Why a vigilant press is not just desirable, but necessary

Look, I seriously doubt that this Illinois Governor thing is going to wind up being a major problem for Obama, but we've all known about crooked Tony Rezko (among other things) for six months and no one in the press ever seemed interested in digging down into these stories to see what else they might find.

I remarked on this very blog a few months ago that it would be much better for Obama to have these scandals hit the press in smaller increments while he was still a candidate than it would be for them to explode all at once in his first 100 days while he's trying to get a handle on a very tough job.

The press laid down on the job to avoid causing Obama some short-term pain... and now it looks like he's about to pay for that with a major long-term headache.

We may be about to find out whether or not my warning was prescient.

UPDATE: Here it comes.

UPDATE 2: Remember when the press busted McCain for supposedly not vetting Sarah Palin carefully enough?

UPDATE 3: Jonah Goldberg is so giddy about the unfolding scandal he doesn't know where to start, but he makes the same point I did in a fantastic paragraph that reads thusly:

"There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls. See there, Suzie? That’s a Pegasus. That’s a pink unicorn. And that’s a beautiful sunflower giving birth to a fully grown Barack Obama, the greatest president ever and the only man in history to be able to pick up manure from the clean end."