PunkAssBlog.com

Remember how hard it was for Woodward and Bernstein to produce evidence that President Richard Nixon broke the law? Accomplishing that difficult task made those men national heroes, and they’ve been coasting on the resulting fame and wealth for (ahem, a few too many) decades.

Getting your hands on the smoking gun used to be the crux of great investigative reporting. These days, though, smoking guns are lying around everywhere, in plain sight. They’re often produced by the bad guys themselves, openly flaunted in the public square as a sign of manhood. Maybe that’s why our national media has almost no interest in covering them or their logical implications.

Tristero works up an awesomely righteous rage over the NYT casually underplaying the Pentagon’s newest model of smoking gun, the proof that Rumself and Wolfowitz knowingly manufactured false cause for war, as nothing more than a cooked-up link.

Says Tristero:

Even in the face of an official report from the Pentagon inspector general which all but says so, the New York Times still cannot screw up the courage to state plainly the only possible conclusion: The Bush administration knowingly, criminally lied to the American people in order to start an illegal war and invade a country that, no matter how odious its leader, was no threat to the United States.

By making the evidence so easy to find, and often by producing it themselves, the Bush administration has defanged the national investigative media. Now these lazy reporters and their editors can simply hang out on teh internetz, where everything will be plopped into their laps in due time.

Problem is, surfing the web all day at your job kinda makes you sleepy. After 6 straight hours of gorging yourself on YouTube and Adult FriendFinder, I’m sure it’s pretty tough to work up a froth over anything, even a criminally insane White House. Besides, the sooner you knock out a quickie piece on whatever blabbity-blah briefly graced the splash page of Google News, the sooner you can get back to this:

By now, Bush could probably walk into the Times with an actual smoking gun and start executing every employee in sight and get away with it. As the Times might say, the President would merely be aggressively interpreting his wartime authority.