Message: Stay Home!

Well, our secret is out.

Someone must have leaked the confidential plan.

It was diabolically clever, I must say. We MSM types, after meeting in a parking garage, decided that our best hope for handing this election to the Democrats is to suppress Republican turnout .

Bwahahahahaha.

You see, it's not that we care about the carnage in Iraq, or members of Congress cyberstalking teenage pages. We just want Republicans to stay home, thus ensuring Democratic control of Congress and the continued dominance of the liberal-media worldview.

Brilliant, don't you think? And it might have succeeded if only some traitor hadn't given us up.

I don't know how this became the new Republican talking point. I mean, I'm all for criticizing the media for, say, overplaying the Foley scandal or running too many polls-say-Democrats-will-win stories. But what journalist even thinks about convincing voters to stay home?

Yet there was the star of "Hannity & the Other Guy" on Friday--the same Sean Hannity who is campaigning for Republican Michael Steele today in the Maryland Senate race--declaring that "the media seems somewhat complicit. I argue that there's even sort of an institutionalized bias to sort of suppress voting and take away initiative from people -- that's how I feel -- based on the news coverage."

Okayyy. And now comes Fred Barnes , executive editor of the Weekly Standard, to say:

"As for Republican efforts to spur a big turnout on November 7, the press frowns on such cheap tactics. 'GOP Aims to Scare Up Big Voter Turnout' was the headline on a Washington Post story last week.

"If you suspect there are forces eager to suppress Republican turnout, you are right. Rarely has the press echoed Democratic themes as relentlessly as it has in the closing weeks of the 2006 campaign. And the main theme is that Republicans are about to be blown away. The question now is whether this message will persuade Republican voters to stay home on Election Day. It shouldn't, so long as Republicans--and especially conservative Republicans--act like adults, not like petulant children angry over one thing or another that didn't go their way."

Barnes has actually worked in newsrooms, including the Baltimore Sun and Washington Star. I respect the arguments he makes, even when I disagree with him. So it's hard for me to buy that he believes reporters would actually scheme to do this.