Jamison Foser again.

Don't miss this column. The man speaks truth, which makes him a rare treasure in our bleak media landscape.

Apparently, NBC has decided it's better to distract the American people with pictures of cuddly pandas than to tell them the truth about what their government is doing.

Things haven't been any better over at MSNBC, where Countdown host Keith Olbermann is seemingly alone in ... well, in giving a damn. Olbermann summed up the situation succinctly during his September 20 broadcast:

OLBERMANN: So, fact-check me on this, on my simplified version of this whole picture. If it's wrong, tell me so. The president wants torture, or a nice euphemism for torture, and all he'll get out of it is made-up information, revenge later against American prisoners, perhaps, and destroying any moral high ground we might still have in the world.

JACK RICE (former CIA agent): Yes, one other thing besides that. He gets to wrap himself in the flag and say he hates the bad people.

But Olbermann's is a lonely voice at MSNBC, where Arar's treatment was otherwise unmentioned, according to a search of the Nexis database.

David Broder rates a special mention, for his reference to "Democrats Al Gore and John Kerry, whose know-it-all arrogance rankled Midwesterners such as myself."

Translation: they were right, and I'm small enough to resent them for it.

Not to mention Broder's sycophantic praise for the undeserving republican Three Musketeers.

Fortunately, in Broder's world, there are people of honor and principle and civility to save us from the nasty bloggers and "know-it-all" Democrats: people like John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Mike DeWine, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham. "These are not ordinary men," Broder tells us, putting his faith in them to stop the president from continuing behaving like a tyrant.

But these same extraordinary men have failed to do so -- again and again. These same extraordinary men have been leaders in Congress at a time when Congress has utterly abdicated its role in government, allowing the administration to be "lawless and reckless" in the first place. These same extraordinary men have stood idly by while the president used "signing statements" to signal his intention to ignore the rare law that they passed without his complete enthusiasm.

That's how McCain's last much-hyped "attempt" to put limits on the administration's torture policies ended: with an avalanche of favorable press for McCain's courageous stand against terrorism -- and a presidential signing statement indicating that Bush would continue to do whatever he damn well pleases.

What this country needs is more "know-it-alls" and "foul-mouthed bloggers" like Digby:

This is an important thing for us to think about. It's not just a matter of abstract morality. It's a practical question of what happens to societies when they let go. It's hard to imagine how gay marriage or women's rights could even come close to the kind of weird, inhumane behavior that is set free when you go this deeply into sanctioned authoritarian sadism.

A country that dismisses its wise men as cranks and know-it-alls and elevates political circus clowns such as McCain - who experienced torture and yet refuses to draw a line in the sand against it - will get the future it deserves.