All the President’s Whores
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November 16, 2005
WB: Judy Woodward
Comments
Regarding photo: thanks, Billmon, now I’m going to have nightmares…
Posted by: KenLac | Nov 16 2005 7:10 utc | 1
Woody deepthroating for W. Fine investigative photography, does that mean Woody was cross dressing while he was going down on Cheney and W?
Posted by: christofay | Nov 16 2005 7:33 utc | 2
And it’ll be a big help to the New Pravda as they can now claim everyone was going down for the Cheney administration.
Posted by: christofay | Nov 16 2005 7:34 utc | 3
this link may be the reference.
jeez, why do i smell fish?
Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.
Posted by: annie | Nov 16 2005 7:54 utc | 4
Billmon,
I was going to say this before and failed to, so I will now.
I think you have a great talent for satire, and I like your pictures and one-liners the best. The serious pics too. I especially liked your one of our esteemed Chief Justice in his bunny ears. I’ve always loved this kind of thing. It trips the imagination. In fact, that’s one thing I love about this country. It’s always been good at political satire.
Of course, I’m always ready for a laugh.
Posted by: jm | Nov 16 2005 8:14 utc | 5
A couple weeks ago Woodward was on Larry King defending the administration on the Valerie Plame case. Some lowlights:
Woodward: First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign … I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started as a kind of gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned [Plame] had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job …There’s a lot of innocent actions in all of this but … this is a junkyard dog prosecutor.
…Some people kind of had convenient memories before the grand jury. “Technically” they might be able to be charged with perjury. But I don’t see an underlying crime here.
.
Posted by: Vin Carreo | Nov 16 2005 8:30 utc | 6
When you try to break away to do some money paying work, Mr B, the story just gets weirder and funnier.
Posted by: christofay | Nov 16 2005 8:32 utc | 7
Priceless photoshop. As to the meat of the matter, something’s breaking. One can sense it. Who’s going down? Is it Rove? Cheney? or is someone fingering Bush, now that his usefulness to the powers-that-be is finished, and he’s out of the country? Reminds me a bit of the standard modus for a coup in Africa. The President goes on a trip and discovers his re-entry visa has expired. Add the Woodward story, Libby’s lawyer’s crowing and the Washington Time’s piece on Bush’s favorite kitchen cabinet, and you get that slight smell of burning wires behind the baseboard. I’m expectng a conflagration.
Posted by: Knut Wicksell | Nov 16 2005 13:46 utc | 8
Judy, Judy, Judy darling.
The Silent Coup writers were wrong about Deep Throat (they pegged Haig), but they also noted that Woodward was in the Navy and held the same position as briefer that Lugar had held when he was in the military.
Woodward, the authors claimed, answered to Haig. Woodward was also, as his former wife recalled, always on the side of the “establishment” when his fellow students were protesting on campus.
The view of Woodward as an iconoclast, in other words, does not hold.
The Silent Coup authors also speculated that Woodward was fed info by the military because they were so pissed at Kissinger (and Nixon) for their statements about withdrawal of troops from Vietnam, for opening trade talks with commie China, and for by passing the military in their diplomatic efforts.
The military certainly did have a mole on the Kissinger staff who copied his papers and passed them along…Schneider, I think, was the name of the officer who worked for K.
It was his testimony, while on a lie detector, when the military was trying to find the source for a leak of information to Jack Anderson (that Anderson didn’t quite have right, but right enough) that alerted the White House to the military’s spying on them…something that was, apparently, illegal…at least then.
This was in the decade after the JCS were proposing Operation Northwoods, of course…How the nation has changed now when the military is more liberal than the prez’s cabinet.
It would be an interesting footnote for all the wingnuts to be able to howl with delight about Woodward being implicated in a govt. smear campaign…almost the equivalent of the Rather moment for them, but of course just part of the sideshow.
Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 16 2005 14:28 utc | 9
http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/
“I remembered.
From the Washington Note:
[A] short while ago — one of America’s top journalists called me to ask what I knew about Fleitz. He said rumors were swirling everywhere and that a “really wild rumor” was that Bob Woodward had a piece appearing in tomorrow’s Washington Post focusing on Fleitz. Realize — NOTHING substantiated here.
Part of the rumor is that Fleitz is on leave.
I just tried to track that down. I just called Fred Fleitz, but got his answering machine and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I then called Under Secretary of State Bob Joseph’s office and talked to a person who told me that Fleitz was on leave for two days but would return to the office Monday morning.
I know nothing more. But here is what I wrote on Fleitz and the possibility of a Plame connection a while back. . .plus if you use the search function on the site for “Fleitz”, you will find a lot of commentary on this website about him. He’s an interesting, swashbuckling, rough-and-tough character who kept his CIA WINPAC portfolio despite being seconded to the State Department.
Posted by: ken melvin | Nov 16 2005 17:33 utc | 10
Well,
He/she has now apoligized to the Post, so it’s OK.
Posted by: Groucho | Nov 16 2005 19:54 utc | 13
Woodward is taking one for the party.
“The Washington Post reported that at least one senior Bush administration official – who was not identified – told editor Bob Woodward about CIA operative Valerie Plame about a month before her identity was publicly exposed.
The newspaper reported that Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak of Plame’s identity, that the official talked to him about Plame in mid-June 2003. Woodward and editors at the Post refused to identify the official to reporters other than to say it was not Libby. “
AND
“Woodward’s testimony in a two-hour deposition Monday would mean that another White House official told a reporter about Plame before Libby revealed her identity to Miller. A spokesman for White House adviser Karl Rove told the Post that Rove did not discuss Plame with Woodward.
William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby’s lawyers, told the Post that Woodward’s testimony raises questions about his client’s indictment. “Will Mr. Fitzgerald now say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this information to a reporter?” Jeffress said. “
The waters are going to be very muddy indeed by the time this show trial gets anywhere near a courtroom. Fitzgerald has left his case wide open to this type of misdirection by prosecuting for something other than the initial crime he was briefed to investigate. The issue of whether Libby was the first or last to show and tell is irelevant in a trial about whether he lied to a grand jury.
Especially if there is any truth at all to NYT’s story yesterday that:
“Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House official indicted on perjury charges, plan to seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony, people involved in the case said Tuesday.”
Within this is Woodward, a classic study in mainchancing.
Being Bob Woodward, if possible he will make a silk purse outta this sow’s ear and somehow turn all this around so that he makes a few dollars (ie book), a neccessity becomes a virtue in that he stayed schtumm because he didn’t want to get involved in illegal dissemination of national security secrets (Plame’s job), or lower himself to the filthy politicking and fingerpointing that non-Wasps prefer.
The bloke is a flea and should be treated as such. If he were a real journalist none of us would ever have heard of him because fame/notoriety is an inhibitor for an ‘investigative reporter’, not an asset.
Just another example of what some of us call the messianic complex of many people. Whereas the failed messiahs in this part of the world call it the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ .
He helped reveal the lies and crimes of the Nixon Whitehouse so too many people put him on a pedestal and praised his virtue instead of accepting he was just an ambitious young man who had decided that ‘Watergate’ was an opportunity to advance his career.
When people learn that their heroes are human they can turn on them in a way that denies the former hero any right to humanity at all.
I don’t think that will happen to Woodward this time however since he’s skilled at PR, in fact much more skilled at that than news journalism but that’s true of a huge proportion of people ‘in the media’ nowadays.
Woodward should be commended for understanding something that too few of us try to comprehend. That is a group of people with largely common beliefs and aspirations will realise those commonalities if they stick together. In this case the group is the repug elite.
Yes the capitalists are better at solidarity nowadays than the left!
Woodward may well loathe Libby and/or Rove with a passion but he is capable of understanding the need to subsume personal feelings for the greater ‘good’.
There is no denying that mainchancers from Stalin to Bob Hawke to Tony Blair have abused the left’s solidarity to advantage themselves and in doing so have made other leftists very sceptical indeed of giving any ‘leader’ blind loyalty.
However I don’t believe that will happen every time or that such abuses can’t be prevented.
Times CAN be a’changing.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 16 2005 21:35 utc | 14
Okay, so what’s our narrative here? Was Bob Woodward a journalistic hero who, when he became a superstar, lost all his quality? Or was he always a shmuck, and just happened to come across the story of a lifetime and has rode that for all its worth since? I’m getting confused here, the lefty bloggers have turned on him in a hurry.
Posted by: Rowan | Nov 16 2005 23:08 utc | 15
Or was he always a shmuck
yep, just a one-trick pony.
Posted by: dan of steele | Nov 16 2005 23:21 utc | 16
Woodward started his career in Naval Intelligence, and has carried water for the CIA ever since.
Including Watergate, which was fed to and through Katherine Graham’s Washington Post in order to bring down that socialist Nixon.
Posted by: Antifa | Nov 17 2005 0:13 utc | 17
@Rowan:
It think everyone gave up on the smuck couple years ago, when he wrote his Byzantine hagiography, Bush at War.
Barf!
Posted by: Groucho | Nov 17 2005 2:17 utc | 18
It’s pretty obvious why Woodward kept his mouth shut. We explored these waters with Judy Miller. The question is, is he (beyond obstruction of justice) compromised as a journalist? Having this inside information and not sharing should have led him to self-disqualify from saying a word about the case. Instead he goes on the air and downplays its importance. I’d say that’s a dismissable offence, if I was his boss and I ran a clean shop.
Posted by: Steve Hill | Nov 17 2005 3:25 utc | 19
Bushie, and Cheney, and Chalabi Makes Three
If you watched Chalabi on Pete Rose last night,
and suffered through his very earnest portrayal
of the “good” Iraqi’s, just trying to get their
affairs in order, and oh, yes, by the way, he’s
the Minister of Oil Affairs and soon to be the
Prime Minister of Iraq. Even Pete Rose soon got
tired of the prosyletizing and evangelizing at
the end of his interview, demanding ‘yes, or no’
about something MSM will never publish anyway.
So it was with a classic Chalabi smirk that we
saw the news tonight revealing an Iraqi Interior
Minister and his Iran-trained Shia cell was busy torturing Sunni’s in some secret prison, and so immediately putting the lie to everything that Chalabi was promising about, ‘hold and go long’.
Iraq will explode in civil war as soon as we go.
That’s the problem with pitchmen. “Evangelizing”, in the current vernacular. “Conversion ratio” in the modern marketing speak. You get a good pitch going, let’s say, “All Roses and Chocolates”, and then the client is converted, but the cost-growth is killer, and the product isn’t performing, and there’s all kinds of gross defects, so you have to start pitching, “Just Wait and We’ll Fix It”.
[SFX – Theme song from “Elephant Walk”]
Sure they will. Iraqis will run their own v. of Democracy and Freedom when I’m the US president.
On the other hand, look, the oil in Iraq is worth by conservative estimates $10’s of TRILLIONS. If you took all the loot and treasure, going all the way from the Romans, Charlemagne, Black Beard’s pirates, Napoleon, Hitler, hey, even Ken Lay, the total of looted treasure in all of human history does not hold a small candle to Iraqi oil wealth.
Surely that’s worth considering re why Woodward would say what he said, and why not. If you were Cheney, and wanted to bring Plame down, who are
the very first journalists you would leak it to?
Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein. Am I right?
Whether Bob reported on Yellow Cake the way they wanted them to, or just the obverse, they would still get Plame’s name outed. I’m sure Rove was sitting there spinning his Rolodex, and spinning every g-d-damn journalist he could find.
Look beneath the personalities. Look beneath the story. Look beneath the money, at the *insiders*.
You’all are starting to sound like Trotskyites.
Ahmed Chalabi is sitting on the largest treasure in all of human history. Our entire civilization depends for it’s very existence on the orderly dispersal, for a tidy and spiraling profit, of that treasure. The US, as the largest military in world history, larger than all other militaries in the world *combined*, is protecting that oil for US. Well, not for any of US, not for you and me, but certainly for US Big Oil and Big Banking.
At least we’ll get a *sip* now and then. Imagine being a poor Iraqi, sitting, no, squatting on the greatest treasure of all, and not a tithe, not a farthing going your way. Their lives will be no better than migras crawling across burning sands between Nogales and Pheonix, 130 in the shade.
Give the Iraqi people an oil royalty? Insh’allah!
The greatest army on earth, the greatest treasure on earth, and an occupation paid by the greatest tax suckers in history, ruled by two evangelical cheerleaders and one wack-job crip oil baron.
Chr-st, you can’t make this s–t up!
I hold with Rob Brezny. These are End Times now. This is The Apocalypse we’re living through. For American’s anyway, Apocalpse ain’t too shabby.
I remember flying into a remote Alaskan oil town in the dead of winter, on Christmas, 1980. There was a sudden swirl of wind, and only one wheel touched down. The pilot fought for steerage and the engines howled like banshees in reverse.
A woman stood up in the shuddering darkness and started screaming her lungs out.
A sourdough oil worker bawled, “Shaddup, lady! For Deadhorse, that was a damn good landing!”
This is just the *beginning* of the Oil Wars!
Throw the little fish back and focus … focus!
Posted by: tante aime | Nov 17 2005 4:07 utc | 20
Who borrowed from Whom?
Woodward kept his mouth shut ‘cuz he has 2 vol. more “inside” crap coming out – according to a story now up on Raw Story. He’s Rovie’s answer to the question How Can We Be as Corrupt as We Wanna Be w/out risking Another Watergate? Simple – convert bobby into the “Court Stenographer”. Instead of looking to Make a Bundle Outing them, he can Make A Bundle if he Covers Up for ’em. He could be auditioning for role as Official Bush Apologist err….Biographer. He needs to Be Fired Immediately. It would be bad enough if he were merely a journo, but as Editor this is complete conflict of interest. Actually, had anyone been awake, he should have been fired as soon as his book came out. You can’t run WaPo w/that kind of conflict of interest.
(And they neutralized the other potential adversary NYT by making sure one of their own got the inside goods to move her to Front Center Page.)
It’s way past time that he got this attention. As I noted when JM stuff was cresting, he was every bit as culpable as Court Historian, but guys were too full of hysterical sexual hostility to her to even see it. (Though both billmon & Pat did concur about the magnitude of the male sexual hostility to her that was driving things into a frenzy.)
Be that as it may, the larger issue is being overlooked. Has it occurred to anyone, that both these “papers of record” are being cleared of their collaborators, perhaps so it’s finally possible to return Constitutional Govt. to America? (Obviously, one cannot have a Paid Collaborator running the WaPo & get rid of Bu$hCo.)
But then no one who read “Silent Coup” believed the “cub reporter” cover story anyway.
Posted by: jj | Nov 17 2005 4:43 utc | 21
A senior administration official said that neither President Bush himself, nor his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., nor his counselor, Dan Bartlett, was Mr. Woodward’s source. So did spokesmen for former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, former C.I.A. Director George J. Tenet and his deputy John E. McLaughlin.
A lawyer for Karl Rove, the deputy White House chief of staff who has acknowledged conversations with reporters about the case and remains under investigation, said Mr. Rove was not Mr. Woodward’s source.
Vice President Cheney did not join the parade of denials. A spokeswoman said he would have no comment on an ongoing investigation. Several other officials could not be reached for comment.
Posted by: annie | Nov 17 2005 6:13 utc | 23
@jj
I hope you’re correct. When you study the story that NYT put together about the laptop, nukes, and Iran it’s difficult to see much change other than cosmetic.
When I first came across that story I just got mad. I don’t go to the NYT much because their Israel stance usually gets the steam coming out the ears; but I went there to check out a particularly NY story and found that beatup.
It’s really weird. I wanted to get the shit off my liver so I wrote a letter to the editor, something I would never normally do with NYT since they aint gonna publish so why give em the pleasure of having the last word by heaving my p.o.v. into the round filing cabinet?
Anyway since I sent the thing in sometime last weekend I’ve had no less than four emails from them. They are all from different parts of the behemoth and all acknowledge receipt of my words of wisdom.
One letter told me in a schoolmarmish tone that since I hadn’t told them not to publish the damn thing they may actually do so. Some sorta threat but not a threat. Anyway there are no illusions about whether the thing will ever appear in print since the letter pointed out that in a just world they would find their asses in the dock in a Nuremburg style trial for incitement to war.
That leaves me with the unhappy conclusion that NYT is attempting a major PR campaign to convince it’s readers that it’s honest.
This is kinda sad since we all know that if it were gonna be honest from here on in; they wouldn’t need to PR it, just be it.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 17 2005 6:16 utc | 24
Charlie, no, Pete, pretty sure it’s Pete Rose. Isn’t he the playa for the Ohio team that was betting on results at the same time he was waiting for the Pope to canonize him into the hall of fame? He was inside the Diebold voting machine when he touched the wrong lever and his blow got snookered all over the tv cams. Too many youngsters saw. Yeah, it was the Pete Rose show.
Posted by: christofay | Nov 17 2005 6:39 utc | 25
kudos for billmon having his photoshop picked up @ firedoglake
Reddhedd thinks that with all the extra stuff in the indictment that didn’t need to be there, Fitzgerald may have been telegraphing to someone that he had the dirt on them, and that’s what provoked the sudden attack of candor and/or memory retrieval. And the Digby corollary is that watching Fitzgerald come down on Libby for perjury with 30 years’ worth and a demand for hard time probably scared the living bejesus out of some of them who decided they just didn’t want to play spin the bottle with the Special Counsel just now.
Which could mean Cheney.
scroll for the photoshop
Posted by: annie | Nov 17 2005 6:48 utc | 26
i can’t provide a link to this because i copied it from the comment section @firedog. but i thought i would pass it along. from swopa
Any idea how to retrieve an earlier version of Kurtz’s article for tomorrow’s WaPo? I could swear I saw a version — a copy of which I alas did not save — updated around 9:30-9:40 p.m. EDT this evening that made explicit that Woodward’s source went to Fitzgerald after Woodward contacted his source in the context of his renewed aggressive reporting on the whole Plame affair. In other words, whether Woodward’s source had already testified and therefore was at risk of a perjury charge or not, the source wanted to get to Fitzgerald to tell him all about his revelation of Plame to Woodward only because he learned that Woodward was likely about to go public with it. However, when I checked back less than an hour later, Kurtz’s article (updated at 10:23 p.m. EDT or so) no longer contained the all-important sentence or two that made this point…
Posted by: annie | Nov 17 2005 7:01 utc | 27
The right wingers spin so fast sometimes the end of the sentence doesn’t agree with the beginning especially if it’s a compound sentence with clauses and stuff. I’m really lamenting my grammar deficiency. To be a media star, the sentence means whatever I want it to mean. I know from Rush Bimbo I’m supposed to just nod my head like a bobble headed dog. I am disgusted with this Pinocchioward spinning. Being close to the power during the patriotic days gave him a 3 yr viagra woody, it got so stiff he thought he’d never fall down (slight drawback with his woody, it’s more of a 3rd peg leg).
Now while I’m still on the topic of patriotic icon imagery, what’s the name of that former Rolling Stone woman photographer who did the viagra set at war pictures, Cheney, W, Rumpy? She also played a part in the making it safe for the 60s boomber generation to honor and respect the Right Wingies. I don’t want to be bothered to try looking it up on Amazon. She also did the picture of Arnold in profile bare chested in s&m riding pants and whip (very Reni) which now reminds me of Mussolini, Il Duce, in his on horse photo. Where were those photos published? Fall 2002 or so. We had won the war in that dustbowl Afghani. 2002, the high point. Woody took some viagra with Larry King and never came down. Those drugs.
Posted by: christofay | Nov 17 2005 8:45 utc | 29
Let me add a link to the same site as Uncle $cam,
but aimed at an interview with John Yoo contained there. The CBC interviewer is suitably aggressive, and Yoo is suitably Yoo-ish, right down to correctly pointing out that Kerry didn’t see fit to raise this issue in last year’s campaign.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 17 2005 9:36 utc | 31
Not to up you one, Hannah K. O’Luthon (many thanks)but, I just came across the Charlie Rose – 2005.11.15 – Ahmad Chalabi interview (TVRip.SoS).torrent if anyone is interested in seeing/documenting, history in the making. The imfamous, always interesting tante aime does a good synopsis in his comment above.
Here’s the hash file # [51fb5be657be65e8852c27515c785567e09ce35eb1526180a]for the torrent.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 17 2005 9:57 utc | 32
Christofay, she’s not a “woman photographer”, she’s the Greatest Pop Photographer there is. She was also the longtime lover of the late Susan Sontag, that “woman writer” in your parlance. Perhaps if you took the time to look up her name – shit, is some mere woman really worth the damn time – you might remember it next time.
Posted by: jj | Nov 17 2005 10:21 utc | 33
speaking of female photographers, Sally Mann was considered a possible pedophile for her photos of her nude children.
PBS thought she was worth a view, and so did the smithsonian…
Annie Leibovitz is considered one of those who made a difference in the world of photography…irony is little appreciated, I suppose…I thought those Vanity Fair pictures were masterful (mistressful?) in their ability to go beyond a surface.
but Diane Arbus is one of my favorites.
her photoTwins should have gotten a credit in Kubrick’s The Shining
And Margaret Bourke-White had an amazing eye and technique.
And, yes, Susan Sontag could wipe the floor with so many men who are all bluff and swagger and bullshit and self-promoting…she did more to bring international literature to American consciousness than anyone in her prime.
Why do you think A.L. isn’t a good photographer, christofay?
Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 17 2005 13:57 utc | 34
i went to see Leibovitz’s show at sam (seattle art musuem), one of my favorite photos was ginsberg and o’connor sitting aross from eachother at a table. very powerful image.
Posted by: annie | Nov 17 2005 16:09 utc | 35
Thanks, jj and fauxreal. My favorite A.Leibovitz image is Keith Haring. Elemental.
Posted by: beq | Nov 17 2005 16:48 utc | 36
MoA – what a pleasure : the crystalline clarity
of unfettered intelligence – sublime
Susan Sontag – delightful
tx to Debs for the tall poppy syndrome ref
hilarious local vernacular
& you probably will be listed as an enemy of the U.S.
& denied a visa, should you ever apply, as a a result
of your less than flattering letter to the NYT
brush up on Woodward re:
Silent Coup
the photogs mentioned – stunning work/artistry
& all this time thought tainte aime a she –
wonderful weave
@Debs
a little primer (acidic) on Woodward
( forgot you were halfway ’round the world)
here
& here
…
from the reader reviews of Silent Coup, one person said that Dean’s wife was a pro, but the authors did not actually say that. They said she was good friends with a woman who, with guy whose story was another horrible example of the raw exercise of power…anyway, that guy did set up hookers for pols.
The Coup authors say that Dean was part of the group that was trying to compromise dems by revealing them with hookers..only, at first (not at the Watergate) there were as many repubs as dems, so the operation was moved into a side office at dem hdqtrs, and the guy was basically pimping out of that room…’cuse me, providing escorts.
Dean saw Mo’s phone number in the guy’s book (which could lead to the idea that she was a working girl, but that wasn’t actually confirmed or not) b/c she was a friend of the madame. So, he misled to keep his lovey’s name in that book out of the investigation.
The guy who was pimping was declared mentally incompetent…I was reminded of him when I heard of the officer in the military in Iraq who was strapped onto a stretcher when he refused to retract his statements about torture going on…he was sent to Germany and kept in a psych ward for, what…six months? and the docs had no reason to keep him except that he was persona non-grata, and if they wanted to destroy his reputation if he did talk, what better way that to be able to point out that he was in a pysch ward for months and months…
The more you learn about recent American history, the more you think that the Borgias were rookies.
…and I still haven’t seen that CIA doc that shows G. Sr. was running those guys in Dallas.
not to say that I believe the official story. It would be more surprising to me that Kennedy was not a hit, along with MLK. And we live with the results of those actions every day.
Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 18 2005 4:19 utc | 40
@Fauxreal, that part of the story is a bit dubious, but the part about bobby is NOT. JMiller got nothing on him when it comes to lying, water carrying, being a player…Journalism merely provides a Cover for Him. Time to pull back the Curtain…
Posted by: jj | Nov 18 2005 7:39 utc | 41
for those that like their
mindwars hashed here’s an amusing
little ditty from James Bamford
The Man Who Sold the War
OT, Hey!
Fitzgiving is here?
Conrad the Marauder has been charged with 8 counts of fraud after Mr. Fitzgerald flipped his former Henchman David Radler.
_____
Back to the topic at hand…..given that Woodward was informed ‘almost a month’ before the Novak column, does this not mean that he must have been one of the first (and most trusted?) to be brought into the cut-out scheme almost immediately after the Wilson Op-Ed piece?
.
Woodward joins a decadent dance
Whatever impact the scandal surrounding the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity ultimately has on the Bush administration, it continues to spread through the Washington press corps like a toxic plume.
As it does, it discredits not only individual reporters and damages their news organizations but also an entire style of reporting that has come to dominate the way Americans are informed — or misinformed — concerning their government’s conduct.
– snip –
It’s a melancholy comment on the state of the American press that it takes a former director of Central Intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner, to identify Dick Cheney for what he has become — “vice president for torture” — and that he had to do it in a foreign forum, on Britain’s ITV news, as he did Thursday.
The other reason all this has more or less succeeded and gone all but unremarked upon is that the administration has adroitly availed itself of the cultural complicity that prevails in a fin de siècle Washington press corps living out the decadence of an increasingly discredited reporting style. As the Valerie Plame scandal and its spreading taint have made all too clear, the trade in confidentiality and access that has made stars of reporters like Bob Woodward and Judy Miller now is utterly bankrupt.
It still may call itself investigative journalism — and so it once was — but now it’s really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who’s calling the tune.
Posted by: Outraged | Nov 19 2005 3:37 utc | 44
Society of Co-opted Journalists Presents Inaugural Judy Miller Award to Bob Woodward
11/17/2005
EWM- (November 17, 2005) In recognition of “outstanding duplicity and journalistic sycophancy while promoting an agenda on behalf of the subject of his reportage,” the Society of Co-opted Journalists will present its inaugural Judy Miller Award to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.
The award is named for New York Times reporter Judy Miller whose pioneering work in co-opted journalism assisted the Bush Administration in whipping up a war. Miller was recently shamed into resigning her position, but her legacy lives on through the daily carnival of carnage in Iraq and this new award…
Posted by: Outraged | Nov 20 2005 0:52 utc | 45