Washington Post Unhinged: Paper Prints Contradictory Reports on Same Day

And from Talking Points Memo:

"Editorial pages are for opinion. But
legitimate opinion journalism is constrained by facts, as nearly as we
can know them as we put pen to paper. And by that measure, the Washington Post's
editorial page has skidded outside the boundaries of journalistic
legitimacy on any number of issues but most glaringly on our
involvement in the Middle East. Today's editorial on the Bush-Cheney-Libby leak of classified portions of the Iraq National Intelligence Estimate is a case in point.

One might simply say that presidents play hardball; and they play
politics. And President Bush or his untethered vice president played
hardball against a prominent critic by releasing information the law
allowed them to release. And get over it. Politics, like life, isn't
fair. And if you swipe at the president, expect to get hit back.

You may not agree with that. But it's an opinion. And it contains an uncomfortably large element of fact.

But the authors of this editorial don't appear to read the news
pages of their own paper or their best competitors. The clock has
simply run out on any attempt to claim the president and his key
advisors weren't acting in bad faith with their constant advocacy of an
alleged traffic in uranium between Iraq and Niger. It's over.

As consistent reporting both from within the executive branch and
the intelligence agencies has shown, the only reason this canard ever
caught any life outside the vice president's office was not because of
its credibility but rather its irrelevancy. By the time Libby came to
leak more information about it months after the war, it had been still further discredited within the administration.

The Post also sticks to the up-is-down claim that Wilson's
trip to Niger supported rather than undermined the Niger-uranium claim.
That is a viewpoint that can only be maintained if you are willfully
ignorant of the backstory to the Niger canard. Wilson's report didn't
add a lot to what most in the intelligence community already thought
about the pretended Niger story. But that was because it tended to
confirm the reasons why most in the intelligence community didn't find
the story credible in the first place.

For whatever reason, the Post has chosen to throw in its
lot with the flurry of mendacious rhetoric and the white-washed
investigations, all of which amount to a grand pen and paper and word
game truss barely holding together the body of official lies that is
still barely governing the capital.

They've made their deal with power. They should justify it on those grounds rather than choosing to mislead their readers."