This looks pretty ghastly, no two ways around it. It doesn't matter whether Rosen worked for Fox News or the Daily Worker. This is way out of bounds.

It's made all the worse, if you ask me, when you read Rosen's report, the one that got him in this trouble. It ran in 2009 and was about how North Korea might retaliate in the face of a sanctions vote at the UN. Here's how it opened:

U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week -- condemning the communist country for its recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests -- with another nuclear test, FOX News has learned.

What's more, Pyongyang's next nuclear detonation is but one of four planned actions the Central Intelligence Agency has learned, through sources inside North Korea, that the regime of Kim Jong-Il intends to take -- but not announce -- once the Security Council resolution is officially passed, likely on Friday.

The other three actions include the reprocessing of all of the North's spent plutonium fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium; a major escalation in the North's uranium-enrichment program; and the launching of another Taepodong-2 intercontinental ballistic missile from the Yunsong military complex on the west coast of North Korea. The North last launched a Taepodong-2 on April 5; it conducted its second nuclear test in the last three years on Memorial Day.

No offense intended to Rosen, but...I don't even see where that's such big news. Of course North Korea was going to do something to protest a UN sanctions vote. Do what? Well, missile tests is what it's been doing for the last several years now to scare people, so...a missile test. I mean, if I'd read that on June 11, 2009, I'd have stopped after three paragraphs and thought tell me something I don't know. So why was the government so up in arms about it in the first place?

This is a disgrace. What I said about Eric Holder last week is looking pretty good to me.