Posted on 08/18/2009 6:00:55 PM PDT by Kaslin
A few years out of college I enrolled in the best journalism school in America. It featured no textbooks, no grades, no degrees, and this particular institution's alumni total fewer than a dozen fortunate individuals.
The campus was a dingy, claustrophobic room, whose inner walls were covered with old political bumper stickers, perched on the top floor of a high rise a half block from the White House.
This was the nerve center for Rowly Evans and Bob Novak, who died of brain cancer complications early Tuesday morning. Their must-read, reportorial syndicated column began just before the Kennedy presidency's violent end. When Novak wrote his final column last year, the Bush dynasty was quietly wrapping up.
The education was in watching them work. Sadly, the craft of reporting has accrued an indelibly bad reputation amongst ordinary Americans. Too many journalists believe their job is to help transform the world.
My beloved old boss did help change things, exposing the appeasement ideology of the Nixon/Ford foreign policy, for instance, and popularizing Reaganomics. But he did so by doing the things a Washington reporter is supposed to do.
It wouldn't quite be dawn as I would be finishing an all-nighter to make the deadline of the Evans-Novak Tax and Money Reports, and in he would roll. On top of devouring all the major newspapers and political magazines, his meticulous telephone logs told of the dozens of well-cultivated sources he would call every day.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Bob Novak will be remembered as a great one.
“Leak to me, baby! I don’t bite the hand that feeds me,” I once heard him gleefully say into the phone.
Don’t confuse integrity with self-serving mercenary ambition. Novak had the latter, in spades; not so much the former.
Novak didn’t care about the truth and didn’t care who paid the price in the Plame affair. Apparently his secret weapon rusted sometime before then. Or ran short of ammo.
You sir, are an ass.
And you, sir, are an old curmudgeon.
Not a very persuasive one, however, I’m afraid.
NT, I have never understood how Nowak could stand by and see Libby skewered when he knew Scooter was NOT the leaker. And stand by when Plame and Wilson made a mockery of honorable government service in their lies to Congress.
Integrity? Not giving up the source?
Seems to me you don’t let an innocent man take a rap for something you KNOW he didn’t do.
A lot of what happened in the ‘06 elections was a result of him keeping quiet. We now live with the outcome of that.
I was not a fan of Nowak—he was OK in my book as a political reporter, but I didn’t think him special. Even on Crossfire I didn’t see him as a reliable conservative.
I’m sure he was a nice person and all, but a lot of damage to Bush, Cheney, Libby, the GOP and the truth could have been avoided if he exposed Armitage for the lying SOS he was. In his mid 70s at the time, Nowak had nothing to lose.
But he choose otherwise.
>> NT, I have never understood how Nowak could stand by and see Libby skewered when he knew Scooter was NOT the leaker. And stand by when Plame and Wilson made a mockery of honorable government service in their lies to Congress.
That’s my view as well. These things fly in the face of that whole “legacy of truth and integrity” thing he’s got happening here.
I see Novak as having been a ruthless and ambitious but self-serving journalist — nothing more, really. Not that that’s altogether a bad thing. But the “conservative’s Conservative”? Not hardly. “Mr. Integrity”? Please.
Thanks, that needed saying.
Granted he did not out his source but he was very clear that it was NOT from the White House.
Mr. Libby is a supposed wise man that the Vice-President selected to work for him. HOW could Mr. Libby get himself in a situation, that he was found guilty for lying about what he did or said and to whom he did or did not say?
Mr. Novak reported what he was told by trouble makers at the State Department. And we have never found out who hired Joe Wilson to get his wife to send him to Africa to stir up this mess in the first place. There is the villain in all this.
No, you are the ass, pal. Integrity? Give me a friggen break.
Go back under the rock you came out from. Douchebag!
Please accept my apology. My previous post was not meant for you but for old curmudgeon.
No, you are the ass, pal. Integrity? Give me a friggen break.
Go back under the rock you came out from. Douchebag!
It's a fair question. Somehow I don't think that Novak sold Scooter down the river just to protect a source. Washington politics is incredibly tangled: there's probably a lot more to the situation than any of us ever knew, and Novak has carried it with him to the grave.
What brought that on?
Something you learned in charm school?
If it was in any way related to Novak, kindly explain.
My recollection may have some fuzzy edges, as it has been a while since I thought about it but my memory is that Scooter Libby was sent to prison for a supposed lie. I am not sure that it was a lie, but that was the charge.
It is my recollection that at that point the matter of who “revealed” that Plame was CIA was moot.
The real villains in this sorry story are Armitage and Powell for not speaking up. They could have done so without jeopardizing anyone.
Although I would not go so far as to call Bush a villain in this matter, I do think that this was far from Bush's finest hour. He could have and should have granted Libby a complete pardon. In fact, he should have pardoned him before the trial ever took place.
Libby got himself into his own hot water. Novak owed him nothing. For all we know, Novak may have been interested in finding out just how much character the other players would demonstrate.
He did take an oath. There are people who consider their word their bond. The world would be a better place if we had more of them.
In my view, Novak was the only person involved in the event that had any character.
The prosecutor was a rat for even questioning Libby when he already knew Plame was no covert operative. He set out to trap Libby for some political reason.
Armitage knew what was happening and said nothing.
Powell knew and said nothing.
Bush knew it was a political witch hunt and did nothing.
And every single Bush operative should have walked out the door the day Libby was convicted.
I would have.
Oh, come on, man. You know who the Man Behind the Curtain was.
Same goatfooted, lying SOS that stood behind the curtain with James Carville, as Carville passed his whispers to Mary Landrieu and her creatures during the "Katrina" scandal that not so coincidentally ripped the guts out of George W. Bush's second term and made him a hated pariah, preparing the ground for a 'Rat walkover to the White House in '08.
Actually the plan was for a JFKerry 'Rat' to move on up to the White House and to keep protected someones business ventures in that land of 'yellow' cake. But apparently that bit of info was never leaked.
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