Ho-hum. Another day, another threat by the White House press corps to stop being so "nice" to Obama. You know, "nice" like pretend he’s a Muslim citizen of Indonesia, or that he pals around with terrorists, or that pretty much any patently ridiculous charge flung at him, especially those flung by Republicans, is a legitimate news story worthy of being regurgitated repeatedly despite definitive debunkings?

Ahem.

As Eric Boehlert’s book Lapdogs demonstrates, "nice" is what that same press corps did and still does for George W. Bush and virtually any Republican out there — and seldom does for any Democrat, unless it’s a Democrat who’s attacking other Democrats. (Yes, gang, this is why the press loves those Blue Dogs.)

This has been how the press operates for decades. Bill and Hillary Clinton ran into the same problems as did Obama. Here’s what I mean by that:

Remember the very first "Clinton scandal"? The White House Travel Office Scandal? (Actually, I think it was the second or third — the "haircut on the tarmac scandal" was the first since his inauguration, if I recall correctly. And of course there was the Gennifer Flowers nonsense, which was neutralized by the news of George H. W. Bush’s own Jennifer Fitzgerald, but that was before the election.)

What happened was this: In the course of reviewing the workings of the White House administrative staff they inherited from the first Bush, the Clintons noticed something odd: Tens of thousands of dollars was missing from the White House Travel Office, which among other things oversaw the travel arrangements of the press corps that traveled with the president. Because of this, they saw fit to fire a bunch of the Travel Office staff.

Now, it’s true that Hillary Clinton had some travel-agency friends who she apparently thought deserved the Travel Office gig. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that over $50,000 of the Travel Office money was sitting, unauthorized, in Billy Dale’s own private and personal bank account.

However, Billy Dale was not without his friends in the press: In his years as the WHTO chief, under Reagan and then Bush I, he ruled with the classic iron fist in the velvet gloves: Juicy perks to those journalists who wrote the "right" things, the cold shoulder to those who didn’t. This is why guys like Sam Donaldson leapt to Billy Dale’s defense, praising their old friend and attacking the Clintons with far more vigor than they’d ever exercised against George H. W. Bush or Ronald Reagan for Iran-Contra. They attacked them so hard over this and other minor "scandals" and smears (such as accusing Hillary of boinking her spouse’s friend and White House aide Vince Foster, that Foster wound up killing himself — and leaving a note blaming the press for driving him to it.

They kept at the Clintons over this for years, and it ended only when the Clinton presidency did — not even an exoneration from a special prosecutor was enough to shut up the press about this.

Starts to sound familiar, doesn’t it? Now you know why I call it "The GOP/Media Complex".