Even on vacation it's possible to get a FAIR AND BALANCED report on the misadventures of Chimpy and his Pals:

Ah, this is the life. To be on vacation near the ocean, sunning on the beach by day, and, by night, hearing Hardball's Chris Matthews, of all people, repeatedly liken Bush to Ted Baxter, the obtuse anchorman on the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show." As I eat fried calamari and striped bass, I get to see Matthews, hardly a friend of progressives, hammer Team Bush over their serial lying about weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake. Was Bush such a clueless puppet, sputters Matthews, that he simply read whatever Cheney or Rumsfeld put in front of him and told him to sell to the nation? Why, I must be in Margaritaville.

Since Team Bush came to power, those of us lucky enough to have the time and money to go on vacation have tried to escape from, or forget, however briefly, the totalitarian and imperialistic schemes of our in-house American Taliban. Nonetheless, it was difficult to shake the sense of doom unleashed by the forces of darkness, and some of us spent previous vacations looking longingly at maps of Canada, fantasizing about where to move. A supine media reinforced our sense that we were exiles in our own land.

But this summer, the worm is turning. The inside story of how and why so many in the press have finally begun to ask hard questions remains to be told. But cracks in the edifice are everywhere. And while, understandably, we on the left are prone to seeing the political glass as always half empty – or less – it is summer, things are falling apart for Team Bush, and we need to appreciate that, for now, the glass is starting to look half full.