This year, they’re all going as Howard Baker. After a statement delivered by the president of the Kurdistan regional government thanking the United States for its sacrifice in helping to free the people of Iraq, one reporter immediately got into character and shouted, “What did the Vice President know and when did he know it?”

This is your White House press corps. These are their priorities. The only news out of Iraq that they care about today is the 2,000th military death, and what really interests them is shouting out obnoxious questions that they know will go unanswered but that they hope will earn them a mention in Dan Froomkin’s column.

Such a moment is even more revealing of how the press is still searching for its glory days of Watergate. The press has consistently ignored legitimate problems with Joseph Wilson’s credibility — the problems that Libby and Rove were trying to identify for reporters — because they taint Wilson’s status as a truth-telling whistleblower. Without that status, he’s no longer the perfect foil to the nefarious White House with its plans to “punish” him by “outing” his wife.

The Kurdish president — the leader of a people Saddam gassed and massacred — thanked the U.S. military today for its sacrifice in helping to liberate his land. “So what?” said our self-proclaimed representatives in the press corps. “What did the Vice President know and when did he know it?”

Video here.