The dirty little secret about Barack Obama's indictment of flyover country is that he said what liberals, including Hillary Clinton, believe. Sufficient proof of this can be found in the liberal outrage at Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate, where Obama was pressed both by the moderators and Clinton to explain Bitter-gate, Wright-gate, Ayers-gate and Flag pin-gate.

Consider the uncannily similar reactions of columnists Tom Shales and Stephen Silver.

Shales expressed indignation that ABC News moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos would dare ask Obama to justify his insulting remarks about small-town Americans and his relationships with certain anti-American people.

Shale's fumed, "For the first 52 minutes … Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with."

Shales was particularly perturbed that Stephanopoulos "came up with such tired tripe as a charge that Obama once associated with a nutty bomb-throwing anarchist."

He was equally peeved at Gibson for bringing up, "yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama."

Columnist Silver is annoyed that Gibson and Stephanopoulos "asked shamefully superficial and gotcha-oriented questions" and for the first half of the debate dwelt only on "rehashes of the nonsense non-stories of the past month -- it was all-Wright, all-'bitter,' all-Bosnia sniper fire, all flag pin all the time." These were all, wrote Silver, "questions about nothing."

Silver characterized the recent stories about Obama's association with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers as "the sort of stuff that only right-wing bloggers and e-mail forwarders care about."

Excuse the quotes, but nothing captures the sneering condescension of media liberals better than their own words.

What do the assessments of these two fairly typical liberal columnists have in common? Well, quite simply their agreement that reports about Obama's pastor, his terrorist friend and his obvious contempt for small-town Americans are superficial distractions that are irrelevant to Obama's suitability for the highest office in the land.

The mainstream media's trivialization of this string of damning stories on Obama brings into sharp relief the ever-widening worldview chasm that separates liberals from conservatives. For them to let Obama get away with brushing off his elitist, contemptuous remarks about small-town Americans as a mistake or as a mere "mangling of words" proves they not only don't understand the gravity of the insult but also probably agree with it. Continued...