TWO FROM WORKING FOR CHANGE
Two from Geov Parrish

Yes, yes. I'm exhausted again, and it's only Tuesday. I've also got a nasty cold to top things off. Remind me to tell you about my new friend-in-illness, the neti pot, someday. It's good stuff. Anyway, check out these two columns for now.

Five unanswered questions raised by Libby indictment

Now, with Friday's five-count felony indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the investigation of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has parted the curtains on some of the mechanisms of that campaign of lies -- specifically, the lengths to which the Vice President's chief of staff was willing to go to in an attempt to smear an ex-ambassador, Joseph Wilson, who had meticulously disproven a key administration claim. Those lengths allegedly included lying twice to a grand jury, and twice more to FBI investigators, about whether he had leaked to the press that Valerie Wilson, the wife of the ex-ambassador, was a CIA operative.

There seems little room for doubt in Fitzgerald's indictment that Libby was, indeed, caught telling a whopper -- and a particularly clumsy one at that. It's a far more serious matter than the lie that got President Bill Clinton hauled up before an impeachment tribunal -- involving not just marital infidelity, but a key justification for putting the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers -- and millions of Iraqis -- at risk.

But in prosecuting the cover-up of the crime, rather than the original crime itself, Fitzgerald's indictment raises or leaves unanswered more questions than it settles.

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The problem isn't just Judith Miller

Now, Miller's bosses are charging that she never came clean with them about her meetings with Libby. And her abrasive personality -- the sort of a personality a woman isn't supposed to have -- has resentful colleagues coming out of the woodwork now that she's down.

But the real beef of her journalist brethren, two years after the fact, seems to be that, as she admits, Miller got the story seriously, completely wrong. Maureen Dowd, in a savage syndicated column this past weekend, sniffed that investigative journalism isn't stenography. But it's not investigative journalism that gets you lucrative gigs at a prestigious outfit like the New York Times.

The Times, the Washington Post, and a very small handful of other media outlets are the stenographers of choice for America's power elite. Because so many other wire services and media outlets base stories on what these papers publish, the result is that America's mainstream media is suffused with credulous accounts of public policy, accounts often planted anonymously and without either attribution or accountability for political purposes.

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