Woodward and Ombudsperson

The Washington Post's ombudsmanwrote an article in the Sunday Post giving Bob Woodward a pretty soft-spoken reprimand on keeping a source on Plamegate to himself. An obscenity-spewing organ of the left called Americablog excoriates the Post and the ombudsman for not hewing to the left's interpretation of this tempest in a teapot, namely that it is, in the words of a hypermanic scribbler at Vanity Fair named Wolf, one of the most important stories of the century.

But the funhouse mirror journalists of the left just don't get it; no law was broken on the face of it, and this is just another case of looking for something to indict, since the Democrats can't defeat the Republicans at the ballot box.

So Tom DeLay gets a [probably well-deserved] comeuppance with a flawed indictment by a Harris County functionary which keeps DeLay from guiding the House Republicans to legislative victories.

And the chief target of this squalid little frame-up concerning a CIA officer and her narcissistic hubby has been Karl Rove.

You see, the Dems are the party of lawyers and they discovered during the ghastly over-lawyered Clinton Administration where both Bill and his were JD's that what you can't win from honest elections can be manipulated by indictments, activist judges, and lawyers who treat national security issues as law and order problems [Jamie Gorelick made chasing down terrorists almost impossible during her tenure at the DOJ].

Of course, with Whitewater Clinton discovered that Special Prosecutors work both ways. Ken Starr is still a bee in Bill's bonnet, judging from recent remarks.

Woodward has a wide perspective down the years, and his 1979 book The Brethren, written with Scott Armstrong, remains the best study ever of a sitting Supreme Court. Woodward has a strong Midwestern commonsensical view of the shenanigans of the anarcho-nihilists on the left. He kept quiet because he believes, rightly, that the whole Plame fiasco is a sham and a political stunt designed to play the only game the substance-challenged Democrats can compete in, the use and abuse of process.