The Washington Post’s Al Kamen insinuates that Andrea Mitchell let herself get manhandled by Sudanese thugs in an effort to promote her forthcoming book:

Perfect timing for NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. There she was yesterday in Khartoum, Sudan, where the thuggish security guards for the Big Thug, President Omar Hassan Bashir, spent the better part of an hour blocking aides to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and reporters accompanying her from entering the presidential palace.
The reporters got in, our colleague Glenn Kessler reports from the scene, but were warned not to ask the president any questions. Mitchell popped one anyway. The thugs grabbed her shoulder and tried to drag her away, infuriating Rice and winning Mitchell oodles of publicity. As it happens, her book — “Talking Back . . . to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels” — is being published soon.

Mitchell (her take on the incident is here) has certainly had her share of liberal media moments, but I think what she did in the Sudan was commendable and brave. She found herself in a repressive Islamic country (and we all know how they feel about women in general, not to mention women journalists) with no freedom of the press, in front of a dictator who’s sponsoring genocide, and she’d been told not to ask any questions. Yet any journalist’s obligation in that situation is to ask — if not to get an answer, then at least to raise awareness of the genocide in Darfur. I can only hope I would be as courageous in that circumstance. It’s a good thing she wasn’t dragged out in the street and shot.

What was Kamen thinking? What does it say about the press that real bravery like this is trivialized as a publicity stunt while those posers in the White House press corps are lauded for somehow mustering the courage to harass Scott McClellan every day with the dumbest questions imaginable? (Kamen lauds them too, or at least he slams anyone who asks a question at these briefings about anything besides Karl Rove.) Here’s a recent sample:

What is [President Bush’s] problem? Two years, and he can’t call Rove in and find out what the hell is going on? I mean, why is it so difficult to find out the facts? It costs thousands, millions of dollars, two years, it tied up how many lawyers? All he’s got to do is call him in.

Do I even need to explain the absurdity of such logic? These clowns are heroes. Yet Andrea Mitchell — who, faced with the dictator of a totalitarian Islamic regime, asked him why he continued to sponsor genocide — is just engaged in self-promotion. Glorious.

MORE BRAVERY: Meanwhile, Kamen’s paper takes a shot at John Robert’s kids. (via Michelle Malkin)

ALSO: A guest on NPR says we need to go to President Bush for answers about the genocide in Darfur, insinuating that the Sudanese regime doing the killing is just a White House puppet. As a Media Blog correspondent wrote of NPR earlier this week, “Please God, eliminate their taxpayer funding!” (via Andrew Sullivan)