When President Bush nominated one John Roberts for the Supreme Court, a certain CBS News reporter with the same name apparently suffered an ego blow. Now that CBS’s John Roberts is no longer the John Roberts in D.C., the reporter took the occasion to pen a smirky commentary piece that reveals his overinflated sense of self importance:

After my four and a half years covering the Bush White House, I couldn’t imagine the name “John Roberts” and the phrase “widely admired for his intellect, his sound judgment and his personal decency” being used in the same time zone, let alone the same sentence. More likely would have been “John Roberts” and “should join Judith Miller in jail”; or “frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs”; or, “Oh yeah, we’ve got a dossier on him”.

Yeah, that’s it, John, you’re such a dangerous, fearless reporter that the Gestapo-like Bush White House would like nothing more than to put you in jail.

This feeble attempt at humor—at least I’m assuming he was aiming for humor here—reveals more about his perceptions of the White House and the media than anything else:

It’s no secret that the White House doesn’t hold a lot of respect for the media at large [...]

Gee, I wonder why that is!

Does Roberts expect that the White House should hold respect for the media? When was the last time you saw the media show respect towards this White House? Reporter Roberts might not understand an important dynamic of respect: people rarely respect those who find them contemptible.

As a correspondent, it was one of the most frustrating days of my life. A lot of my fellow White House denizens share the same sentiments. My BlackBerry was buzzing all day with messages from colleagues – “I HATE this” and “Just SHOOT me now” were two of the more popular expressions of exasperation.

Just a hunch, but the dread expressed by these news insiders might have something to do with the president making the Supreme Court choice, not with the process itself. I doubt these same insiders “hated” the day President Clinton announced Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a nominee. At the very least, they probably weren’t requesting to be shot.