Mourning Wood

I've got two things to say about this new development in the Plamegate government leak story. As anyone who reads any blogs besides this one and The Superficial knows by now, it has been revealed that a senior Bush administration official leaked the name of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post several months before Scooter Libby leaked the name to Judith Miller or Matt Cooper.

(1) As a journalism student back in high school, I idolized Woodward and Bernstein's groundbreaking work investigating the Watergate scandal. It's probably the most famous achievement in journalism of our time, due in part to the excellent film All the President's Men, in which Woodward was portrayed by Robert Redford. At that time, of course, I had little appreciation for nuance. Woodward was a hero journalist, period.

In the intervening years, I've learned enough about the guy to know that he wasn't QUITE the selfless, iconic hero of so many worshipful young reporter's fantasies. He was and always has been an establishment kind of guy. We know now that his most famous secret source, Deep Throat, was really the deputy director of the FBI, a guy more interested in centralizing power in his agency than ending corruption or government secrecy.

But it's still disheartening to see a guy like Bob Woodward become a puppet for the most shamelessly corrupt administration in American history. This sort of trade - in which a journalist basically agrees to become a PR director for a political cause in exchange for exclusive access to the leaders of that cause - is complete and total horseshit, the example opposite of the job journalists are hired to perform.

This revelation means that Woodward has known information all along, through this entire 2-year plus process, of vital importance to the public, and has kept his mouth shut. He claims reporter-source confidentiality, which is the biggest load of bull I've ever heard. Confidentiality means that you don't reveal who told you about a story if that information would compromise your source. It doesn't mean a journalist should never have to testify in a trial, or that a journalist has a right to disclose or withhold whatever information they want from the public, or certainly that a journalist can run a story they know to be biased and misleading, hiding behind a confidential insider source. Woodward, at one time or another, has implied all of these things.

And it goes beyond simply hiding important facts from the public he had promised to inform. He actively has been going around trying to downplay the entire leak investigation of Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald. Without revealing to anyone that he had any personal connection to the story whatsoever, including his own editors at the Washington Post! What a scumbag, pretending to be an impartial observer in order to cover the asses of his criminal crony friends.

(2) Just because Woodward has admitted someone leaked to him before Libby leaked to anyone else doesn't mean Libby is off the hook. My God, has everyone lost their minds?

Here's how the propaganda has been sold...If someone (possibly National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley or the Big Man himself, Vice President Dark Helmet) told a reporter about Valerie Plame before Scooter Libby, than Libby's not the real leaker and should be cleared of all charges.

Excuse me? This is the best the White House can do? One of our resident fuck-ups had already sold out that undercover agent before the resident fuck-up you've indicted. Nyah nyah nyah.

Firstly, Libby's under indictment for lying about what he knew and when he knew it, not for leaking anything, so he's still guilty as hell. Secondly, Fitzgerald had clearly indicated at Libby's indictment that he was presenting the case as he presently understood it, and that all facts might not be available to him because everyone involved in still lying. The Republicans are seriously trying to convince us that, because so many other people are still lying, we shouldn't do anything bad to the liars we've already caught. Yeah, it's a really stupid argument.

And yet, according to reliable sites like Media Matters, the press is going for it. Sigh...At least Bush's poll numbers are still in the crapper.