Salon.com News | I invaded the White House press corps: "In the last few years, the press has lost all sense of its own mojo. Things bottomed out after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when any aggressive grilling of the administration branded reporters as unpatriotic, which potentially alienated their audiences. The high emotion surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror (or the new, improved Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, which the Beltway kids snarkily refer to as G-SAVE) have made them very useful hostage babies for the administration cowboys to shield themselves with during shootouts with the press. Somehow, aggressive questioning of the White House got spun as a heretical insult to slaughtered American innocents. It was so demoralizing that after a while the press succumbed en masse to what I call the Potomac dinge: passive cooperation in one's own degradation -- the deranged, unconscious complicity that is found in victims of ritual abuse.

'This is the most complacent and complicit media I've ever seen,' Helen Thomas, the most senior member of the White House press corps, told me in an interview at her office at Hearst.

The Rove affair, however, and the artless info-block by Scott McClellan that followed, was one twist too many in the press corps' shorts. The long-simmering scandal about the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, wife of Bush critic Joe Wilson, became a full-on plumbing emergency when it was revealed that the black stuff all over the faucet was the fingerprints of Karl Rove, President Bush's right-hand man, realpolitik guru and pet genius. Despite White House denials of any administrative vendetta, Washington smelled Rove's funk in the air. The stakes were raised by the president's assertion that anyone found to be involved in the Plame leak would be fired. When the humble folk of Press Town got word that Rove was, indeed, involved in the outing of Wilson's wife, they finally got morally indignant enough to go after McClellan and his boss lynch-mob style, with rolling pins and pitchforks.

As Helen Thomas observed, 'They're beginning to come out of the coma a little bit.'"

(Via Salon.)