Watching Alan Grayson, the progressive congressman from Florida, on CNN the other day was the last straw. My colleagues generally annoy me to no end when they don’t do their jobs, when they resort to stenography instead of actual journalism. But the spectacle of Wolf Blitzer and Gloria Borger, abetted by Alex “White Hands” Castellanos, bullying the 6′ 4″ Grayson, trying to force him to play the role of left wing lunatic, was just more than an honest journalist could stand.

Grayson held his own, didn’t need my outrage. But I wasn’t outraged for him. I was outraged for all of us who do our best every single day to wade through the bullshit heaped upon us by an obtuse media that seems determined to mislead us as much as any on the take politician.

My fellow progressives annoy the living crap out of me too, constantly calling my colleagues “the villagers,” as if there’s something  hideous about belonging to a village. Of course, in this context, they’re talking about my inside-the-Beltway colleagues, but from reading those progressive blog posts and listening to them talk, you’d think they have the same disease those DC journos have — the false belief that they are the only real journalists in the country.

There must be something in the water in our nation’s capital. It poisons journalists and politicians alike, swings them to the dark side so fast it seems like they were always like that.

Yeah, yeah, there are a few who are inexplicably immune from whatever toxin is in the air there, but most of them — my colleagues, I mean — seem to wake up every morning with no recollection of anything that’s gone before.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for Blitzer and Borger and Castellanos (and Georgia’s Rep.  Tom Price, who whined that Grayson’s comments on the House floor — that the Republican health care plan is don’t get sick and if you do, die quickly — were the most vile partisan remarks he’d ever heard) berating the freshman congressmen with comparisons to Rep. Joe Wilson’s “you lie” outburst during Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.

How they remembered that, I have no idea. But you’d think that supposedly intelligent journalists would understand the difference between a sudden outburst in the middle of a nationally televised address falsely accusing the president of lying and a congressman using hyperbole during a late night speech on the largely empty House floor to highlight the simple fact that the Republicans have no health care plan and are fiercely determined to prevent one from being enacted.

Call me crazy, but that seems pretty damn clear to me.

Now, if they’d wanted to make a fair comparison, they’d have had to delve into their repressed memories of, say, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx taking to the House floor in support of a non-existent GOP health care bill that “will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” Or Florida Rep. Ginny Waite-Brown from the same House floor saying that the Democratic health care plan was essentially telling senior to “drop dead.”

Not from the House floor, but another Georgia congressman, Dr. Paul Broun penned a letter for the American Conservative Union in which he noted that ”If these federal bureaucrats decide that your treatment is not ‘Government Approved,’ then your doctor will be ordered to deny you treatment… or risk facing stiff penalties! In other words: When mama falls and breaks her hip, she’ll just lie in her bed in pain until she dies with pneumonia because he needed surgery is not cost efficient. ”

Or maybe they might have remembered House Minority Leader John Boehner’s official statement saying the Democratic bill (which, by the way, wasn’t even written at the time — and still isn’t finalized) “may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” Democrats “could create a slippery slope for a more permissive environment for euthanasia, mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide.”

And it really amazes me that they failed to recall Sen. Chuck Grassley — one of the Republican members of the notorious Gang of Six that stalled the health care bill in the Senate Finance Committee and then said they wouldn’t vote for it anyway after Max Baucus had given away the farm — saying telling a town hall meeting that “You have every right to fear … a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on Grandma.”

Those would have been fair comparisons. Except for the part about what the Republicans said being pure, unadulterated bullshit and what Grayson said, while designed certainly to attract attention, being true.

If these same colleagues can’t even remember what happened this summer, how can we expect them to remember eight years ago when the Bush administration lied its collective ass off to get us into war with Iraq now that we’re hearing almost identical rhetoric about Iran?

Ah, but that would be just too much hard work, I suppose, to inject context about things that actually matter into the hours and hours and hours of debate about whether Obama’s “failure” to deliver the 2016 Olympics to Chicago has hurt his credibility. They could at least tell you how positively gleeful all the conservatives were that Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting. Or maybe they could stop long enough to tell you that when Glenn Beck cries because he’s so patriotic, it’s really because an assistant put a little Vick’s Vapor Rub under his eyes. A little dab’ll do ya.

And it would interrupt the flow of the conversation if they were to note that the “Hollywood liberal elite” is not in lockstep behind Woody Allen in support of Roman Polanski.

Would it be so hard to report that a columnist for a major conservative news Web site — NewsMax — thinks a military coup could take care of the “Obama problem”? Or that an Arizona congressman — Trent Franks — thinks that our democratically elected president is “an enemy of humanity”?

And god forbid they admit that the core of the Republican party has now wandered far into the wilderness of mania and conspiracy theories, all wrapped up in a neat little package of no longer repressed racism and tied with a pretty little bow of threats of violence.

Now, I wish Alan Grayson had not called Republicans “knuckle-dragging neanderthals.” For one thing, it’s insulting to neanderthals, and for another, while it sure appears to be true some days, it’s not.

The mainstream Republican party is certainly out of step with a changing world, and it’s clearly stuck in an old, regressive way of thinking that just isn’t useful anymore. But neanderthals were a pretty solid group, with societal norms and structures as good as any cro-magnon. They looked a little different is all. We just don’t know why it was that they didn’t make it, while our ancestors did.

But it also allowed my colleagues to ignore Grayson’s actual message — that the Republicans have no intention of supporting any kind of health care reform because they like things the way they are, even though the way things are is detrimental to a large number of Americans, meaning mostly poor people and minorities.

That’s why my illustrious colleagues really should be looking at. Who benefits from the status quo, and who would benefit from a fair and equitable health care system?

We know the answers. But rather than reporting those answers, my colleagues prefer to spend their time and millions of dollars giving the soapbox to ridiculous theories and outright lies, all the while pretending those theories and lies are somehow germane to the world we live in and add to the discourse about the state we find ourselves in.

But that would require work, wouldn’t it? Investigation. Reporting. Making a rational judgment. Somebody might get mad at us and call us liberal. Or something.

One of My Colleagues linked me to a poll last week showing that a fairly sizable majority of Americans favored the idea of media as watchdog. I’ll tell you what I told him.

I’m sure they do. They just wish we’d get off our asses and do it.