"...casual and offhand..." leak Of course I had to get this from Fox. Woodward appears to be flacking for his Bushco handlers in what can only be assumed to be some Fourth Estate variant of the Helsinki syndrome.

Bob, the mode of a perhaps staged delivery cannot mask the intent of an administration wide whispering campaign. It seems that a number of high administration officials were making the same offhand remarks to quite a number of different journalists.

There is something that exists between people that share a secret. That feeling of being on the inside sometimes seems empowering. Very little else is common to the Miller and Woodward cases except this issue of why that sharing exists. And in their defense, it should be said that quite a bit of confusion exists in the Washington press corp about those secret relationships.

I've always felt that the driving curiosity of a journalist's ego driven search for truth was dealt with in simple, cliched ways that belied serious ethical consequences. I've said it before and will probably say it many times over because it strikes me as a philosophical certainty: The search for truth is never passive or neutral. Just make sure you carry it through to truth revealed.  ¶ 11/22/2005 07:52:00 AM