From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume:

—On the Democratic Congress—

HUME: All right, suppose, Mort, these [bad opinion-poll] numbers persist into 2008. Does this mean that the Republicans have a chance of getting back in in the Congress or is it going to be a pox on all houses?
MORT KONDRACKE: Every indication is that what the public wants is a change. And my guess, the next change is to deliver the entire government into the hands of the Democrats, and let them try it . . . They don’t like what is happening in Washington, but one formula that has not been tried lately is all-Democratic rule. We haven’t had a Democratic president, a Democratic Congress since the Clinton administration. And I think that the public will want to try that.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: I find it hard to interpret a drop in Congressional approval when liberals and Democrats take over as an indication that the public is going to want them even stronger in 2008. I think if anything, this bodes ill for Democrats.
MARA LIASSON: I think it’s hard to extrapolate from Congress to the Democrats. The Democratic party, right now, is polling better than the Republican party. Congress is polling worse than it did when Republicans were in charge. But I think it’s a kind of pox on all their houses. I think the landscape still favors the Democrats controlling Congress in 2008.

—On Blair’s Commentary on the Press—

LIASSON: [H]e does talk about the kind of conflation, or, as he calls it, the confusion of the news and commentary, which used to be separate. The Wall Street Journal was always held up as an example of this, where the editorial page is very clear in its point of view, but the news pages were straight. And he is saying now you can’t tell difference, and that is a problem. And that is something that has been complained about for years and year and years, including in the United States. . . .
KRAUTHAMMER: I don’t agree. I think this is a man reacting to a savage press about him, like Bush in this country. I think Mort is right — largely as a result of the war, also as a result of the fact that the press in Britain felt that it had give him a free ride early on. Here liberals have a sense that Bush got a free ride after 9/11 and they have been particularly aggressive in attacking him since.
But, look, we have had this for 200 years. What was written about Jefferson, particularly in wartime. Abraham Lincoln was called an ape. Truman had a savage press. We had a history of yellow journalism in the nineteenth century. This is mild in comparison.