(1) Relating to yesterday's post regarding Mike Allen's worshipful and one-sided profile of the departing Dan Bartlett, Newsweek's Richard "the-press-here-does-a-fantastic-job" Wolffe was on Countdown Friday night echoing, with an almost mournful tone, Allen's tribute to Bartlett.

Bartlett, said Wolffe, is "the son [Bush] never had"; was "trusted, valued, and appreciated"; and -- most of all -- was known for pushing the President to be more candid and forthcoming, especially regarding Iraq. Listening to Wolffe (and Allen), Bartlett is a Paragon of Truth and Valor, bravely standing up to George W. Bush and demanding candor when few others would or could.

Thankfully, immediately following Wolffe's tribute to the core Goodness of Dan Bartlett was James Moore, author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. Moore proceeded, in very blunt terms, to swat down the script of adoration adopted by Beltway journalists about Bartlett, explaining that one doesn't stay with George Bush for 13 years by telling him that he's wrong, but rather, by becoming a loyal member of his "coterie of sycophants." Moore also reported on just some of the very controversial conduct engaged in by Bartlett, including his role in having Bush's National Guard records "scrubbed," which people like Allen and Wolffe don't think is worth mentioning.

C&L has the video of both segments here, and it is worth watching to observe how fond Beltway journalists are of Bush operatives like Bartlett, and how flagrantly they ignore facts about Bartlett which conflict with the homage they pay to him.

As a side note, it is always so striking how these Beltway pundits -- who are held out as such sophisticated and insightful observers of the political scene -- are so driven by basic group think, almost always reading from the same script of conventional wisdom, spouting the same cliches on almost every topic. Bartlett was the truth teller, the one who bravely stood up to Bush and demanded greater candor. I doubt you will hear a single Beltway pundit deviate meaningfully from that script.

That highlights another point made often though particularly visible here. Beltway journalists these days develop friendship with, and obvious admiration for, White House press operatives like Bartlett. They depend on people like Bartlett for their stories, and are eager to be selected as the ones to go forth and convey the White House line (which, in special cases, gives them coveted "exclusives" and "scoops").

So when the Allens and Wolffes hear Dan Bartlett say something, the idea that he is lying would never occur to them. Sure, he might be (at worst) innocuously "spinning" like everyone in Washington does, but Dan Bartlett is an honorable, great guy. He doesn't lie, and hence they view White House statements as credible, rather than viewing them with the skepticism that is the hallmark of good journalism. Just listen to what Allen and Wolffe said about Bartlett. Is there an iota of adversarial sentiment in any of it?

(2) Last week, I criticized a featured article by Time's Joe Klein which purported to describe "good news" in the Anbar province. My criticism was that (a) Klein's article was based on anonymous government sources which did nothing but make pro-government statements, thereby rendering anonymity worthless and improper, and (b) Klein provided no information of any kind about these anonymous sources. For those reasons, Klein's use of anonymity violated multiple principles of good political journalism.

The Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary has written an article arguing that I "am wrong about Klein" because violence in Anbar really has declined and Sunni tribes really are combating Al-Qaeda, and therefore criticism of Klein's article was unwarranted. According to McLeary, my criticism of Klein was misguided because Klein got "all the facts of a story right, and hand[ed] in a piece that accurately captures what's happening in the world."

Kevin Drum passive-aggressively mounted the same defense of Klein in response to my criticism (Drum did so without acknowledging that he was responding to my post, let alone linking to it, opting instead for the "some argue" formulation that "some" people use as a way of purportedly responding to an argument without having their readers see the argument in question). According to Drum: Klein "doesn't really deserve any abuse for reporting" the Anbar improvements or the Sunni efforts against Al-Qaeda because "both of these things have been widely reported elsewhere."

The responses from McLeary and Drum to my criticism of Klein are complete non-sequiturs. I didn't contest in any way that violence in Anbar has ebbed. I didn't suggest that anything Klein reported about Anbar was inaccurate. Whether it was or was not had absolutely nothing to do with my criticism of Klein's journalism.

My argument was confined exclusively to the journalistic methods Klein used to report this item. The notion that a journalist's methods of reporting ought to be immune from criticism as long as the ultimate conclusion turns out to be accurate -- which quite clearly is the claim McLeary and Drum are advancing -- is really rather bizarre.

By this reasoning, if a reporter were to pay a source, or bribe a source, or even write an article by picking pieces of paper with random storylines out of a hat, the reporter's behavior wouldn't be improper and would be immune from criticism as long as the ultimate conclusion produced by such methods turned out to be factually accurate. McLeary seems to say this expressly:

Sure, Klein needlessly relied on an anonymous government source, as well as other unnamed sources who backed up what his original source told him, but it turns out that what these sources told him happens to be true.

That's a rather amazing statement. Is it really the view of the Columbia Journalism Review that a reporter can do anything as long as, in the end, what he says is accurate, and that nothing he does along the way can or should be criticized when that is the case? That is quite clearly what McLeary is arguing in an attempt to defend Joe Klein.

Granting anonymity to government sources in order to spout the government line is an improper and destructive journalistic practice. Whether the anonymous government source in a particular case ends up saying something accurate is irrelevant to that matter. In fact, one could even say that if a government source spouting a pro-government position is saying something that is true, then there really is no reason to shield the source with anonymity.

This isn't just some obscure bureaucratic violation or some debate over a small and petty matter of journalism rules. Though McLeary and Drum seem not to realize or believe it, the willingness of reporters to grant anonymity so casually -- and especially to grant it to government sources who are feeding the government position -- happens to be one of the most destructive practices in political journalism and, as much as anything else, was what caused the collapse of real journalism in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The Washington Post and The New York Times apparently realize its importance, since they have both promulgated guidelines for the use of anonymity barring exactly the behavior in which Klein engaged -- including rules against citing anonymous sources while providing virtually no identifying information about the source, failing to explain why the anonymity has been granted, and granting anonymity when all the source is doing is affirming government positions. And the guidelines for Good Journalism to which I linked at Nieman Watchdog make clear that the way in which Klein granted anonymity is both journalistically improper and quite harmful.

If McLeary and Drum want to disagree with the criticism of Klein, they can do so by defending Klein's use of anonymity in this case, or by arguing against the anonymity guidelines from the Times, the Post and/or Nieman. That, at least, would be a coherent response to the criticism I voiced. But they don't do that. Instead, they both claimed that Klein's ultimate point is correct and they seem to think that that somehow constitutes a justification for Klein's use of anonymous sources. It doesn't. The ultimate accuracy of Klein's reporting is irrelevant to the question of whether the journalistic methods he used are proper.

(3) Speaking of Joe Klein, Mitt Romney fan Hugh Hewitt -- in an interview with Klein -- was angry over some negative statements written by Klein about Romney. As a result, Hewitt accused Klein of "putting on a hit on another Republican candidate who's starting to separate from the pack." A new poll released today from The Washington Post/ABC News reported the following:

In the Republican race, Giuliani leads the field with 34 percent, followed by McCain at 20 percent, Thompson at 13 percent and Romney at 10 percent. No other Republican receives more than 2 percent. Those results showed no significant change since the last poll in April.

The poll's detailed data shows that Romney was at 9 percent in several earlier polls. But in Hewitt's world -- where desires are the same as beliefs, which in turn are the same as facts -- Romney is the candidate "who's starting to separate himself from the pack."

Hewitt also routinely accuses people of "anti-Mormon bigotry" for believing that Romney's Mormonism is a factor to be considered. According to the same poll today:

But Romney's religious affiliation continues to present an obstacle to his candidacy. Thirty percent of Republicans said they are less likely to support a candidate for president who is Mormon -- a number unchanged from February.

Even worse, of those Republicans who said they would be "less likely" to vote for a Mormon, a robust 49% said that there is "no chance" they would ever vote for a Mormon. It looks as though, at least according to Hewitt's standards, substantial numbers in his beloved party are religious bigots.

(4) Brad at Sadly, No highlights a new Newsweek column from Jonathan Alter in which Alter overtly states that our occupation of Iraq is "imperialistic" in its goals and that "the 'I' word is not a left-wing epithet but a straightforward description of policy aims -- yet another difference from those two older wars in Asia." Brad says: "The idea that the Iraq war was an imperial action was completely bloody obvious to most sane people, but I understand it takes a while for mainstream press folk to catch on."

Describing America as an empire or pursuing imperial domination has been, for quite some time, more or less taboo, or at least a point that one could make only by almost immediately relegating oneself to the fringes. But I think that's changing.

A major topic of my forthcoming book, which will be released this month (June 26), is that the major questions which the country faces are all but ignored for a variety of reasons. One of those central questions is America's role in the world -- whether we want to (and are able to) continue on what is plainly an imperial path, where we seek to exert our will on the world through the use of superior military force. The contrast between (a) the political elite's belief that we should stay in Iraq (combined with the clear intent to stay permanently) and (b) the vast majority of Americans' desire to leave presents, I think, a unique opportunity for calling those assumptions into question.

(5) This afternoon, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern, I will be on the Sam Seder Show with Ron Daniels, the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Christy Hardin Smith of FDL. That show can be heard here.

This Wednesday, at 11:00 p.m. Eastern, I will be in studio for an hour or so on the Alan Colmes Show on radio. Away from the suffocating and hopelessly one-sided H&C format, Alan is actually an excellent and informed interviewer, so it should be a good discussion.