The American Spectator

Washington Prowler

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. /p>

"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."

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