JULY 19, 2005

It was getting all hot and sexy in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, and everybody wanted in to see the showdown. It was unusually difficult getting my security pass. The White House Media Affairs Office told me that there were too many journalists that needed to be processed; it was a madhouse. The gang was juiced for a swarming, and that might be why the briefing was abruptly canceled the minute it was supposed to take place. Instead, we were told that at 9 p.m. that evening the president would announce his Supreme Court nominee.

There was a whole lot of eye-rolling. "Well, that was the quickest way to change the conversation," more than one correspondent groaned.

JULY 20, 2005

The 20th was a weird, hot day on campus.

It seemed somehow related to the Roberts nomination that there was an extra helping of snappy young Republicans humming around the White House on the 20th -- prematurely wide and matronly young women with obsolete cheerleader features dressed like Lady Bird Johnson, with tightly twisted hair and $2,000 handbags, and 20-something guys with that roundheaded military eunuch look: plastic wraparound sunglasses and boxy, off-the-rack navy-blue suits with the periwinkle-blue shirts that have become the uniform of the GOP Youth. The guys have a restless, jacked-up machismo that probably comes of venting the frustrations of abstinence in Krav Maga class, and a thumping sense of the authority and entitlement that comes with belonging to the winning team, which they call "The Party." Superclean motherfuckers -- an abrasive, stinging kind of clean, like they all just got shaken out of an icy tumbler full of Pine Sol, pumice and the New Testament.

The members of the press corps were exhausted that morning: they had to stand around waiting for the president for three hours the night before, then stay up typing until 3 or 4 a.m. I thought the corps was being directly bitch-slapped; the grind was too punishing and the timing too perverse to resemble anything but deliberate venality on the part of an annoyed Caesar. But such abuse is apparently normal.

When one atrocity draws too much fire, it is good to change the subject -- in this case, to the beliefs of John Roberts, the president's Supreme Court nominee. It was a classic slick Bush move, wholly momentum-puncturing. The press corps now had another job to do, and they could no longer pester McClellan about Rove without appearing obsessive, unprofessional and "unfair." Rove had officially become Old News. In order to stay with the Rove story, the press corps would have had to have broken with precedent, and cross a professional ethics red line: They would have had to consciously become the news themselves. The revolt of 7/11 was an accident, a fluke; any further persistence could have been read as a grab for the limelight, which most reporters would sooner jump into a volcano than be accused of -- it's a huge, icky protocol no-no. But only by this uncharacteristic grandstanding could they have truly done their job.

And nobody, save the marginalized journalists, was willing to do it. On July 20, professional decorum defeated journalism. The press corps lost 90 percent of the headway they'd gained since the 11th. The rebellion was clearly punctured and deflating, and there was no way to protest this, short of total anarchy.

Les Kinsolving is a charming old guy in a baseball hat with a big quaky voice; he prints out his questions every day on a legal pad in big block capital letters with a felt-tip pen. Kinsolving feels he gets the cold shoulder from some corps members. This could be due to his habit of killing momentum when everyone is getting unified and excited by asking off-track questions; Les disperses the smell of chum in the water by throwing Nerf balls in it.

I was fascinated by his weird politics. A Baltimore talk radio host and ex-Episcopal priest, Kinsolving has been haunting the press corps since the Nixon administration. He calls himself a conservative, but (and this is a measure of how meaningless the words "Democrat" and "Republican" are in Washington these days) he is pro-choice, anti-death penalty, and pro-euthanasia. As far as I could tell, the only thing separating him from Bill Moyers was his spouting of the right-wing line that Valerie Plame "had a desk job in 1997" and therefore was not really covert, and the fact that he thought that Bill Clinton should be in jail for "what he did to that girl, in the Oval Office."

When Les Kinsolving asked this question I had another revelation: McClellan would be providing no information about Rove following the investigation. In fact, Scott McClellan would be providing no information ever, about anything. It wasn't his function.

KINSOLVING: Nineteen members of Congress from seven states have written a letter to the president saying that they are still waiting for an answer to a May 26th question: Is the president opposed to contraception? And my question is, could they now have an answer to my question? Or do you regard them, too, as not to be dignified with a response?

McCLELLAN: No, I think we've talked about these issues before and these issues when it comes to the federal government and programs aimed at promoting abstinence and how those ought to be funded on at least equal footing with other programs, so I think we've addressed the president's views in that context.

"You get frustrated, and you think it's like nailing mercury to a wall, and then you realize that it's not because Scott is so masterfully evasive, but because the White House declines to provide any mercury, or a wall, " a reporter who insisted on anonymity told me after the briefing. And this was a guy from a major conservative news outlet, one person who I thought would have some mechanism for making sense of it all, however delusional.

I overheard two young box-suited GOP Blueshirt boys talking as I was exiting the White House security gate:

"He's a good guy."

"Good guy."

I assumed they were talking about John Roberts, the topic du jour.

They shook hands. One guy tipped his head slightly sideways, to lay on a more unctuous sincerity:

"Good Christian."

Over the next week, it began to look like the Free Press insurgency had been pretty much quashed. The placement of John Roberts as Rove's anti-scandal-Kevlar vest worked like a charm: by the 21st, there were political cartoons showing the press corps -- a mass of arms and microphones -- dashing collectively away from Rove to besiege Roberts, leaving Rove smiling like he'd flash-fried and eaten Big Bird.

JULY 26, 2005

I began to feel, in a very visceral way, that that the James Brady Briefing room is way too small. There is such a constant storm of news, and all the reporters try to catch all the raindrops simultaneously; it's very difficult to follow any storyline diligently through to its conclusion. An atrocity is born every 10 seconds -- the landscape of what is considered pertinent information shifts constantly. To slow the metabolism of information would be unnatural and constipating. No scandal, no matter how tragic or venal, can generate enough weight or momentum in the Age of Fleeting Information to register as more than a speed bump. The wily administration knows this, and takes advantage.

Occasionally the large and sonorous CBS correspondent -- whose name, coincidentally, is also John Roberts -- would park like a yacht to Terry Hunt's right, in the front-center seat. The day's big story was NASA's impending Discovery launch; there was also an ill-fated Boy Scout Jamboree to discuss.

Roberts annoyed McClellan by asking if the president was still gung-ho on going to Mars. Just before Bush's State of the Union address, he gave a much-ridiculed speech in which he made it a top national priority for the U.S. to journey to the Red Planet.

ROBERTS: So the president supports a Mars mission?

McCLELLAN: Well, this is a long-term mission that the president outlined, John, so I think you have to look at the overall perspective in what the president said...

ROBERTS: And how is the Mars program going?

McCLELLAN: NASA can probably update you on the effort. Again, this is a long-term program, and you can sit there and smirk about it, but the president felt it was important.

The official transcript says "(laughter)" after this exchange, but it was hard laughing, like people do in bars when somebody says something particularly nasty to someone else.

I chalked the edgy vibes up to the corps' having tasted something like freedom for a split second; now they were back in their cages, and feeling de-clawed.

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