The astute-ness over at Dr. Green's log continues with his notation of
Michael Hiltzik's article in the Washington Monthly, in which the thesis is that the Rove/Plame flap reflects particularly badly on a D.C. press community that priviliges its own access -- and pursues access by granting administration officials confidentiality, willy-nilly. It's no wonder, Hiltzik says, that reporters get spun by the likes of Rove, if they are routinely allowing the president's No. 1 pol the means to direct the story without attribution and total "I-can't-reveal-my-source" cover.

A little (and illuminating) pronoun problem creeps up in the piece. I'm always hesitant to blame the "elitist" media for the manifest sins of the administration. One of the reader comments made to the online edition of Hiltzik's article takes issue with Hiltzik's point that reporters should expect someone like Karl Rove to manipulate them:

And should we be appalled and surprised that Rove used the occasion to mislead? To paraphrase George Orwell, you can’t blame Rove for taking such an opportunity to further his own interests, any more than you can blame a skunk for stinking.

Commentor "Russel" chides Hiltzik for his acceptance of Rove's perfidy as natural, and wants to re-focus on the charge that Rove "compromised the national security of the U.S." That, he says is "the ball" that we should all have our eye on -- issues of press habits are secondary.

I don't think I need to spend time here defending Hiltzik, but as I re-read, trying to grasp whether or not the commentor had a legit point (I do balk when the meta-analysis of political misbehavior threatens to push the original sin into the background), I realized that there's a revealing gap here.

In the passage above, Hiltzik is speaking to a (presumably media-centric) audience who already buy the argument that the administration are essentially Machiavellian political actors. By this I mean: cynically interested only in maximizing their own political gain. Hiltzik doesn't pause to worry over the "national security" question, since he believes (and believes his audience understands) that the niceties of this law are beside the point: a Rove will do whatever a Rove will do. He will escape the boundaries of the law whenever possible in pursuit of political gain.

Whether Hiltzik believes this of all administrations or merely this one is a good question, and one I'll admit I can't deduce from his language here. But I suspect he'd say the same about a canny left-wing political strategist. My point is that his "we" and "you" in the passage above are a perceived audience of press folks and others who think or feel "inside" about the struggles between the administration and the press.

The commentor is bothered by this -- the whole thing sounds to him like giving ground. Hold Rove to the law! he says. There's a note here of outrage less at Rove than at the (real or perceived) Washington culture of political cynicism that expects it all to be about power.

He reads the "you" and the "we" to refer to Americans on the whole, and is consequently shocked at the notion that we should be so jaded about what the White House will and won't do. And even though I think that his focus on national security is not the most important thing here (it's a legal point, yes. The larger issue is that the White House was very underhandedly smearing a knowledgeable critic of their go-to-war plan) , there's an implication in his response with which I sympathize.

Not to say I agree with it, exactly, because it's not quite an argument. Hiltzik is making the point that we shouldn't let the press off the hook here because their bad use of confidentiality leads to results like this one. Where I'm interested is in the gap between his cynicism about Rove's intent, and the broader public's idea about what we can or should expect from political leadership. This may be a case of our speaking so much about the metatext (how reporters get their stories) that the text (Rove smearing Wilson) threatens to disappear.

In Hiltzik's professional world, of course, you're expected to be able to talk about both without losing sight of either. For the rest of us -- especially in the age of information overload -- that's a tougher task. Are we the professionally cynical "we" who coolly view Rove as a player for power? Or a civic "we" who necessarily approach our for-better-or-for-worse elected government in the spirit of openness, of wanting to believe what they say until proven otherwise, of wanting to craft and refine (or dispense with) laws in pursuit of what we believe is an equitable balance of interests?

My suggestion is that we are pretty damn confused about this. Or mabe it's just me.