The Scoop on Woodward

"WOODWARD: But Michael's point is exactly right. There is deep mystery here. It only grows with time and people are speculating and there are -- there is so little that people really know.

"Now there are a couple of things that I think are true. First of all this began not as somebody launching a smear campaign that it actually -- when the story comes out I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter and that somebody learned that Joe Wilson's wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal.

"And, there's a lot of innocent actions in all of this but what has happened this prosecutor, I mean I used to call Mike Isikoff when he worked at the 'Washington Post' the junkyard dog. Well this is a junkyard dog prosecutor and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth."

Bloglust

Kevin Drum writes in his Washington Monthly blog: "I can't begin to make sense of this. The only thing that's clear is that Mr. X [Woodward's source] must have had some reason to suddenly come clean, and that reason must have had something to do with Fitzgerald's ongoing investigation. Perhaps Mr. X is a cooperating witness, or perhaps he's someone who started to feel some heat and decided to come forward because he got scared. Who knows?

"But what this does tell us is that the Plame investigation is alive and well and continuing to make progress. Fasten your seatbelts."

Howard Kurtz writes in his washingtonpost.com blog: "Hmmm . . . Who was this Shallow Throat, and why is this the first we're hearing about it?"

Blogger Josh Marshall writes: "[I]t now seems that Woodward -- who has long been publicly critical of the Fitzgerald investigation -- has been part of it from the beginning. Literally, the beginning. . . .

"Woodward seems to have some explaining to do, at least for the fact that he became an aggressive commentator on the leak story without ever disclosing his own role in it, not even to his editors."

Firedoglake blogger Jane Hamsher , who may have been the first to dub Woodward "Mr. Run Amok," writes: "Woodward isn't just reluctant to criticize the Administration -- he's become the water carrier of choice. . . .

"Woodward stopped being a 'journalist' in the true sense of the word long ago -- when he decided celebrity status and book sales meant more than the truth. He has gone from being -- well, whatever he was, to something much worse: an official peddler of lies told by powerful people to whitewash their criminal activities."

John Aravosis of Americablog writes: "It's also beginning to sound a lot like Bob Woodward is becoming our next Judith Miller. His repeated rants in defense of this administration, and against the special prosecutor, certainly take on a very interesting edge considering Mr. Woodward didn't bother disclosing that he was quite involved in this story, and was hardly the impartial observer his silence suggested he was. Not to mention, he knew all along that HE TOO had received the leak, suggesting that a clear pattern of multiple leaks was developing, yet he still went on TV and said that all of these repeated leaks were just a slip of the tongue?"

You can find the growing blog chorus here.