The Pendragon's Hall

The press just won't go away. Now their masters in Congress, and Howard Dean at DNC, are saying, "Repeat after me: Bush is corrupt. Bush is corrupt." The latest charge is that the President "lowered the ethics bar" at the White House by hedging on whether or not he will fire Karl Rove for his supposed "leak" of a CIA operative's name. Lowering the ethics bar? How about, "I did not have sex with that woman?" Even beside that, it only makes sense the President waits to see what the final story is before firing one of his top advisors. It's a long held myth of the Left that Republican presidents can do anything to please them other than die. If Bush fires Rove, there'll be a slew of media stories about other cabinet members and aides and wondering why Bush doesn't fire them. Perhaps if Bush really is "lowering the bar" on ethics, it's because it was already so low from the Clinton years that just about anything gets him by. And the story isn't even out yet. The media is so determined they are going to replay the Watergate years where people actually listened to them, that they have to stand by this story no matter what proof comes their way. In "All the President's Men" one of the most dramatic scenes in the largely made-up movie comes when editor Ben Bradlee, despite all evidence to the contrary, declares: "We stand by our story!" Of course, in the media's dream world, it will come out all right. But this is real life. It is highly unlikely that Karl Rove, a man who knows politics and the media, would be so foolish as to leak the name of a CIA worker out of favor with the administration to, of all people, a TIME magazine reporter. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, this lady was not a covert agent working in the field: she wrote the report on WMD. She's a paper pusher at the CIA. Her life and work were not endangered, especially as supposedly she challenged the view of Iraq's WMD capabilities. Not exactly a sticking point for terrorists. Karl Rove shouldn't have leaked her name, however; that's quite right. He should have had the IRS audit her. The press wouldn't have minded that.

While we're on the subject of media lies, I see Bob Woodward's new book on "Deep Throat" is already out. He doesn't waste any time. Fortunately for him, he learned long ago that the way to write bestsellers is a minimum of fact. I'm anxious to read it, however: I want to see how he explains the fact that he picked up his newspaper in a lobby so "Deep Throat" would never have been able to know which one he'd pick up. Or how his apartment couldn't be seen from the street so "Deep Throat" could not have seen his flowerpot signal? Or why the second man in charge at the FBI could be skulking around a parking garage in the middle of the night? He'll probably do what he has done all along: conveniently forget his apartment number and leave out minor details like the newspapers. That's what he's done for years. The truth: there was no one "Deep Throat" and Woodward certainly wasn't meeting him secretly at night. This was a creation for the movie which actually preceeded the book in idea. And Robert Redford couldn't stand the idea of playing a paper-pusher. The "ethics bar" in the media is pretty low too.