Plame case: The failure of our "press corps"

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."  - Old Man Bush 04/26/99

Gene Lyons in his latest column (Propaganda machine encounters reality Dunklin Daily Democrat 07/27/05) states clearly what most Big Pundits won't, especially not this bluntly:

For years, the Republican media machine has dominated national politics. Through a combination of ideological certitude, message discipline and bullying, the right often succeeds in defining issues its way. Outfits like Fox News, the Washington Times, and Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts, serve as propaganda organs of the Republican National Committee.

Democrats have no equivalent apparatus. Indeed, one of the GOP's most useful fictions is "liberal bias," the idea that big city newspapers and TV networks pick on poor, beleaguered Republicans. But nobody touted Iraq's imaginary WMDs harder than The New York Times and Washington Post.

With Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, GOP agitprop [as Marxists called it] has grown increasingly brazen. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, puts it "we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. ... [T]here are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern."

He says that the e-mail he's been receiving on the Rove/Libby/Plame case reminds him of the sheep in George Orwell's Animal Farm who loyally absorbed each and every change in the party line:

Why are the sheep agitated? Basically for the same reasons White House operatives attacked Joe Wilson to begin with. They'd concocted a fake nuclear threat to scare Americans into supporting a war against Iraq that Bush's neoconservative supporters had long planned for other reasons, and they were afraid the public would figure it out.

Blow the smoke away, and it's a simple, therefore politically combustible story: the White House attacked Wilson's wife to punish him for telling the truth, revealing an American agent's identity to hide falsehoods that drove the nation to war. They did so in 2003 to get President Bush elected as a strong wartime leader; and they're doing it now to hide their own dirty tricks.

He uses this metaphor for the current state of America's Potemkin press corps and the loyal devotees of the Republican Party noise machine:

Sometimes even the most brazen agitprop can't stand against reality. Under communist rule, Moscow had two newspapers: The standard joke was that "There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and there is no Izvestia in Pravda." ("There is no truth in News, and no news in Truth.")

Americans aren't there yet, but the Wilson/Plame affair is pushing them in that direction.