Our annual dinner kept me from seeing the Anderson Cooper show’s segment on Murtha last night, but to judge from the transcript CNN’s Joe Johns (who once wrote for The American Spectator) went quite easy on Murtha and his Abscam record, barely finding time to run a single comment from Dave Holman, who broke the Murtha Abscam tape story on this website last September 29.

Incidentally, what is Johns doing referring to Dave as “the guy who came up with the tape”? In my book, “guy” is a pretty derogatory term. In fact, the only other time it was used on last night’s show, it was in reference to O.J. Simpson in a later segment. Fred Goldman, father of one of Simpson’s victims, says about Simpson, “This is a guy who viciously, brutally murdered two people.”

So what was Dave’s crime? His being, as Johns introduced him, “a writer for the conservative ‘American Spectator’ magazine”? Or his performing what Murtha is calling a “right-wing smear job”? Trying to decide between those two possibilities is likely to result in a hung jury at CNN.