1. Nancy Pelosi. No explanation needed.
2. The great, venerable and time-tested James Taranto Principle, described below.
What is the Taranto Principle? It is a principle laid down by the Wall Street Journal's perceptive editorialist, James Taranto. Mr. Taranto, in his column "Best of the Web Today," surveys the press and reports daily on their output with special emphasis on their contradictions, hypocrisies and — most deliciously — imbecilities. Like all other thoughtful observers of American press, Mr. Taranto recognizes that they are heavily biased toward the Democratic Party and the left in general.
Yet, while many who hold that this advances the Democratic Party and the left, Mr. Taranto believes that it has a harmful effect on left-wing politics, often causing left-wing candidates to lose at the polls.
According to the Taranto Principle, the press's failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left's bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans. According to Mr. Taranto, in 2004 the press quietly went along with Senator Jean-Francois Kerry's exaggerated claims to heroism and military prowess, thus encouraging his braggadocio and leaving him utterly unprepared when his fellow vets stepped forward and demonstrated that he had been a dreadful showoff in Vietnam.
Officers who had fought alongside him served up evidence that his exploits were embellished and sometimes completely made up. They cast doubt on his medals and most damningly reminded us that in testimony on Capitol Hill Kerry accused his fellow soldiers of war crimes. The vets reproduced the video, video that any journalist could have laid hands on.
The vets' assault on Mr. Kerry is now called "Swift Boating" by left-wingers and journalists alike, who insist the vets' charges were "lies," though four years later it is apparent that the so-called lies composed an accurate rendering of blowhard Mr. Kerry's war record. Had the press treated his initial boasts with some skepticism, he might have been better prepared for the vets' response. The left-leaning press spoiled Mr. Kerry and brought out the worst in him to the revulsion of enough voters to lose him the election.