Big press is biting off its nose to spite Karl Rove. Plus: Frist in confirmation form. Also: The Naral-MoveOn Democrat Senate.
p>
SPITEFULLY RECKLESS
br>
Now that a number of reporters for national news outlets are going
out of their way to attack senior White House adviser
Karl
Rove
, one has to wonder what they could be thinking given
the number of news stories these same reporters broke from the same
kind of conversations
Time
magazine writer
Matthew
Cooper
purportedly had with Rove on that fateful day two
years ago. Never mind that much of former Ambassador
Joe
Wilson
's supposed Niger "intelligence" was largely
revealed to be baseless, or that a number of reporters who
socialized with him and his friends at the time knew exactly where
his wife was and what she did at the CIA.
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"What Rove appears to have done was something half of the
Clinton White House was doing almost every day to Republicans on
the Hill if we got the chance," says a Washington lobbyist who
worked at 1600 during Clinton's first term. "We pushed gossip about
Newt [Gingrich]; we badmouthed
Grover [Norquist]; we did what we
thought they were doing to us."
And of course, they pushed stories and story leads. "I just
don't see what -- beyond their screwing with Rove -- this
accomplishes. And I gotta believe that there are people on our side
pushing this thing, and if they are, it's not smart," say the
former Clinton staffer. "This kind of thing has a way of biting you
on the ass. That 60 Minutes II story on Bush's military
record should be on everyone's mind right now. I don't think the
media wants anyone looking into how they develop stories, and this
is where this Rove thing is going."