Nice piece in The New York Times by Frank Rich about "Crossfire"'s marshmallow-toasting with Armstrong Williams (Transcript).

Here's an excerpt:

That [Mr Novak] and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television's self-proclaimed "most trusted" news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of "news" metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism.

or indeed, have them reaching for their thesaurus.