« The Big Hit
Gadflyer = MUST READ »

The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore

In “Strain Is Seen in Giuliani Ties With President”, NY Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller describes the fraying of trust between the former NY Mayor and the former Yale cheerleader.

When I first began reading the piece, I didn’t even look at the author. But all of the breathless gossip by “a Republican close to the administration…who asked not to be identified because of the political sensitivity of the situation” begged the question, “WHO CARES?”

Well, when I looked up at the author, and saw Bumiller’s name, it all began to make sense. In an earlier post in this blog, I pointed readers to a New York Press contest called ‘Wimblehack,” which was set up, March Madness style, to identify the country’s worst campaign journalist. Bumiller dominated the competition with her uncanny ability to feed to the reading public exactly the information that the Bush administration wanted it to hear:

This habit of taking at face value the unconfirmable assertions about the personal feelings of officials—assertions hand-delivered to the journalist by a paid mouthpiece whose very job is to deadpan preposterous pieces of mythmaking to the media—is nothing new to most political reporters. But almost no one consumes this stuff more eagerly than Bumiller.

Take her piece from March 2 of this year, “Gay issue leaves Bush ill at ease,” in which Bumiller gives off-the-record spokesmen a chance to allow Bush to split the difference on the gay-marriage issue:

When President George W. Bush announced his support last week for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, his body language in the Roosevelt Room did not seem to match his words. Bush may have forcefully defended the union of a man and a woman as “the most fundamental institution of civilization,” but even some White House officials said he appeared uncomfortable.

This kind of thing is standard in the business—it is how we are delivered such seemingly unknowable facts as the “remarkably close friendship” we are told exists between Bush and Vladimir Putin—but what’s striking about Bumiller is that this is apparently her conscious response to an administration whose excessive secrecy she has complained about in public.

All of which begs the question: why, exactly, do the Bushies want us to know about Guiliani’s loss of influence at the White House?

The answer, obviously, is so that they can blame Rudy, instead of their own incompetance, for the blow-up of the Kerik nomination. Rudy gamely plays along with this charade, falling on his sword:

I feel very bad,” Mr. Giuliani said in a telephone interview on Sunday afternoon, adding that he felt somewhat responsible for the nomination of Mr. Kerik, who withdrew his name on Friday because he had failed to pay taxes for a nanny who was in the country illegally.

“Even though there was never a conversation about it, I realize that one of the reasons they did it was because of my confidence in Bernie over the years,” he said. “And I feel like maybe I should have involved myself more in it.”

ok–so Rudy is to blame for the Kerik debacle because the White House trusted his background check instead of performing its own? Come on! When will the Bush administration EVER take responsibility for one of its own mistakes?

But after reading that NY Press Wimblehack article, you’ll understand how the administration is playing Bumiller and the Times here. It’s sad, especially for anyone who trusts the NYT to investigate the stories it reports.

And, of course, the big loser here is Guiliani. I can’t say I feel sorry for him, especially after watching him go on the November 3rd morning talk-show circuit to warn Kerry and the Democrats that it was okay to take a few hours to compose himself, but that he had to concede soon because it was bad for a “country at war” to be doubtful of the outcome of the election.

Yup, that’s right–Rudy whored himself out for this administration, and the Bushies didn’t even give him the courtesy of a reach-around.