The "W" Word finally sees print in the Paper of Record I've had no access to a computer or a phone for the last three days, so of course it was during this time that traffic on Whiggate Update decided to jump from an average of 5-6 to an average of 200-300 visitors a day, but more importantly, it was over this weekend that the "W" word finally received its first mention in the pages of the The New York Times. And, of course, by "W" word I don't mean Dubya (which, of course, begins with a "D"), I mean White House Iraq Group and its increasingly more well-known acronym, WHIG. Frank Rich's Sunday Opinion piece, "It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby" jumped at me when I opened The Week in Review section of yesterday's paper, with the WHIG word not only prominent in the text, but in the sidebar. It was everything that their boring front page coverage of "who told Judy Miller what when" was not. Without getting bogged down in the details that sap the life and drama from these crimes, Frank Rich brought us back to the bigger story of how this is not the story of bob novak and judy miller and matt cooper, no matter how fascinating I'm sure they find themselves. This is the story of a war planned in secret and sold with false "facts" and talking points to the American public and the world through a gullible embedded press corpse. It's interesting that the two people on the Times staff who most clearly and most regularly see through the lies of our Leaders in Washington are not the embedded reporters and editors who are privileged to be on a first name basis with Scooter and Karl, but an economics professor, Paul Krugman, and a theater critic, Frank Rich (both of whom are muzzled from the vast majority of internauts by this idiotic new Times Select filter, which blocks their columns from those of us who refuse to spend a cent on internet content -- but this one is available at truthout.org).

Thank you Frank for uttering the magic words in the Times. I hope that thousands of lesser writers are shamed into following your lead.
  ¶ 10/17/2005 08:19:00 AM