While campaigning for the presidency, candidate Clinton had to deal with a dumbed-down press corps that decided--at the prompting of the GOP Noise Machine--that it had to dissect the tone and frequency of her laugh in search of character defects. That she laughed at wildly inappropriate moments and that her “cackle” was..newsworthy.

Sound familiar?

Also, as a candidate Clinton had to sit through a Steve Kroft 60 Minutes interview where, just as he did with Obama over the weekend, the host inserted himself into the story and manufactured news with his oddball questions. In the earlier case, it was Kroft's bizarre obsession with pressing Clinton about whether she thought Obama was a Muslim. (What that had to do with Kroft's 60 Minutes report on how Obama or Clinton were going to help turn around the economy in Ohio, remains a mystery to this day.) And just like with Kroft's left-field “punch drunk” comment this weekend, it was the host's heavy-handed Muslim questioning that became the “gotcha” news.

The media's “punch drunk” coverage has been a colossal embarrassment, made worse by the fact that Democrats have seen this act before.