaction to their heinous behavior during the Clinton years, the villagers are now preparing to treat Obama with skepticism in reaction to the failures that resulted from their fawning obsequiousness.

Oddly, these lurches always seem to disfavor the Democrats.

Digby's concern is shared by many progressive media critics, this one included. Which is not to say that the media should treat Barack Obama the way they treated George Bush for much of his presidency. That's a key difference between progressive media critics and those on the right—we want the media to do their jobs better, while conservatives are not particularly fond of the concept of journalism and won't be happy unless the media act as the propagandists of the conservative movement.

I think they're missing a significant part of the Washington media's behavior. Progressive bloggers regularly call them the "villagers" or the "kool kidz" because they act like a bunch of people in high school trying to pretend that they are completely hip, while everyone else is so incredibly, you know, not.

It's hard for them to keep up this pretense with a president like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. These guys are, without question, cool. They became cool on their own merits, surviving the campaign process after starting, relatively speaking, out of nowhere. Clinton left office with high approval ratings, such as Obama has now.

George W. Bush is just as undeniably not cool. He might have been a regular guy, the one you'd want to have a beer with, but he wasn't cool. He got to the White House with all the advantages in the world, including a father who had been President once removed from the man he succeeded in the office.

As Bush's approval ratings fell and the country left him behind, the press abandoned its 2001-2003 era man-crush on him, just like the high school crowd at the lunch table ditches the formerly cool kid who's now running his own commercial Web site and making $2000 per month and who doesn't really have time any more for their petty gossip about who puts out and who has the best pot. It was the same way with the first President Bush, if you'll recall, whom they roundly mocked for not knowing the price of milk.

And now comes the new kid, "Barack Obama," who doesn't even have the sense to be totally embarrassed by that goofy name. Even worse, he is obviously cool, and everyone can see it. He has things going on that these nattering ninnies had previously claimed as their own, but when the other kids can see the real thing in action, it's obvious how empty and shallow they really are. He shows them up daily without even trying. He's so cool that even as their admiration for him transforms into seething rage, he's still totally cool to them, talking to them and smiling with them and making them look good.

This, of course, only makes them more insanely insane. And sure enough, just like Bart Simpson does when a new kid appears to be cool at Springfield Elementary, their first, base, primal instinct is that they must tear him down. "He thinks he's so hot? We'll show everyone what a loser he is, and then we'll be the cool ones again."

This never happens with Republicans because:

1. Republicans are never "cool," except in the John McCain "pretty cool for an old guy" sense, and
2. Republicans don't care about #1.

Republicans do not threaten the media's egos, so the media are perfectly happy to co-exist with them. In a one-on-one interview between Charles Gibson and Orrin Hatch, no one's going to doubt that Gibson is the cooler of the two, and Gibson is decidedly uncool (and George Herbert Walker Bush-level out of touch on the economy).

Democrats who are preternaturally uncool (Dennis Kucinich, Harry Reid) don't trigger this impulse either, even if they're policy whizzes (Russ Feingold). Democrats who are marginally cool and yet obviously know what they're doing (Howard Dean) do, and Democrats who are undeniably cool just make the media crazy.

Since it does not seem in Obama's nature for him to stop being cool, it's not clear what the country can do about this. Ignoring the Washington media won't work, because the press is so myopic that instead of understanding the national cry of "Hire reporters who aren't pathologically insecure," they'll instead hear "Americans don't want news from Washington," so it'll go from psychopathic coverage to no coverage. Republicans are fine with that, too, because they do their best work when no one's watching (Gitmo, surveillance, Dick Cheney).

The only answer I see so far is to say, repeatedly, loudly, in the face of every immature reporter who shows this syndrome, "Grow the fuck up, stop being threatened by the President being cool, and do your fucking job."

They'll probably just look at you as if you were speaking Aramaic, though. They have no ability to look at their own behavior. None at all.