Rarely has the institutional media been more hyper-critical of mere mortals, and never more Petronian in their own behavior and craft. Maureen Dowd plagiarizes and calls intellectual theft weaving a theme into her column; Todd Purdum wants us to believe that several unnamed sources in his Vanity Fair piece claimed that independently they concluded that their fellow Alaskan Sarah Palin is a clinical narcissist and worse because of their coincidentally similar consultation with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and Katharine Weymouth promises that the Post will not organize pay-for-play cenae where Washington Post grandees in rarified salons facilitate high-power chat between lobbysists and Obama administration officials (entry tickets at $25,000 a pop) — that, according to Washington Post authorized fliers, were already organized — e.g., “I won’t plan what we’ve already planned.”