(no subject)
I was lazily clicking through the news, when I came across the following item in Dan Froomkin's White House Watch. This is from the National Press Club last night:
One topic that came up, not surprisingly, was bloggers. The liberal ThinkProgress blog has a video excerpt of that exchange.
"It's amazing, you get this wonderful imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out," Snow [Yes, Tony Fox-News-pundit-turned-White-House-Press-Secretary Snow] said.
Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe responded: "There seems to be this sort of - the witch hunt that's out there. A lot of the blogs are, are, are unduly devoted to media criticism which is itself kind of interesting given all the things you could comment on. . . .
"In my humble view, the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general," Wolffe said.
The bloggers "want us to play a role that isn't really our role. Our role is to ask questions and get information . . . It's not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender. Now obviously there is a contentious spirit there.. but it's not a political exercise, it's a journalistic exercise. And I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates more than journalistic ones."
To which Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald responds: "It is truly astonishing that the people who enabled the administration to spew one falsehood after the next -- and who aided and abetted the worst strategic disaster in our country's history by mindlessly passing those falsehoods along to their readers, completely failing to investigate any of it, but instead obediently validating it all with journalistic approval -- now want to sit around in the most self-satisfied way and pronounce that they are doing an absolutely 'fantastic job' and complain about the vulgar masses who disrupt their tranquility by criticizing them for being insufficiently vigilant."
Three cheers for Glenn Greenwald.
Oh, wait: One more thing. This is priceless. From the Libby trial:
Dana Milbank writes in The Washington Post: "For a brief moment yesterday, Scooter Libby was not a former White House aide on trial for perjury. He was an orphan in need of a loving home.
"He's been under my protection for the last month; now I'm entrusting him to you," defense lawyer Ted Wells told the puzzled jurors.
His voice breaking, the $700-an-hour lawyer pleaded: "Give him back! Give him back to me!"
[WTF?!]
Wells sobbed loudly and went back to his chair, where he sat staring at the floor and emitting the occasional sniffle.
Exactly what Wells was trying to achieve with this outburst -- if he intended it at all -- was a mystery. And that made it an appropriate coda for the defense's closing argument in the CIA leak case yesterday. Wells, who has successfully defended the likes of Robert Torricelli and Mike Espy, may yet win an acquittal from the jury, which will start deliberations today. But it won't be because of the cohesion of his closing arguments. Libby was alternately portrayed as a man who told the truth, a man who inadvertently misspoke, and the victim of conspiracies involving everybody from President Bush to Tim Russert. _Dana Milbank, The Washington Post