PALAST ON THE 'ACCESS TO EVIL'

Mum's the word from this mumzer, a k a Robert Novak, right, who is fittingly dubbed Lord of the Journo-Flies for Chris Lehmann's bloated piece on the Plame investigation.

The real story is elsewhere: Kyle Gann, esteemed downtown composer and fellow AJ blogger, messages that he likes Greg Palast's take on Judy Miller, the New York Times reporter now sitting in jail to protect the identity of her confidential source. Gann's right. Palast, marksman that he is, hit the bull's-eye as usual.

Here's what he said this time:

The only thing more evil, small-minded and treasonous than the Bush Administration's jailing Judith Miller for a crime the Bush Administration committed, is Judith Miller covering up her Bush Administration "source." ...

[T]he weasel who whispered "Valerie Plame" in Miller's ear was no source. Whether it was Karl Rove or some other Rove-tron inside the Bush regime (and no one outside Bush's band would have had this information), this was an official using his official info to commit a crime for the sole purpose of punishing a real whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for questioning our President's mythological premise for war in Iraq.

Palast explains further:

Part of [Miller's] oddball defense is that The Times never ran the story about Wilson's wife. They get no points for that. The Times should have run the story with the headline: BUSH OPERATIVE COMMITS FELONY TO PUNISH WHISTLEBLOWER. The lead paragraph should have been, "Today, Mr. K--- R--- [or other slime ball as appropriate] attempted to plant sensitive intelligence information on The New York Times, a felony offense, in an attempt to harm former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who challenged the President's claim regarding Iraq's nuclear program."

As to the idea that Miller stands for the principle of freedom of the press by going to jail to protect her source, he reasons:

Every rule has an exception. My mama always told me to compliment the chef at dinner. But that doesn't apply when the chef pees in your soup. Likewise, there's an exception to the rule of source protection. When officialdom uses "you-can't-use-my-name" to cover a lie, the official is not a source, but a disinformation propagandist -- and Miller and The Times have been all too willing to play Izvestia to Bush's Kremlinesque prevarications. ...

And thus we have Miller sucking on the steaming sewage pipe of White House lies about Iraq and spitting it out in the pages of The Times as "investigative reporting," for which The Times has apologized. Likewise, we had the embarrassment of Bob Woodward's special access to the Oval Office after the September 11 attacks when Woodward reported the exclusive news that the President was a flawless commander in chief in the war on terror -- [See "Bush at War"] -- for which Woodward has yet to apologize.

While reporting from the Potemkin village of decision-making set up for him at the White House, Woodward missed the real story that, in the words of the Downing Street memo, our leaders were losing track of Osama while they spent their time "fixing the intelligence" on Iraq.

It's hard to argue with any of that.

Meantime, on the slight chance that the special prosecutor investigating the Plame case actually gets his man, Leon Freilich penned this verse:

MAD KING GEORGE

If Karl Rove's ass
Winds up in the cooler,
Will we need a brain
Transplant for our ruler?