Every campaign season brings its own share of frustrations. This one is no different. So now I get to vent. The polls are closed. The outcomes are known (mostly). And the spinmeisters have done what they do. Yet I feel entitled to one final campaign postmortem. In three big ways, I found this campaign season more aggravating than usual. I'm disappointed in liberals. I am flabbergasted by conservatives. And above all else, I'm really disappointed by and angry at the press.

Let's start there. Our friends in the Fourth Estate did more to let me down this election cycle than ever before. This is mostly a matter of judgment and standards. A friend from California visited Massachusetts just days before the election and asked me if it was really true that the Republican tide was so strong that Barney Frank might lose his congressional seat. "Are you kidding?" I said, somewhat incredulously.

"No," she replied. "A news report said he was in real trouble." Meanwhile, Frank won re-election with a comfortable 54 percent, versus 43 percent for his closest challenger.

I asked the same friend if Californians were really ready to elect two conservative women to statewide office -- namely, Meg Whitman, who was running against Jerry Brown for governor, and Carly Fiorina, who was running against Barbara Boxer for U.S. Senate. She chuckled and said, "Not likely."

I replied, "Right! But the national press coverage made it seem that this incredibly well-financed Republican juggernaut was rolling through the nation, the two high-profile women candidates in California as leading exhibits."

At the final count, the putatively "liberal" Boxer beat former Hewlett-Packard CEO Fiorina 51.9 percent to 42.6 percent, even though Fiorina put approximately $6 million of her own money into the campaign. Former eBay CEO Whitman went down to even more crushing defeat. Though spending more than $140 million of her own vast fortune, she was defeated with just 41.3 percent of the vote, versus Jerry Brown's 53.5 percent.

Yet if you had followed the headlines and the dominant press narratives, you would have thought the conservative tsunami was ready to wash over California (defeats for Brown and Boxer) and Massachusetts (defeat for Frank). Wrong. Because the press got it so completely wrong, I wish for them, next time around, a whole new sense of self-respect, professional standards and political savvy. From my vantage point, too many journalists -- including more than a few at respected national outlets -- seem to have swallowed, completely and obligingly, official Republican talking points served up as if they constituted actual news or good journalism.

The outright contempt for reason, thinking, eloquence, tolerance and intelligence exhibited by some forces on the far right, including much of the Tea Party movement, is my second biggest frustration of campaign season 2010. Since when is ignorance a virtue? When does not understanding U.S. history or the Constitution qualify you for high elective office? How is the cause of democracy advanced by speculating about shooting one's opponent? These questions all had more of a realpolitik edge to them this year as various Republican candidates seemed to embrace the lowest, most mean-spirited political ethos seen in generations.