Another Pentagon leak that has not been clarified is how its erstwhile favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmed Chalabi, learned the United States had broken Iran's diplomatic codes. He is said to have passed this information on to Iran in order to ingratiate himself to another patron.

Even when a leaker is identified, the damage done might never be made clear. A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani who helped his country develop nuclear weapons, admitted on television that he provided nuclear-related information to other countries. Bush claimed to have brought him to heel as an accomplishment of his war on terror. But Khan was pardoned immediately by Pakistani President Musharraf; he has been under house arrest and kept away from the press ever since.

The White House knows the press will drop most stories after a couple of news cycles with nothing new and that stalling can stave off any lasting embarrassment. At most a couple of small fish wind up taking the fall -- as has happened in the case of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Apparently staff sergeants are the highest-ranking responsible officials in our armed forces.

Can the Washington press corps be depended upon to uncover any further administration wrongdoing? Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used the Watergate scandal to vault from obscure reporters to media stars. Today's media, however, are largely either compromised or cowed. Corporate interests dictate what Fox News portrays as fair and balanced, which is why its viewers are far less well informed than those of competing networks. But it would be as much a mistake to think that people use the media to inform themselves as it would be to think that the media only seek to present the truth. The bottom line drives the latter effort. And many readers, viewers and listeners would rather have their worldview validated than be presented with conflicting information.

What's more, never tiring of screaming about the liberal bias of the press, the right has successfully beaten much of it into submission. And the right sees no inconsistency in using its domination of talk radio, cable television and pathetically predictable print outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's tabloids and the Washington Times to do it. The press is now so timid that investigative reporting takes a back seat to providing an echo chamber for administration spokesmen in the name of balance.

And while its foreign policy has been a failure of monumental magnitude, the administration has been relentlessly successful at filling the airwaves with its alternative version of reality. When the New York Times reported that 380 tons of specialized high explosives, one pound of which was used to bring down Pan Am 103, had been left to be looted in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the reaction by the administration's surrogates in the press was to attack. They said it was a liberal media October surprise and that Saddam Hussein or maybe the Russians had moved the explosives before the war. The Pentagon trotted out a couple of middle-grade officers to fill the air with smoke and claim they had not seen the explosives or had detonated several tons of them. That neither officer knew anything about the disposition of the 380 tons in question was irrelevant, as the press felt obliged in the interests of balance to aid in the obfuscation. By the time a Minnesota television station came up with videotape showing that the explosives were still under International Atomic Energy Agency seals after American troops had arrived, that incontrovertible proof was lost in the haze. So don't look to the press to provide clarity or truth about the coming scandals.

If there is any silver lining, it is that zealots without constraints will eventually hang themselves on their own excesses. While you can fool most of the people twice, you can't do it forever. This administration loves to talk about Saddam's mass graves even though the most recent ones date from the mid-1990s. They never mention the estimated 100,000 Iraqis, half of them women and children, who have been killed while being liberated. But parallel realties can be constructed and maintained for only so long.

Eventually more people will realize that the Republican morality has no more depth than Bush's intellectual curiosity. Then new ayatollahs will spring up and try to claim the mantle of the demolished majority, but they will also fail. Eventually the people will figure out that taxes are the price we pay for a safe and just society and that morality, like democracy, has to spring from within rather than be imposed from above.

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