Village Accountability

So, Maureen Dowd's plagiarism, Jack Shafer? Hey, she's handled it better than other plagiarists!

How about you, Howard Kurtz? Meh. She could have rewritten the sentence, so no biggie!

Torture, David Ignatius? We wouldn't have used it if it didn't work!

Nancy Pelosi didn't tell us about a classified briefing, and the CIA won't vouch for the accuracy of the documents showing the schedule of briefings, and the briefing notes "won't be crystal clear as to exactly what went on in the briefing", and the most anal retentive man in the history of Congress backs her up?

Burn her, the witch.

BREAKING: David Ignatius Is A Fool!

David Ignatius laments the fact that Iyad Allawi didn't get illegal support from the CIA that would have rigged the 2005 Iraqi Parliamentary election in his favor. Seriously. Also lost in this is the fact that Allawi's secular list has absolutely no base of support outside of so-called "centrist" political pundits in Washington. More here.

That Ignatius feels it makes sense to keep writing about this without any mention of the big lobbying campaign under way on Allawi's behalf at the moment is pretty stunning. Of course, when Nouri al-Maliki first came to power, Ignatius hailed this as brilliant progress. That's because Ignatius seemed, during Zalmay Khalilzad's time in Baghdad, to just write whichever columns Khalilzad wanted. During an earlier period, when Robert Blackwill was running the Iraq desk at the NSC, what we mostly heard from Ignatius was about the transcendent genius of Robert Blackwill.

Today Blackwill is one of Allawi's lobbyists.

It's amazing, the level to which our elite pundits are bought and sold.