Mr. Bush ran out the clock on his hour of prime time, using it with the focus of Jimmy Dean selling sausage, snubbing tough reporters while calling on buddies, issuing one-size-fits-all talking points to all comers, giving the answers he wanted to the questions he didn't. He even openly taunted one correspondent, CNN's John King, for daring to ask a multi-part question.

"I don't think he was sufficiently challenged," said ABC News White House correspondent Terry Moran. He said Mr. Bush's hyper-management left the press corps "looking like zombies."

Mr. Bush worked from a podium-pasted pre-determined list of acceptable reporters to call upon. USA Today's Larry McQuillan, on the White House beat since Jimmy Carter, said Mr. Bush's homeroom-proctor sheet of preferred questioners managed to insult those didn't appear on it-- and make those who did seem like Karl Rove's brown-nosers, the camp kids who got the best desserts. "The process in some ways demeaned the reporters who were called on as much as those who weren't," Mr. McQuillan said.

"They completely played us," added a correspondent for a major daily newspaper. "What's the point of having a press conference if you're not going to answer questions? It was calculated on so many different levels."

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...So, at what point will the media stop talking about how badly they're getting played and actually start playing back? Acknowledging how complict and weakspined they've have been is not the same as the media actually getting down in it...