Once again, poor Barth is confused. One day the Washington Post is editorializing that

The Wilson-Plame case, and Mr. Libby's conviction, tell us nothing about the war in Iraq

intentionally ignoring how much it tells us about the creation of phony justifications for that very war.

Now they tell us that the case of the Governor who is alleged to have tried to sell the Senate seat vacated by the President-elect, to whom he refers generally as a motherfucker who won't do anything for the Governor but express appreciation were he to appoint someone the President-elect favors, "raises questions" about the President-elect.

What sense is there to make of this?


These were the same people who told us that the same President-elect had to answer for truly nasty and incendiary comments made by the pastor at the church he attended, or face the end of his campaign for the presidency. Whether they were right or not, when the President-elect gave the speech they demanded, but spoke to Americans as if they were adults, the disappointment for all the lost opportunities to destroy a person by the comments of another was palpable.

So, then they got Bill Ayers to replace Rev Wright and tried to turn that into something to the point that a Vice Presidential candidate was able to point argue that the President-elect would "pal around with a domestic terrorist." Joe McCarthy must have been so proud when she said that, but, alas, the charge was so nonsensical that even the easily bamboozled would not fall for it.

So, now Blagojevich. The United States Attorney files a complaint which quotes extensively from tape recorded conversations showing that the transition office would not do what he wanted, but it is the President-elect who nonetheless has to answer questions about his role in something in which he was not involved. A person hit by a car while crossing the street should expect similar questions, I guess, about just where he or she was intending to go when they got hit.

After all the President-elect is from Illinois and Blagojevich is the Governor of Illinois. Say, didn't Senator Clinton, the Secretary of State-designate, grow up in Illinois? What does Blagojevich's apparent crimes say about the late Senators Paul Simon or Paul Douglas, or Everett Dirksen, Adlai Stevenson, Abraham Lincoln or even Saul Bellow, for crying out loud?

One of Richard Nixon's acolytes and chief apologists (a man who also has kind words for Joe McCarthy and who calls World War II "unnecessary") writes that

if this scandal touches any member of Obama's White House staff, who may have spoken with Blagojevich and listened to his solicitation of a bribe without reporting it, we are going to have a new special prosecutor in Washington, D.C.

Indeed, the U.S. Senate should probably make the confirmation of Eric Holder as attorney general, the Clintonite who midwifed the pardons of Marc Rich and the Puerto Rican terrorists, contingent on his naming an independent counsel in the Senategate scandal.

If every hint of corruption was reported to the FBI or local law enforcement, they would be overwhelmed and unable to focus on cases with evidence. People try not to hear things they don't want to hear and that is probably not a bad thing since comments like "what can you do for me?' rarely make for successful prosecutions. But more importantly, if outing a CIA agent to discredit her husband's revelation of an attempt to create a phony basis upon which to start a war is insignificant, how can the level of the transition office's outrage at any attempt to "sell" a Senate seat be worthy of this much attention?

And yet, the same editors and producers obsessed with this nonsense, are able to report that the UAW's refusal to unilaterally allow members of the Senate to re-write contracts its members have with auto companies was the reason a sufficient number of Republicans were able to kill legislation to allow GM and Chrysler to make it to January without massive layoffs and worse, freely ignore a now widely circulated memo urging Republicans to argue that allowing the auto industry a chance to survive into the new year actually represents the

democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election [and that] Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

(David Schuster had it on Countdown last night as did a few others, but mostly the evidence of the cynical basis for the filibuster has gone ignored)

This lifelong reader of newspapers is saddened by what has happened to them, even as his dreams of working for one of them never seem to die. But the reasons for the impending demise of so many of them go beyond the technological reasons, as discussed, in part, here and here.

Media Matters has a great column today about all of this and Whitewater and I imagine that Frank Rich will also have a few things to say tonight for the Sunday Times. It remains incredible that the President impeached in recent years was the one who lied about cheating on his wife, and not the one whose lies led to a war which enabled a "pay to play" scam that outdoes the fondest dreams of the most corrupt politician anyone could even imagine.