To Shill or Be Shrill: Pussy-Footing Around Bush Impeachment

That Bob Woodward continues to flack for the Bush administration from his knees is surprising only in light of Woodward’s distant past as the co-author of the Watergate story. But Watergate was his one-hit wonder. From then on he’s been the Sinclair Lewis of investigative journalism, or the Harlequin of Washington—re-applying the same formula and the same narrative methods on different themes: the Supreme Court, the CIA, John Belushi, the Pentagon. It’s no surprise that his best work (All the President’s Men and The Brethren) had the spine of co-authors. And even Nixon, it turns out, was a fish in a barrel. The Washington press corps just hadn’t dared look past the surface of the barrel until Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Mark Felt showed the way. These days almost every Washington reporter who’s aspired to be a Woodward has, on heaps of ironies, become Woodward—minus the all-access pass to he capital’s power boudoirs: Every reporter is a panderer, meek, pliant, as easy to deceive and manipulate as a mutt drooling for a bone. “Sources” know it. In a city flooded with reporters to whom competition is the virtue and truth-seeking a post-modern snicker, Washington’s Rovian mechanic is such that leakers and manipulators are the circus masters. Read the rest...