What about Bob?

In the Federal City you've been blown and shown pity
In secret, for pieces of change. - Bob Dylan

It keeps happening. No matter how often Bob Woodward telegraphs his true heart, American liberals and their fabulists who still believe there's something like a separation of powers, and in some storied dragon slayer called WoodwardBernstein, find themselves crushed again beneath the weight of collapsed expectations.

Woodward dropped his Plame bombshell with precision. ("A Boon To Libby Defense?" reads today's CBS headline.) Democrats who may ask "What was he thinking?" either haven't paid much attention to Woodward for the past, oh, 30 years, or confuse the establishment Yalie-ONI vet with Robert Redford's white knight. He was never on our side, he was just played as one in the movies. And it's unconscionable that anyone should be surprised by Woodward anymore.

Perpetuating the myth of Woodward and Bernstein was fine by all sides. Americans in their waking dream-state could console themselves by their example, that if things got really bad, then they would be told so. And the conspiratocracy's enabling chattering class could say, as they have recently about 9/11, that there are Pulitzers to be won by investigative journalists who can prove the attacks were permitted to happen. That no nominations have been forthcoming is embraced as tautological evidence for the bogus character of "conspiracy theory." (Pulitzer nominations, of course, are reserved for shills such as Gerald Posner, who received one for Case Closed, while weightier works like John Newman's Oswald and the CIA and Dick Russell's The Man Who Knew Too Much are fortunate to receive even limited distribution.)

The problem with dismantling Woodward's reputation - a process which he seems happy to oblige - is what comes next? Liberal bloggers are now championing Walter Pincus, the "CIA's house reporter" who worked for the agency in the Sixties and has been an asset ever since. Pincus was a major player in covering-up the CIA's crack-dealing, and in assassinating the professional character of reporter Gary Webb, after Webb's "Dark Alliance" exercise in truth-telling managed to find a rare toehold in the mainstream.

For the most part newspapers are money-sinks. They are not operated for profit so much as to manage opinion and dictate the parameters of respectable discourse. Perhaps we could say that Warren Buffett, former patron of Omaha's Larry King, actually is a Director of the Washington Post for the good of his health. Anyone who ascends as high as Woodward has within the machinery should be presumed to be part of the problem, just as anyone who falls as low as Bernstein fell following his 1977 Rolling Stone exposure of the CIA's subversion of the press in "Operation Mockingbird" must have done something right.

America has seen a lot of good journalists die prematurely in recent years. Typically they've worked independently, pursuing trails most editorial boards have decided to leave cold. But there's another kind of journalist sometimes spotted suspiciously close to crime scenes, especially those scenes which aren't officially called crimes.

Judith Miller for instance, who was the media contact for the doomed Dr David Kelly, and who was the recipient of his last email in which he bemoaned "dark actors playing games." JFK conspirator David Ferrie's last known visitor was Washington Post national security reporter George Lardner Jr. As Lisa Pease writes in The Assassinations, "Lardner claimed he left David Ferrie at 4 a.m. the day Garrison had decided to call Ferrie before the Grand Jury. There is no reason to suspect Lardner had a hand in Ferrie's death, but the coroner thought the body indictated an earlier death, and claimed 4 a.m. was the 'latest possible time' of his death." And investigator Edward J Epstein, who has long enjoyed a cozy accord with the CIA and argues for the cover story that Lee Harvey Oswald was a KGB agent, just happened to be the last person George De Mohrenschildt saw on Earth before apparently shooting himself in the mouth prior to an interview with Gaeton Fonzi of the Select House Committee on Assassinations.

And speaking of Webb, for what it's worth, in a recent interview, 9/11 whistleblower Indira Singh mentions she's been told by DEA sources that he was murdered. Singh also tells that her research into the terror economy is now encompassing child pornography and human trafficking. The three-part audio can be heard here, here and here.

Singh is a whistleblower with respect to Ptech and its implications for 9/11 complicity, and I think it needs to be said that when whistleblowers address broader issues, and move beyond the scope of their witness, their words assume a different aspect. She speaks instead as a researcher, one I believe to be on solid ground, but researchers must speak with a different authority than whistleblowers.

And here's something else that needs to be said: Indira Singh should not have to do this. We should not have to do this. But we have to. Because Bob Woodward, Walter Pincus and their peers aren't going to do it for us. There are no Pulitzer prizes awaiting the exposure of these crimes. There's just escaping with our lives.