Woodward on Larry King

Bob Woodward and Larry King just managed to spend an hour talking about the CIA leak case without revealing one single new piece of information that is of any use to anyone.

I learned that you can replace ‘Watergate’ for ‘9/11’ and ‘Deep Throat’ for ‘War on Terror’ and it still works just as well as an obfuscation strategy. Again and again, Woodward referred back to Mark Felt to justify his actions in this case, as though the two cases were identical.

Let me ask a question, Bobby. Did the prosecutor know your source was Mark Felt? Did the House investigators know? No? Then shut the fuck up.

Whether your source is Stephen Hadley, Richard Armtitage, or ‘Swinging’ Dick Cheney it is no longer a secret. You have been released from the promise of confidentiality. You have already spilled the beans to the one person who is in a position to do real damage to the leaker. Don’t tell me that the White House still doesn’t know who it is. The only people still in the dark are the American public.

When Larry asked you how Wilson’s wife came up you said it was at the end of long interview, implied it was part of idle chit-chat, and that there was no implication that the information was secret. Really? And yet, you still won’t reveal it?

Let me ask you this: you asked about Joe Wilson’s trip to Africa. How did you phrase the question? Did it strike you as odd that a question about Joe Wilson would elicit a response about his wife? Would you care to explain the context of that non sequitur of an answer?

If Larry King didn’t suck so much as an interviewer maybe we would have had some answers to those questions rather than your stumbling, bumbling, mumbling stalling tactics and endless references to your past heroism in exposing Government corruption rather than helping to cover it up and minimize it. No? Is that too much to ask?

Woodward, you are totally out of line. No one is going to trust you to keep a confidentiality now that you have reported your source to the prosecutor. Who cares that you kept it secret until the trial? Big deal. You’re a waterboy for this administration. Tell us who the rat is. Tell us why you are lying to us about this source.

You claim that you didn’t tell your editor because you were afraid of a subpoena? So, you didn’t trust your editor? And then you claim to have gone to the source and convinced them to confess which you knew would destroy your reputation, expose your contempt for your editor, and result in you being forced to testify? What baloney!

You should be fired.

Author: BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.