I’m not a big fan of Woodward’s. In fact you could say I can’t stand him — as an icon at least (As a person I’m willing to give him a smidgen of a benefit of the doubt). And I think he screwed up on the Plame affair. But if you took this breathless column by James Carroll seriously you’d think Woodward was a rightwing hack. It’s not at all clear to me that Woodward was doing anything to help the administration by staying quiet all that time. If he’d come forward and took Rove and Libby out of the equation earlier, it would have been a boon to the White House. But Carroll is definitely in some other quarter of the space-time continuum where different realities are in play.

Update: Lots of email along these lines:

Jonah,
You should have put a warning on the link to James Carroll’s Boston Globe column; I almost lost my breakfast reading it. I’m not sure I’ve read such self-righteous drivel in quite some time.