Posted 8:02 PM by Gene

"I want to live up to her expectations," Mr. Obama said of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green. "I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it." By abandoning the royal "we," the president suggested that none of us is above the need for soul-searching. We in the media should pay heed.

This blogger intends to pay close heed to how the royal we that are the media handle themselves. He intends to pay close heed when they abandon the civility gag for ratings, when they pursue the horse race and the sound bite and the other strategies that exacerbate civic tensions, when they make facile phony apologies for their moral incontinence.

And we must not forget the royal we includes our superiors in government, who since day one have actively investigated all conceivable loopholes for their scruples.

This blogger will heed very closely indeed -- and he expects within a month every last self-serving platitude from the past week will have faded into a conveniently amnesic memory.

We all hope and yearn and demand for better; but decades of the royal we have brought us only constant worse.