Ganging Up

Except that there was plenty of "blatant opposition" during the Monica years as well.

Salon has been getting some fairly vicious anti-Judy mail, as Andrew O'Hehir reports:

"'New York Times reporter Judith Miller is sent to jail for contempt of court, but not for writing months of front-page fiction about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction,' a reader in California recently wrote to Salon. 'Al Capone did time in prison for tax evasion, but not for murder. I guess you have to take what you can get.'

"That letter, which I quote in its entirety, pretty much sums up the response so far from Salon's readers (and much of the lefty blogosphere) to our two recent news stories about Miller. . . . At least on the leftward half of the political spectrum, there is a wide gulf between the way the media is telling the Miller story and the way the public understands it.

"Salon also received at least two letters suggesting, with apparent seriousness, that Miller deserves not just prison time but the death penalty for her journalistic sins. (Salon published one of those, which I think might have been a failure in judgment.) A more lenient correspondent suggested a life sentence, while many others seemed to share one reader's pithy but less specific sentiment: 'I hope she rots.'. . . .

"Miller is also spectacularly ill-suited for the role of poster child for the use of confidential sources or First Amendment freedoms in general because, as numerous commentators have noted, the source she's now protecting wasn't some selfless, embattled whistle-blower, but rather 'a high government operative determined to stab a whistle-blower in the back,' as a Salon reader from Washington put it."

O'Hehir finally offers this less-than-ringing defense of Miller: "The First Amendment covers all members of the press, without regard to truthfulness, integrity or their perceived similarity to sub-reptilian life forms."

Rove has his share of media connections--he recently was over here for a sitdown with Post editors and reporters--as this Los Angeles Times piece observes:

"Rove also maintains contacts at leading news organizations and often provides background guidance to top reporters and editors, as he did for Cooper. These contacts are part of Rove's less-discussed role of crafting Bush's image, enforcing the strict Bush code of discipline and jumping hard on perceived opponents of the president. 'If you are at a senior level in Washington these days, you inevitably must deal with the media,' said Terry Holt, a former spokesman for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, speaking of Rove. 'He has good relationships [with reporters], and he's good at it. He has great credibility with the people that he deals with.'"

But maybe less so now.

As for Bush, he mostly brushed off two questions with the McClellan tactic of noting there was an "ongoing investigation," as the New York Times reports:

"President Bush said Wednesday that he would withhold judgment on whether Karl Rove, his senior adviser and political strategist, had identified an undercover C.I.A. operative in a conversation with a reporter for Time magazine.