“None of this is new, but the degree of intensity is different,” Milbank says. “It’s taken an uglier turn. I’ve been doing this for years, and there’s never been anything quite like this.”

Milbank says that after the Palin attacked the New York Times and Katie Couric in her stump speech yesterday in Florida, he and other reporters were pelted with boos, with some saying things like “screw you” and “fucking liberal media.”

“McCain has so overtly taken on the media — they’re doing it to rile the base,” he continued. “And lo and behold, the base is good and riled.”

The base and its candidates may be “riled,” all right, but no way that “good” applies to any of them.

Telling someone that a public figure is an immature jerk is a waste of breath. Demonstrating it so the reader thinks to themselves “what an immature jerk” means you’ve convinced someone. I don’t think “telling” advances the conversation much but “showing” does.

But . . . um . . . Steve Schmidt missed something.