Now that we know WaPo reporter Bob Woodward craps his pants when someone tells him “as a friend” that he’ll regret making a fool of himself by publicly staking out an untenable interpretation of political strategy, it would be irresponsible not to speculate on what other scary things cause his bowels to freeze with terror.
The thing that gets me is that, even when Woodward was playing the Fearless Muckraker Who Cannot Be Intimidated on CNN and other outlets, he had to know he had self-refuted the Mafia-toned interpretation he lent to Sperling’s email.
As the presumed author of the email response to Sperling’s “threat,” Woodward knew he had put his actual, wholly benign interpretation of the exchange in writing. He knew the man he accused on TV of issuing threats like a Chicago mobster had it within his power to release the whole email exchange and vaporize whatever point Woodward was trying to make — and make Woodward look like a squealing candy-ass into the bargain.
Excepting the Not-So-Breitbarts, even the wingnuts who originally seized on Woodward’s accusation as validation of their Gangsta Obama meme realized they’d been had when the entire exchange was released. That facts were able to penetrate their fact-repellent bubble indicates the scale of Woodward’s cock-up.
I’m not sure what Woodward was thinking. It’s clear he has an enormous ego and operates within a media and political sphere legendary for cathedral-sized self-regard, but even taking that into account, Woodward’s TV tour was remarkably dumb and self-destructive.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
liberal
OT: Sometimes Democrats are the problem, too.
Chyron HR
Jesus Christ, if you have to post pictures like that, at least put them behind a “more” link.
the Conster
Going on Hannity was the FAIL. If he’d just stuck to CNN and that Joe show he’d have a scrap of dignity left, but Hannity is where VSP reputations go to die.
Joy
OMG, the first thing I’ve read on the internet this morning and you put these frightening pictures up. I may never be the same.
Robin G.
I don’t know, that dandelion’s kinda freaking me out.
danielx
Call it the Woodward version of the Romney Bubble, or the Bush Bubble, or the Faux News Bubble, or the Republican Party bubble/echo chamber. One of the symptoms being his inability to realize that his public statements make him sound like a colossal douche…
Also, too – this is the third morning in a row that I have gotten up and it’s been snowing outside. I need to be in the Keys drinking boat drinks.
Baud
One of those babies is black. Just saying.
Roger Moore
Bob Woodward looks at those pictures and thinks “allergies, cholesterol, disease carriers, more allergies, biting risk”. I recommend he be sure to wear Depends, since it looks as if he’s going to shit his pants over the tiniest little thing.
Betty Cracker
@Chyron HR: Since you asked so politely, I’ve immediately obeyed.
Linda Featheringill
Nice bit of snark, Betty. And btw, I enjoyed the pictures.
Tone in DC
@Robin G.:
It’s self destructing! It’s breaking up! It’s breaking up!
The $6 million flower…
dmsilev
I dunno, that kitten on the left looks pretty vicious to me.
Baud
@Tone in DC:
We can rebuild it…
Oh wait, the sequester. No, we can’t.
c u n d gulag
Jayzoos H. Keerist, frowning down from Heaven on his Christian followers being persecuted by Romans putting them in the gerbil’s den, I can see why Booby Woodenword sought shelter in the open sunshine of the MSM!
And that brilliant journalist – Unibrow!
Why, that e-mail to Bobby is exactly what an appartchik of Stalin would send, right before shipping the overnight KGB shift to knock down his door at 3am, and haul him off to a GULag, or one of Hitler’s banal bureaucrats would send, before the Gestapo came to pull him into a small windowless cell to be brutally tortured, before being sent off to starve in some Concentration Camp.
The horror.
The horror.
The horror…
Waynski
I wonder if his ego hasn’t gotten so inflated that he sees access these days as having access to him and thought Sperling wouldn’t publicly embarrass the great Bob Woodward for fear of being denied his awesomeness.
Suffern ACE
@liberal: oh good lord. It’s not binding. It isn’t a declaration of war. It isn’t an aumf. Except gee whiz golly, we need to pass this.
JCT
Woodward is giving the term “whiny ass titty baby” a whole new meaning. What a sorry spectacle. Being a wingnut surely is a sort of disease.
Suffern ACE
@Baud: yes we can. It’ll be the 5.25 million dollar flower. Probably missing the bionic eye, but seeing how it didn’t have an eye before, no one will notice.
LGRooney
He thought of himself as beyond that because with one swift stroke of the Bob Woodward pen he could bring down the whole O presidency.
“Shake in fear you mortals! I am Woodward and I will have respect! Fear my ability to write a catty inside account of all your failures by the failures embittered by their release from your employ!”
JGabriel
Betty Cracker @ Top:
Good.
.
Schlemizel
its as common feature of many of the internet freak outs, both left & right, but this whole thing is not registering with my non-politically active friends & co-workers. Its a zero with them, have not heard the original, are not aware of the follow up.
Thats both good and bad. Its good that the story didn’t get traction. Its bad that we spent so much time fretting & fussing about it.
Linda Featheringill
I found the Hannity-Woodward interview and watched it. Boy, what a waste of time.
Woodward’s synapses are probably not synapping as fast as they used to.
And Hannity comes across as not very bright. Does he always seem that way?
Jennifer
One wonders how many pairs of trousers he ruined back in the Watergate days, when Depends had yet to be invented, when it’s possible someone might have tried to harm or kill him for what he was digging into.
I think the most appropriate response is “Calm down, Mary.”
The Ancient Randonneur
So poor Bob didn’t get his ring kissed with sufficient deference and now he’s on the Butthurt Tour. Oh my, that Chicago-style Obamafu is pretty darn potent. I just hope they don’t send Biden over to give him a wedgie. We could have a real First Amendment crisis on our hands.
BGK
Dunno, but what I could tolerate peripheral-vision-wise of Fox News on the other teevee machines at the gym this morning shows they’re still running hard with this story. Both Douchys had stories about how Woodhead wasn’t the only one intimidated, and how those receiving Kenyan beat-downs were crawling out of the woodwork.
I nearly gave up when I saw “Puttyhead” Lauer (glasses on, as he was being all serious and demonstrating his intellectual thinking skillz) interviewing Woodward on “Today” at length. Misfortunately, the closed captioning wasn’t working, and I had no desire to subject myself to Woodward-whinging, so I could only imagine what was said. I could’ve sworn I saw Woodward’s lower lip tremble a few times.
I have this queasy feeling the story’s not going away. Teevee loves to report on itself.
Nied
I’ll just leave this right here.
Betty Cracker
@Schlemizel: I noticed that too, and I’ve often wondered if the reactions of political junkies has any effect on what stories actually puncture the bubble of indifference for the general public or not. It seems so random, what gains traction and what doesn’t. Most people I know would guess that “Benghazi” is a type of Middle Eastern pastry despite the best efforts of John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
JPL
Woodward is only defending the young reporters who might receive such an email and quiver in their boots. Of course, if such a reporter exists, they need to quit their job now.
BTW..Woodward is going to be on Face The Nation on Sunday so I guess he won.
BGK
@Linda Featheringill:
I’ll engage in some low-rent ethnic profiling and say that, among those of Irish-American ancestry (which comprises half my family), there appears to be an inverse relationship between smarts and head size. Hannity, O’Reilly, and Tweety all would fit in well on Easter Island, and the quality of their verbal exhaust speaks for itself.
Betty Cracker
@Linda Featheringill:
Yes. Hannity manages to make Bill O’Reilly seem like a towering intellect in comparison. I’m not sure Hannity has opposable thumbs.
the lost puppy
“Raindrops and snowdrops and whiskers on kittens!”
Ash Can
I just don’t get this at all. He’d already made himself a pariah on the left, and now, by going after the Obama Admin so ineptly, he’s made himself a pariah on at least much of the right. Why exactly did he do this? Is he just so desperate to ingratiate himself with the right that he’s grasping at straws to do it? Or is he grasping at those straws just because he’s so desperate to put dents in the Obama Admin? Is he simply, as was suggested here somewhere, reacting to societal changes? Is he simply suffering from White Male Persecution Syndrome (WMPS)? (And yes, I suppose that would be pronounced “wimps.”)
shortstop
Thanks for the NSFW photo alert, BETTY.
shortstop
@Waynski: I think you could be right. Also, I was forced to conclude long ago that Bob Woodward does not have it going on upstairs. He is just not very swift.
pk
I believe his IQ is 59.
Ash Can
@Jennifer: The same thing has occurred to me. Why is it that someone who was able to handle that kind of pressure is now so delicate that he runs bawling to his mother when someone looks at him funny? Maybe his high-pressure past did something to him.
shortstop
Bwa! I just wandered over to old Bob’s Facebook page to see what’s going on. His profile photo is, get this: a photo of him in the Post newsroom back in the 1970s glory days. Doesn’t that say it all? The pathos!
The Ancient Randonneur
Video of David Axelrod confronting Bob Woodward about being “threatened”? This really is getting richer by the moment.
General Stuck
@Ash Can:
It’s always tricky trying to glean the motives of others, especially in politics. But I think this short statement by Woodward and Politico in their article, might give a clue.politico.com/story/2013/02/woodward-at-war-88212_Page2.html
“Woodward thinks”. The guy has been so idolized by the Village and news people in general, for so long, it may have finally gone to his head that he actually has political power to expect things to be done a certain way that he gets to decide who is to blame, or not.
The freakout, seems to me, is Woodward’s in that his tender sensibilities have been bruised by a WH defending itself with his reporting. You didn’t see Gene Sperling, or anyone else other than the press secretary in daily press briefings blathering publicly about customary and usually confidential conversations before an article is published. And it is Carney’s job to answer questions on why Woodward is so butthurt and whinging every 10 minutes on Fox News or CNN.
I think I just shit myself
tumblr.com/blog/terrifyingtobobwoodward
Mark S.
@Betty Cracker:
I highly doubt this is going to gain any traction with the general public. You need to be in your 50’s to have been around during Watergate, and nobody’s actually read a Bob Woodward book in the last 20 years. Actually, that probably explains why ol’ Bob was trying to keep this story going any way he could.
nemesis
Woodie is just the outrage du jour. The story, as with essentially all dialy outrage stories a) will be forgotten by next week b) fail to penetrate the disinterest and malaise of the general public. For real, who wants to read about these inane, made up from whole cloth stories day in and day out?
The sad story had legs beyond one day because the media, when it feels one of its own has been wronged, even when the evidence points away from being wronged, will extend the story because its easy to report on and easy to mischaracterize.
News outlets like CNN simply post stories to their web pages, count the clicks, and run the most clicked stories on the tv machine. Pretty easy to freep stories on web sites so….
There is an entire cottage industry subsisting off of outrage du jour. Collectively, it makes us dumber.
In order to rise above the din of daily quackery eminating from tv, print and the twattertubz, you have come strong. Go big or be ignored. Woodie is waving his hankie screaming “Look at me. Remember me?’ to the pundit loving class of pundits.
arguingwithsignposts
Shouldn’t this post be password protected or something. Think of the
villagerschildren.Cassidy
I know it’s been answered, but can’t be said enough.
Yes. hannity has two modes: 1) what a dumb man thinks a smart man sounds like, and 2) what a coward thinks a tough guy sounds like.
Maude
@General Stuck:
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Suffern ACE
Says the guy who’s now gone on five news shows in two days to talk about it. And no bobby, the debate is not about who to blame for the sequester.
LGRooney
@the lost puppy: “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.” Jesus, get your kitsch straight.
Ben Cisco
@Nied: Win.
@Linda Featheringill:
Yes, and there’s a reason for that.
Cacti
Bob-o’s meltdown is starting to remind me of Fredo from Godfather II.
“I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says…like dumb. I’m smart and I want respect!”
Citizen_X
@Ash Can:
Hmm. Watch out. WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) are going to…weakly interact with you, I guess.
Petorado
Everybody knows that when Sperling said “as a friend” he really meant “say hello to my little friend.” Sperling is clearly Tony Montana and that email was straight out of Scarface.
schrodinger's cat
Itteh bitteh kitteh committeh thinks Bob Woodward is too whiny.
@Betty Cracker: Benghazi, sounds like the name of a Star Trek villain to me.
shortstop
@Suffern ACE: This is a good sign: there’s a tiny bit of dawning recognition that he’s making an ass of himself. Let’s crank this up to full-throttle self-awareness of his total humiliation, and our job is done.
ETA: Stil laughing at you telling Doug that he was going to regret staking out a position above this one.
Anya
To be fair, i find babies frightening.
bemused
Attention seeking Woodward tripped over his own ego. Now he is trying to salvage his “reputation” from his self-inflicted injury. I doubt he is losing sleep over his fiasco. It’s a safe bet that he will always be welcome at the Village table.
shortstop
@Anya: Some people don’t?
quannlace
Hey, everyone knows there’s something creepy about dandelion heads.
Spores! Spores!
xian
Woodward is a nearly 70 year old white male Republican. Of course he is afraid.
Cacti
@Citizen_X:
Here’s the missing “I” from the former: White Impotent Male Persecution Syndrome, or WIMPS.
Bob-o has a bad case of the WIMPS.
Omnes Omnibus
@arguingwithsignposts: The children can handle it. The Villagers? I don’t know.
geg6
@Linda Featheringill:
So I take it that this is the first time you’ve ever really seen or heard the Manatee? Not very bright is a massive understatement.
1bb3
Now are the poor Foxes! Things have not been going well since they pulled back the curtain on election night to humor (hector, humiliate?) HamRove. All Meagan Kelly’s long walk (Night of the Long Legs?) proved was that they know full well the difference between fact-based reality and their programming. And that they will continue to keep it locked away in the back, far away from the light of day and all recording devices. They’ve always been gnat level annoying, but now it’s just sad, sad, sad. Out of bullets, empty gun has been thrown, even the mythical finger pistols are devoid of ammo.
And all this because of a Metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln.
Villago Delenda Est
@General Stuck:
Dude, who was cast as Booby? Robert Redford! Of course he’s idolized! Who was cast as Bernstein? Dustin Hoffman! Need I say more?
Well, yes. I trace the downfall of American Journalism to that film. Not that it was a bad film or anything, but all the sudden all these “journalists” turned into people who were not looking for news, but looking for screenplay fodder.
geg6
@JPL:
And would that be with Ming Dynasty economics reporter, Bob Schieffer?
Redshirt
I’m loving this story for the usual reasons, but prime among them is it’s another chip to the foundations of our glorious MSM. A further corrosion of their prestige and influence.
And Obama’s team is doing this intentionally. Which is awesome.
Villago Delenda Est
@Anya:
Some of them grow up (so to speak) to be teabaggers and libertarians. Of course they’re frightening.
schrodinger's cat
You want cute, you can’t handle cute.
Kitteh massaging a Pug.
Forum Transmitted Disease
I think I can say with a lot of assurance that not many people under the age of 45 know who he is.
This is the biggest nothingburger ever. Sequester, anyone? Republicans spike the economy (Dow down triple digits already) and so far not one front page post today about it?
maya
Have some pity. Woody has been embedded in the Washington, D.C. war zone far too long and is obviously suffering from PTSD – Pundit Toppling Significance Disorder.
The Pale Scot
I think Chuck covered this in the episode “Chuck vs the aisle of terror”
Inter-species Relationships! Is it a baby, or a snail?
patco13
Mr. Woodward has forgotten THE basic tenant of journalism. Reporters report the news, they do not make it….
karen marie
@liberal: Attempt at post-whoring career resurrection.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
@liberal:
The Senate can go fellate themselves over directing the actions of our armed forces. There’s a reason someone is known as the commander in chief.
Omnes Omnibus
@liberal: Sound and fury…
Bruce S
Back in the nineties, Joan Didion, reviewing a bunch of Woodward’s output for NYRB, discerned that the WaPo star writes books “in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
Harsh, but obviously true.
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
@Schlemizel: Most people barely even remember Woodward. His name doesn’t carry as much as people think it does.
El Cid
Perhaps he never thought his Evil Enemies would be so dastardly as to turn the tools of actual journalism against him — you know, to, like, look for and then print / broadcast what actually happened.
What sort of a world have we come to in which influential people seeking to publicly garner support for their tales must face hordes of commoners discussing what those actual influential people said or experienced?
Whatever happened to the good old days of simply allowing these people to do and say whatever they want?
The Other Chuck
Dear Bob,
Regretting it yet?
Love,
Gene
catclub
@Bruce S: That was amazingly observant. reporting on what Bob Dole was wearing in interviews. No concern for actual issues or consequences.
minutemaid
lol…you bloggers are the ones being trolled. These old white guys know that doing this stuff will get liberal political writers panties in a bunch. From traditional media on down to the lowly bloggers….and you people fall for this every….single….time.
That is partly why Trump does what he does and Woodward is just doing more of the same. You people will NEVER learn. NEVER. You have the memory of a house fly. “Oh, I hit the window…oh I forgot what I just did, hey that’s looks like a way out…oh I hit the window”
Yutsano
RICOTTA CHEESE?? HOW DARE YOU BETTY!!
@minutemaid: Herp.
Tonal Crow
@The Other Chuck:
You have been reported to the FBI for blatant terroristic threats. Black helicopters and knock on your door in 5…4…3….
Lurking Canadian
I’m reading on my phone. What is the frightening stuff in the bowl? Butter? Popcorn? Whipped cream?
terry buckalew
That bowl of Feta cheese is pretty scary.
jl
Was that last pic of a demon sheep a coded threat towards Woodward?
Even naive me can suss out what is really going on here.
blondie
@Linda Featheringill: Yes.
Imani Gandy (ABL)
@Baud: HAHAHA.
Imani Gandy (ABL)
@minutemaid: wait, so Woodward destroyed his credibility so that Betty would get her panties in a bunch by posting frightening photos of sheep, whipped cream, and black babies?
Good one!
dance around in your bones
I am SO glad John Cole invited you to front page here, Betty Cracker. I lurked at Rumproast but am very much more happy that you are here. Making wine foil sculptures and all. PLUS – CHICKENS!
Since this is practically the only place I hang out at anymore. No more license to kill time, now I’ve got grandkids to serve. Believe me, they are far worse than cats in their demands.
tatateeta
Here’s a comment from a reader of Paul Krugman’s blog which I think is right on:
“Janet EllingsonSalt Lake City, Utah
Verified
In 1996 Joan Didion in the New York Review of Books wrote a review of several of Bob Woodward’s books, focusing particularly on the latest release “The Choice” about the Clinton presidential campaign. She summarizes brilliantly: “these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”
And when I think of what I know of Woodward, I realize he sucks at analysis of all the facts he collects for his books. Also, I have always been troubled by Plamegate and Scooter Libby’s trial. Woodward said that state dept official, Richard Armitage, outed Plame but he waited until the trial had already started to reveal that.
Betty Cracker
@dance around in your bones: Awww, thanks! Stick around — I may make wine foil Spartan helmets for my chickens one day!
Sammy
@Cacti: I’m going to sort of steal this “White Impotent Male Persecution Syndrome, or WIMPS”.
debbie
@Linda Featheringill:
I’ve listened to him while driving home from work. Not only does he not sound bright, but he sounds like he thinks he’s the world’s #1 expert on whatever he’s talking about. In that way, he’s the perfect foil for Woodward. They can both glory in their own excellence.