"It is not irresponsible to demand that bureaucrats do the job we pay them to do. It is not irresponsible to expect people in authority to be held responsible for dumb, and perhaps fatal, mistakes. And, finally, it is not irresponsible, even in time of war, to raise questions about the presidency of…"

Can you guess whose name was dropped at the end of that quote? We'll have to go all the way back to…2002 and, of course, the George W. Bush presidency.

What's that? You thought this quote from Bill Press was referring to President Barack Obama? Quite reasonable, actually, given that one of his chief national security officials today took to the opinion pages of USA Today to call critics of the Obama Administration's handling of the war on terror unpatriotic.

Well, he didn't actually use the word "unpatriotic", but neither did then-Vice President Dick Cheney when he told Congress that criticism of the administration's war effort "is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." That was the quote Press took issue with in 2002, so where is his disdain for the Obama Administration?

In fact, Cheney was warning Democrats not to "seek political advantage" by opposing the Bush Administration its war efforts. This is exactly the same thing that Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan said in today his USA Today column: the first sentence of the column is "Politics should never get in the way of national security."

But pundits who went after Bush and co. are so far conspicuously silent about Brennan's complaints.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford, in a July 2002 column headlined "Is It OK To Hate Bush?" complained that the administration had "made very clear again and again: You are not allowed to openly abhor the president or his decisions because doing so clearly indicates traitorous inclinations and this is wartime which is a Very Difficult Time for Us All."

Frank Rich whined in the New York Times in December of 2001 that it was "no longer just politically incorrect to criticize George W. Bush or anyone in his administration these days -- now it's treason."

MSNBC's David Shuster claimed, "the right routinely brands [then-Senate Minority Leader Tom] Daschle and others as unpatriotic and un-American."

Speaking on another MSNBC program, former Clinton administration official John Podesta complained that Bush Administration officials were "calling [Democrats] un-American for raising very legitimate questions. That's politics."

Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper's Magazine, complained of the critics "on the right, the people who say that people like myself who question the premise of the war, even question the definition of the war, are somehow unpatriotic, un- American, and so on."

So where are all of these talking heads now that Obama and his administration are issuing virtually the same critiques of their political opponents? Once again, it is plainly evident that the press considers dissent patriotic only when dissenting from a Republican.

[Author's note: any quotes without links were found through a Nexis search.]

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