In a recent email a friend asked: "How concerned are you about the dirt being hurled [in the presidential campaign]? It's getting rough out there... politics as usual or something darker and more dangerous to the fabric of our country?"
The same day I read Dana Milbank's column in The Washington Post, in which he reported on a Sarah Palin swing through Florida. A couple of items in that column caught my attention. One was the observation that:
"Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun ....
