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Today's press conference was remarkable for a number of things -- President Obama's meekness among them -- but the most disturbing thing was the way reporters grilled him, as though they were Fox talk-show hosts and he just another football of a liberal guest. Their questions, as they always are at Fox, were essentially Republican talking points reshaped as questions.

And it wasn't even the Fox reporters who did it.

First up was the AP's Ben Feller:

Q: Are you willing to concede at all that what happened last night was not just an expression of frustration about the economy, but a fundamental rejection of your agenda?

Sure. Lessee, just two years after fundamentally embracing his agenda -- and rejecting the conservative one -- they've now decided to reject it altogether.

Then, after Obama made clear he didn't buy this nonsense, MSNBC's Savannah Guthrie asked:

Q: Just following up on what Ben just talked about, um -- you don't seem to be reflecting on or second-guessing any of the policy decisions you've made, instead the message the voters were sending was about frustration with the economy, maybe even chalking it up to a failure on your part to communicate effectively. If you're not reflecting on your policy agenda, is it possible voters can conclude, you're still not getting it?

Savannah, we're sure there's a nice deal awaiting you at Fox someday. No one at Fox could have framed that right-wing talking point better. Indeed, we'll bet they wind up playing it a lot there.

It sure is revealing, in a comparison/contrast kinda way, to go back to President Bush's post-election press conference in 2006, after voters had just rebuked Republicans by throwing them out of Congress.

Because no one asked him if his agenda had been repudiated. No one asked if he just didn't get it. All Bush did was say he was going to basically keep doing what he was already doing, and hey, everybody in the press corps was just fine with that.

That's your liberal media at work for ya.

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Brent Bozell of the right-wing "watchdog" Media Research Center was a guest on Hannity last night, whining about how the mean librul media keep painting those poor innocent wholesome upstanding realamerican Tea Partiers as extremists -- it's just so unfair!

Bozell, like Miss Anne Elk, has his theory:

Bozell: Yeah, let's understand what's going on here, Sean. If you were a Democrat running for re-election, and you wanted to run on your record, on the record of the Democrats, are you going to run on an agenda that calls for the nationalization of the banks, the socialization of health care, massive new tax increases, out-of-control deficit spending? If you want to look at an extreme agenda, it is the Democrats' agenda.

Um, excuse the brief interruption here, but, WTF? Who exactly is calling for nationalizing the banks or imposing massive new tax increases? And "socializing health care"? It's true that liberal Democrats called for a public option, but that is a plan that would preserve private health care as well. Bozell is just making crap up -- which, in fact, he has a long history of doing.

Bozell: They have only one option, which is to say, 'You may not like us, but those Republicans, they're even worse.' And that's what these attacks on the Tea Parties are all about.

Now, if Democrats want to do that, that's fine, it's politics. But what's reprehensible is that the liberal media are carrying their water for them every single night with these attacks on the Tea Parties.

This was followed by an amusing exchange with Hannity in which they whined about how poor Carl Paladino and his 10-year-old daughter have been treated unethically by the New York Post. Oh, is that that the liberal New York Post, fellas? Hahahahahahaha.

Bozell summed it all up with his theory, and what it is too:

Bozell: Sean, we watched this happen all year long, where the media will wade into a Tea Party even with hundreds of thousands of people, looking for that one brain-dead Lyndon LaRouche follower who isn't even a member of the Tea Party, who will say some crackjob, whacko thing, they'll put it all over the news.

Actually, you don't have to dive far into the Tea Parties to find them saying crackjob whacko things. After all, the "Birther" theory that President Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim is believed by a majority of Tea Partiers. They continue to believe that Obama is going to institute "death panels," that he's going to take their guns, or any of the other top 10 provably untrue things Tea Partiers believe.

Which includes, by the way, the claim that Obama is raising their taxes (he actually passed the largest middle-class tax cut in history) or that he's going to nationalize the banks. Things that people like Brent Bozell and Sean Hannity glibly repeat as truth on national television.

But really, the media didn't have to wade into the crowds to find the nutcases spewing extremism at Tea Party events: They only needed to go listen to the events' official speakers.

After all, who can forget Joseph Farah of World Net Daily at the National Tea Party Convention, assuring everyone that that Birther theories were all perfectly true:

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