re: #182 Killgore Trout

I’m sure it’s fairly common, there have been a handful of others coming forward today to say someone on the White House leaned on them about something or other. I’m sure if you dig through the archives there is no shortage of similar allegations from previous presidents. I think Woodward’s ego may also be a factor. He’s been a DC rockstar celebrity and journalistic hero for a very long time. Until recently he’s probably always been treated with kid gloves. The era of his brand of investigative journalism is over. The mainstream journalists are easily to roll over because they’re lazy and not very interested in anything other than collecting soundbites and the partisan media is a willing proxy for their respective parties. Woodward isn’t needed or respected anymore. I think he was a little hurt to be treated like everyone else.

Having read the full exchange of e-mails, I’m not sure if I would even say there’s leaning going on here. I mean, the sentence in question reads:

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

I mean, if someone I considered a friend and respected was about to make a claim that the facts didn’t support and logic said was bullshit, I’d say that they’d regret saying that in public too. And because I try to be a good friend, I’d tell them so, because better to hear it from me and think about it than to deal with the egg on their face in public.

Of course, your read may be different. All we have are words on a page, after all.