The Unsettled CW. Liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and Digby like to stress the unity of the American political establishment or "the village" as Digby likes to call it.

But there could be some shifting going on in the establishment. The RNC's racist farce over "Barack the Magic Negro" is an indication that the Republican Party might not turn out to be a credible opposition to the incoming Obama administration.

There's so me signs that the leadership of Republican institutions might be worried about their credibility. For example, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has forced out two of their most vociferous neo-cons--Michael Ledeen and Reul Marc Gerecht. No institution that employs John Bolton, Charles Murray, and Newt Gingrich could be very credible in the final analysis.

But it appears that AEI is trying.

There's some signs of the repositioning of the Democrats in relation to the mainstream media as well.

The media might be softening its embargo of the left as well. On Face the Nation last Sunday, CBS invited Paul Krugman to provide critical perspective on Obama's stimulus package rather than any kind of conservative figure.

It appears that Democratic elites are getting fed up with media stupidity. Caroline Kennedy improved her stock with me by asking if her insipid New York Times interviewers had ever thought about writing for "women's magazines." Actually, Kennedy wasn't being fair to women's magazines which are generally superior to political journalism. She should have compared Times political correspondents to entertainment or sports reporters instead.

And today, Zbigniew Brzezinski actually referred to Joe Scarborough to Scarborough's face as "stunningly superficial" in discussing Israel and Hamas.

None of this is an indication of any kind of big structural shift, but it does appear that the conventional wisdom is fairly unsettled right now.