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Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Is the sleeping giant awakening?
Posted by Jill | 7:06 AM

Ever since the campaign of 2000, George W. Bush and his minions have been given a free pass by the press. While every breath Bill Clinton took and every word out of Al Gore's mouth were examined for something foul, the attitude of the press towards Bush has been one of fawning obsequiousness.

Until yesterday.

Some of the change in the press' conduct towards Presidential Toady Scott McClellan yesterday may have been that of sharks smelling blood in the water, but I don't think that's the case, given the press' history of overlooking anything associated with this Administration.

I think it's rather a case of the press realizing, in the aftermath of the jailing of Judith Miller and the threatening of Matt Cooper, that this Administration is NOT their friend, and that ANYTHING that the Administration can interpret as being in opposition to its aims will be met with severe punishment.

If that's the case, Katie bar the door.

If nothing else, what we're seeing now is just HOW much like our popular conception of gangsters this administration operates. They use threats and browbeating, rather than persuasion, to whip their own party and the press into shape. Republicans are still so cowed that they are feigning a laughable degree of ignorance about the story:

The criminal investigation into how the C.I.A. officer's name came to appear in a syndicated newspaper column two years ago continued largely out of public view. But the recent disclosure of evidence that Mr. Rove had, without naming Ms. Plame, told a Time reporter about the same time that Mr. Wilson's wife "works at the agency," thrust the case squarely back into the political arena. That reflected Mr. Rove's standing as among the most powerful men in Washington and his place in the innermost councils of the White House.

Because of the powerful role Mr. Rove plays in shaping policy and deploying Mr. Bush's political support and machinery throughout the party, few Republicans were willing to discuss his situation on the record. Asked for comment, several Republican senators said on Monday that they did not know enough or did not want to venture an opinion.

But in private, several prominent Republicans said they were concerned about the possible effects on Mr. Bush and his agenda, in part because Mr. Rove's stature makes him such a tempting target for Democrats.

"Knowing Rove, he's still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan," said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. "But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there's a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people."

A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove's involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.

"The only fear here is where does this go," the aide said. "We can't know."


I don't know about you, but when I read this kind of tiptoeing, I think of Artie Bucco's complex relationship with Tony Soprano.

The wingnuts, predictably, have learned their lessons well from Mr. Rove. They're smearing Joe Wilson and his wife as being some kind of shadowy, omnipotent figures who lied and machinated to embarrass the president. They're parsing the definition of "name". They're examining whether Valerie Plame was an NOC at the exact moment the leak occurred, and if not, then no crime was committed. I don't know about you, but to me this kind of tense-parsing sure sounds like "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

I don't quite dare hope that the press is finally waking up and is going to start following the ruination that this Administration has wrought on the American people. But I'll be watching carefully.
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