Leave it to the Beltway herd, with their special brand of arrogance, to insist that the Downing Street memo wasn't news.
To judge by their responses, the leading lights of the Washington press corps are more embarrassed than the White House is by the revelations in the Downing Street memo -- which quite suddenly is becoming as "famous" as NBC's Tim Russert suggested weeks ago, when most of his colleagues and everyone at his network were still ignoring the document.
Mooing in plaintive chorus, the Beltway herd insists that the July 23, 2002, memo wasn't news -- which would be true if the absence of news were defined only by their refusal to report it.
They tell us the memo wasn't news because everybody understood that George W. Bush had decided to wage war many months before the United States and its allies invaded Iraq. The memo wasn't news because anyone who didn't comprehend that reality back then has come to realize the unhappy facts during the three ensuing years. The memo wasn't news because Americans already knew that the Bush administration was "fixing the intelligence and facts around the policy," rather than making policy that reflected the intelligence and the facts about Iraq.
(snip)
But let's also look at what Kinsley himself wrote on July 12, 2002, after those war plans were leaked. On the Post's Op-Ed page, he suggested that despite all the logistical planning and bellicose rhetoric, "Bush may be bluffing ... Or he may be lying, and the leak may be part of an official strategy of threatening all-out war in the hope of avoiding it, by encouraging a coup or persuading Hussein to take early retirement or in some other way getting him gone without a massive invasion."
So Kinsley himself wasn't quite certain whether Bush had decided on war, yet now he says we all knew.
more…
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2005/06/17/dsm_press/index.html
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