Glenn says it well, as always:

As I noted yesterday, TPM's Josh Marshall - who fancies himself an edgy insurgent against mainstream media complacency as he spends day after day defending the US government's most powerful officials - printed an anonymous email accusing AP of engineering a "smear of Justice". Worse, Media Matters this morning posted "talking points" designed to defend the DOJ in the AP matter that easily could have come directly from the White House and which sounded like Alberto Gonzales, arguing that "if the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated" and that "it was not acceptable when the Bush Administration exposed Valerie Plame working undercover to stop terrorists from attacking us. It is not acceptable when anonymous sources do it either." It also sought to blame Republicans for defeating a bill to protect journalists without mentioning that Obama, once he became president, reversed his position on such bills and helped to defeat it. Meanwhile, the only outright, spirited, unqualified defense of the DOJ's conduct toward AP that I've seen comes from a Media Matters employee and "liberal" blogger.

During the Bush years, it was conservatives who supported the Bush DOJ and Alberto Gonzales' threats against the press on national security grounds; now, defenders of such threats to press freedoms are found almost exclusively from progressive circles (similarly, many of the most vicious and vocal attacks on WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning have come from progressives).

This is such an under-appreciated but crucial aspect of the Obama legacy. Recall back in 2008 that the CIA prepared a secret report (subsequently leaked to WikiLeaks) that presciently noted that the election of Barack Obama would be the most effective way to stem the tide of antiwar sentiment in western Europe, because it would put a pleasant, happy, progressive face on those wars and thus convert large numbers of Obama supporters from war opponents into war supporters. That, of course, is exactly what happened: not just in the realm of militarism but civil liberties and a whole variety of other issues. That has had the effect of transforming what were, just a few years ago, symbols of highly contentious right-wing radicalism into harmonious bipartisan consensus. That the most vocal defenders of this unprecedented government acquisition of journalists' phone records comes from government-loyal progressives - reciting the standard slogans of National Security and Keeping Us Safe and The Terrorists - is a potent symbol indeed of this transformation.