After Brian Stelter and David Bauder weighed in on all the flack MSNBC is catching for leaning left, and heavily toward Barack Obama, it's about time the snowball started gaining speed. And so it has. We've got WaPo's Howie Kurtz and Time's James Poniewozik weighing in on the fracas, which has been attack bait for Fox News.

Though everyone from the White House and John McCain's campaign to Hillary Clinton's camp is expressing their outrage, "Phil Griffin, the NBC senior vice president who runs MSNBC, dismisses the criticism, calling [senior strategist for John McCain, Steve] Schmidt's broadsides 'pretty outrageous accusations.'"

Well, you'd be kidding yourself if you argued Chris Matthews didn't have it in the bag for Obama, and Olbermann is "edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability" (those are Poniewozik's words). But much of the heat 30 Rock has been taken is over the merging of NBC News and MSNBC under one roof, which of course means they're working in tandem to push a political agenda.

Except they aren't. Brian Williams' NBC Nightly News, for instance, is a very different animal, and while perhaps a little more progressive than your average newscast, is pretty centrist.

But kudos to NBC's critics for framing the debate in this way. Rather than highlight the fact that Olbermann is simply Bill O'Reilly's foil, the charges against MSNBC are the same accusations that have been leveraged against Fox News, and nobody is really defending that network as "fair and balanced."

Then again, MSNBC's loudest critics are the inner circles of President Bush and Roger Ailes, who've been holding hands for the past eight years. So really: Throwing stones?