At the leftwing Huffington Post, Jason Linkins writes, “Rahm Emanuel And David Axelrod Have Become The Sum Of All Media Crapulence:”

Remember way back when President Obama told people that it was maybe a good idea for them to turn off the teevees and disconnect themselves from the idiot ramblings of the political press, a rough beast with a bottomless hunger for antic narratives and useless gossip?

Maybe Obama should have asked his two top advisers to stop feeding the beast themselves, to spare all of us some grief.

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Rahm Emanuel! Suddenly, he is Ground Zero for so much media crapulence. Suddenly, he is the protagonist of the most fevered “who’s up/who’s down” narratives. Slowly, and then all at once, the media has become filled with the tales of Rahm’s agonies and ecstasies. Good lord, even Eric Massa is cashing in on the zeitgeist, casting Emanuel as a bit player in his ongoing operatic nonsense. And the best part is that he gets the nude scene! This raises many questions, not the least of which is: does Rahm perceive his ability to persuade to be related to his nudity?

And, uhm, David Axelrod? What is going on with him? The New York Times says that nobody “has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as” him. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are out of work. They’ll let David Axelrod know when they have the time to tend to the hard strain of soft perception.

So much attention has been given to these two men, and the problems that come from being so powerful and influential and yet not in possession of the ability to bend reality itself to their notions, that one may wonder to oneself: “What is the point?” The answer is: there is no point! The only valuable thing to notice here is that all this mishegas rather elegantly demonstrates that this is really the only sort of story the the political press is good at writing: palace intrigue and dangerous liaisons, starring Rahm Emanuel’s intimidating wang in a shower.

Linkins is absolutely correct regarding one the Beltway Media’s main templates, when he writes, “the only sort of story the the [sic] political press is good at writing: palace intrigue and dangerous liaisons.” But I don’t recall the HuffPo, or anyone else on the left complaining when such stories were emanating daily from legacy media coverage of the largely dysfunctional second term of President Bush’s administration.

Which increasingly, the Obama administration looks like it’s playing out, at 78 RPMs.