I’M NOT SURPRISED AT THIS DEVELOPMENT: “The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources.”

Members of the press are, for the most part, appalled. But having made a big deal of leaks and their alleged harm to National Security in the Plame case, they’re in a poor position to complain. Bill Keller’s outrage is particularly out of place, and his suggestion that the Bush Administration is “declaring war at home on the values it professes to be promoting abroad” is just a political sound-bite, and not a particularly good one. There’s not even a right of journalists to protect leakers under the U.S. Constitution, despite journalists’ representations, and doing so has hardly been a slogan on the war on terror. The tendency of the press to conflate its own desire for guild-like special privileges with the protections of the First Amendment is one of the reasons for its decline in trust and popularity.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Roger Simon.