Since most reporters will not ask the questions that Americans want answered it has forced citizens and celebrities to step up.

While reporters and commentators continue to tiptoe around the question of whether Bush administration officials, right up to the president, deliberately misled the nation into the war, average and not-so-average citizens have raised the charge of “lies” and caused a stir usually reserved for reporters. Is America, or just my own head, about to explode over Iraq?

The latest example of citizen journalism occurred Thursday, with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s persistent questioning of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld at a forum in Atlanta. CNN’s Anderson Cooper, interviewing McGovern later, told him he had gone where most reporters had failed to tread. Whether Anderson meant this as self-criticism was impossible to tell.

This comes on the heels of satirist Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents Association dinner on Saturday -- publicized primarily by Web sites and blogs -- and this week’s streaming-on-line debut of Neil Young’s “Living with War” album, which proposes impeaching the president “for lying” (and “for spying”). It has already earned more than a million Internet listeners, and on Saturday reached #3 in sales at Amazon. "Don't need no more lies," Young sings repeatedly in one song.

McGovern, Colbert and Young are hardly grassroots Americans, but we also have the recent example of Harry Taylor, who on April 6 rose at a town meeting in Charlotte, N.C. and asked the president about his domestic spying program, among other things, saying he was ”ashamed” of the nation’s leader.

Many years into the future, when history gets its chance to evaluate how things went so terribly wrong during this administration, the American press may find themselves receiving the lion's share of the blame. The American press which had done such an admirable job during Vietnam and Watergate, allowed themselves to be marginalized and made impotent by a bullying swaggering Republican media machine. And for that they should feel shamed beyond words.

The lack of a vibrant aggressive press is exactly why you are reading these words. If they had done their job I would be reading, or playing a computer game, or just watching televison. But because they so completely fucked up their job, I and many other average Americans felt the need to fill in for their absence.

On the upside my spelling and sentence structure have improved immensely. Thank Thor for small favors.