Don't Ask, Don't Tell
On the day that Deep Throat comes out of the closet, reminding us of the bravery of a duo of writers and several deep cover sources who helped uncover the democratically harmful lies of a President back in the early '70s, the Press of today seems completely neutered (the following via Salon's War Room:

Yesterday morning in the White House Rose Garden, George W. Bush held his first full press conference since the Sunday Times of London revealed that Tony Blair was told in July of 2002 that the Bush administration had decided to use military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support that decision. What did Bush say about the now infamous Downing Street memo at yesterday's news conference? Not a word. Nobody bothered to ask him about it. The White House press corps got the better part of an hour with the president. There were about 20 questions in there, and they covered all sorts of topics: the current situation in Iraq, the nomination of John Bolton, Bush's thoughts on replacing William Rehnquist and his views as to whether the Secret Service should have alerted him when it appeared that Washington was under attack last month. Reporters had time to ask Bush about the sentencing of the former head of Russia's oil company, about the decision to let Iran apply for WTO status and about his commitment to making his tax cuts permanent. They queried the president about his relations with Congress, about the way America is viewed in the world, about how often he disagrees with his wife. They were important questions -- well, most of them -- but would it have been so hard to ask just one about that Downing Street memo? Couldn't someone have asked whether Bush in fact had made up his mind to go to war at a time when he was telling the American public that he hadn't? Couldn't someone have stood up in the Rose Garden and said, "Mr. President, a top British official says that your administration 'fixed' the facts and the intelligence on Iraq. Care to comment on that, sir?"

Instead, we have a Press that simply reports what our leaders say, verbatim and without probative curiosity:

The insurgency in Iraq is "in the last throes," Vice President Dick Cheney says, and he predicts that the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office.

That's an interesting take on current events in Iraq, where a refreshed insurgency has been killing large numbers of US troops and even larger numbers of Iraqi citizens:

At least 77 U.S. troops were killed in May, according to a count of deaths announced by the military. That is the highest toll since 107 Americans were killed in January. It marked the second straight monthly increase since 36 U.S. troops died in March, among the lowest tolls of the war. [...] In the recent spike in violence, insurgents also have aggressively targeted Iraqi security forces and civilians. Boylan said more than 600 Iraqis were killed or wounded in May. [...] "The reality is we have discovered, despite all our propaganda, that we are facing a very tough, resilient and smart adversary," defense analyst Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute said.