Josh Marshall Brian Beutler has good piece up on what he describes as “The Establishment’s Obama Derangement Syndrome”.
I think things are a bit more complicated than he makes it out to be. For example, pundits like David Ignatius and Joe Klein say “both sides are doing it” because that’s what they say about everything, whereas pundits like Bob Woodward and Ron Fournier are explicitly blaming Obama because Woodward and Fournier are conservatives who side with Republicans on most everything.
The latter group doesn’t interest me so much, because that’s how things work with all conservatives. The former group is sort of interesting to me because I think the paradigm that they cling to is slowly dying. Younger non-partisan establishment journalists — like Michael Grunwald and Ezra Klein — are mostly saying (accurately) that Republicans refuse to make any compromises whereas Obama has offered quite a lot of compromise. The older ones are uniformly repeating the “both sides do it” mantra.
“Both sides do it” won’t die out altogether anytime that soon, but I think we may have hit and passed Peak Both Sides Do It.