No. I don't mean that there is anything surprising about tonight's revelation that it was the Vice President from the late administration who directed the CIA to conduct some activities without any notice at all to Congress, hardly news to anyone who watched the imperial presidency of the prior eight years, but why, as this was all burbling out earlier in the week, the party's national spokesman, Morning Joe, was so determined to somehow twist this, with the assistance of a dimwitted Democratic Congresswoman from Florida named Eshoo, into an attack on Leon Panetta.
. I am not comparing this "Joe" with the tailgunner "Joe" from the early 1950s, but this kind of doubletalk is how McCarthy operated. I suspect this Joe is not fooling anyone and Mike Barnicle did a decent job of trying to make some sense out of what was going on,

I intended a very light post today, because of an excessive number of requirements on me this weekend related to earning a living (and, yes, baseball to be watched), but tonight's breathless dispatch from the Times provided a decent peg to at least one of the subjects worthy of a longer post when I have the time. I do not favor censorship, and all Joes are entitled to their opinions, but this one's ability to obfuscate on behalf of the truly evil among us needs to be shown for what it is, instead of the goofy banter it pretends to be.

And this comes at roughly the same time as the news that Dan Froomkin is going to be doing something at Huntington Post, but not the aggregator column that many of us have learned to depend on. (The archives remain and are also invaluable).

Froomkin to Huffington is both great news and sad news. Sad only in the sense that established print-based newspapers lose yet another truly independent voice. Though Froomkin's byline rarely, if ever, appeared in the printed Post, his identification with the Post meant something. To many people, a column in Huffington, TPM, Kos, Salon, or whatever, is some "internet thing" and the semi-word "blog" has come to mean, generically, something not as credible as that put out by the established print media. We know that to be an overly broad painting of great reporting in the same corner as factually dubious broadsides that dominate the net.

Maybe that has changed, or is changing and maybe Dan's presence at Huffington will help alter that image. There is bad journalism everywhere, most notably cable tv, which is right there with the noisemakers on the net, yet because it comes in on a television, seems to get more currency. Morning Joe's rant the other day, or any random ten minutes of the Republican talking points program can prove the point but the illness is everywhere.

For instance, while we can accept the Post's decision to drop Froomkin's column as not being ideologically driven, it cannot be seen as anything but further evidence of its clearly expressed policy to protect the beltway denizens and viewpoints rather than challenge them as in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate days. They briefly came out of that closet a week or so ago and forced to beat a hasty retreat when their plan to fully inform only beltway people who paid for it, became public.

On the weekend after Scooter Libby was convicted two years ago, the same issue about the same newspaper was addressed here. I love newspapers and cannot live without them, but the Post is losing me fast, just as its New York namesake lost me thirty plus years ago.

The good news is that Froomkin will be back in some way, and helping shape coverage in a more important way. I will miss his daily aggregation which has really helped me to limit the amount of hunting I have to do to find out what's going on, but a little Dan is better than none.