Admission: over the course of my NewsBusting, I've actually developed a certain admiration for Bob Herbert. Not that I agree with virtually anything the NY Times columnist has to say, but that I appreciate his directness and the absence in his work of the superfluous sarcasm that marks that of a number of his colleagues.

That said, I offer up Herbert's lament of this morning, "Where Are the Big Ideas?", as the epitome of wrong-headed liberal thinking. Herbert's complaint is that when it comes to the role of government, the presidential candidates aren't thinking big enough. Hillary and Obama's proposals to subject 1/7th of the nation's economy [or whatever the current proportion that health care represents] to government control are small beer in Bob's eyes. He dismisses their plans as "masterpieces of minutiae."

Herbert says that "the essential question the candidates should be trying to answer — but that is not even being asked very often — is how to create good jobs in the 21st century." The columnist gives us an idea of the kind of big-government thinking he has in mind to answer his question:

Since 2000, the mainstream media has conducted a war against the Bush Adminstration the likes of which have not been seen since their equally vitriolic campaign against Richard Nixon. They have refused to publish anything positive about Bush or his Administration, they have manufactured scandals out of nothing (Valerie Plame) while doing their best to expose secret operations that are protecting Americans and they have consistently refused to accurately report the good economic news.

Today comes even more evidence of just how badly the press has failed in their duty to report to the American public. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft corporation, spoke to a forum to discuss fighting malaria. As reported by Power Line, Gates said,