In the daily Political Hour chat at washingtonpost.com, Post reporter Perry Bacon Jr. stood up not only for the professionalism of Bush’s supposedly supine press corps, but for the professionalism of the Huffington Post’s inquiries into a tribunal to punish alleged Bush-Cheney malfeasance:

Boston, Mass.: Perry — according to Ana Marie Cox’s twittering, the press corps has indigestion over Sam Stein from HuffPo being allowed access to the insider’s game. Ari Fleischer’s reappearance to object to Bill O’Reilly, without irony, (cough) Jeff Gannon (cough) shows how the game was played with W. Do you feel, like a lot of us out here do in blogistan, that the press corps has now fully been exposed as the courtiers they were to Bush, as opposed to skeptical truth tellers?
Perry Bacon Jr.: I strongly disagree the Bush core was “cortiers” during the Bush administration; I would refer to reporting on secret prisons, Walter Reed, No Child Left Behind, Bush’s policy on the environment, a host of other issues. That said, I think every news organization would like to ask questions at a new conference, but Huffington Post is a news organization as well, I don’t have any personal concern with one of their reporters asking a question at a news conference. And it was a good question.

Why would Obama humor Sam Stein with a question, and then refuse to answer it? Does simply honoring his deep seriousness with the opportunity to have his question avoided qualify as a form of press-room pork?

The other amusing moment in the chat was a Canadian questioner’s using the Nobel Peace Prize as a cudgel to beat the Republicans. Clearly, the inquiring mind feels a Nobel Peace Prize is something John Boehner should have before he dares to fight Obama on an uber-spending bill:

British Columbia: Good morning. I’m not sure that the GOP in your country really ‘gets it’ about how dire the global market crisis is. They don’t appear to recognize the fact that the rest of the world’s budgets, stimuluses, etc., are WAITING for this package. Being good world citizens doesn’t seem to enter their scope of consciousness. My question is connected to this: how many Republican presidents and senators have won a Nobel Prize? I know Gore and Carter have but have any GOPers?
Perry Bacon Jr.: I don’t have a good count of how many Republican members of Congress have won Nobel prizes…

The GOP list is short (and very aged): Henry Kissinger in 1973, Frank Kellogg (for the Kellogg-Briand Pact) in 1929, Charles Dawes in 1925, Elihu Root in 1912, and Teddy Roosevelt in 1906.