Woodward undergoes Auto da Fe

The Inquisition continues and Bob Woodward’s remarks that he talked to Scooter Libby subsequent to the Judy Miller/Libby conversations and Libby said nothing to Woodward about Plame DO NOT FIT THE PRE-SCRIPTED SHOW-TRIAL ceremony and Woodward is now being revealed as an enemy of PURGE-TRIAL PROTOCOL and therefore subject to intense scrutiny by the MSM and his openly jealous peers at the WaPo.

Of course, Woodward is peerless at the Washington Post and, with his common-sense perspective, thought the entire Wilson/Plame imbroglio a stink-bomb concocted by the Elders of the MSM to cripple the Bush Administration. Their noisy attacks on Woodward are chiefly due to the exalted position Woodward holds in the media hierarchy, where he is not just another ink-stained slave chained to the oars of liberal attack galleys.

Woodward has committed the cardinal sin of regarding the inside-the-Beltway gotcha games as the trivial coups-de-pouce that they are---exercises in the triumph of process over substance that the MSM excel in drawing out indefinitely. Coldheartedtruth explains the black art of eliciting obstruction of justice and perjury that Woodward rightly regarded as malicious mischief.

Woodward’s impregnable high status in the authorial hierarchy has earned the contempt of liberal acolytes like David Broder, Howie Kurtz, and Tim Russert, who are motivated by jealousy of his own editorial freedom, while their bosses keep their noses close to that liberal stone that grinds exceeding small.

Nora Ephron, has a tongue-in-cheek damned-by-faint-praise piece in the HuffnPuffPost that has an interesting perspective---Woodward as the finally clueless [about Watergate, no less] Theodore H. White.

However, Nora misses the comparison---Watergate was a major series of crimes, Plamegate is a trumped-up tempest in a teapot. Indeed, Saddam may have been angling for yellowcake, but the documents Wilson inspected were phony. The British MI-6 contend that the jury is still out on the larger question: would Saddam have attempted an Osirak II had UN Sanctions been largely lifted as they were about to be? Yes, it may have taken a while, but the 1999 visit to Niger of Saddam’s Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican did not concern Papal policies toward Sub-Saharan Africa!

Trying to claim Plame was outed has already been discredited---she had been overt for more than five years and was not covered under the applying statute. Therefore, the entire Special Counsel role has been to prosecute suspected White House operatives for what?

Woodward correctly has the perspective that Ephron misses----the entire Plame affair is a molehill elaborately and with great exertion being turned into a mountain by the MSM and their Masters in the Legal Skullduggery Brigade----the Dems hoping to catch mistakes in the rubrics of ritualized self-examination a Special Prosecutor demands of witnesses.

These mistakes in memory or interpretation are morphed into crimes, and presto! Process has once again triumphed over substance and our progress toward a nanny-state proceeds apace.