If there weren't a Washington press corps...

... we would have to invent one....

They're already in a snit over Nancy Pelosi, trying hard to portray her as Madame Nhu. It's a bitchy cat-fight over clothes because she doesn't want Jane Harman running the House Intelligence Committee. Maybe it's more because Harman spent years sucking up to Darth Cheney and went along with his fearmongering, and under the Republicans, it's been run by insider political hacks (Porter Goss) and the ought-to-be-institutionalized (Pete Hoekstra). She's suffered some sort of monstrous setback because the Democratic Caucus elected Steny Hoyer over her favorite candidate for Majority Leader, Jack Murtha. So, Pelosi's out of control already, the Democrats are in disarray already, while there's nary a harsh word for the Senate Republicans bringing back The South's favorite genteel white supremacist, pork packer and toupee model, Trent Lott, in a very close vote for Minority Whip.

So, a word to the wise Democrat: the press is back to operating on Clinton rules and they're gunning for you. They don't want to know about Bush's failures. They don't care that the man has the intellectual capacity of a grape and the empathy of a raisin. They truly aren't concerned that the Republican sewer that Washington has become is rife with juicy stories of wrongdoing, and they aren't going to cover that unless their noses are rubbed in it (except, perhaps, for the few remaining investigative journalists in town, such as Sy Hersh, Bob Parry and Jonathan Landay and the boys at the McClatchy nee Knight-Ridder Washington bureau).

The town is simmering in a stew of corruption, executive excess, bribery, incompetence, preznidential hubris of a level and kind far above that exhibited by Richard Nixon, foreign intrigue, illegal war and a White House full of ne'er-do-wells that Tom Clancy's fevered imagination couldn't create, and the Beltway pundits are chortling over a Democratic House leader who hasn't even been sworn in yet.

That should tell you what's going down. The new Dem representative from East Bumfuck, Indiana, farts in public and that's good for a week's haw-hawing. Some unfortunate Democrat bobbles a punch line and there's two weeks' worth of comparisons to John Kerry. Open your mouth, and the press is going to make something of it that it wasn't.

Let's call it for what it is--yellow journalism of the modern age. It's the tits and ass of news. The NY Times and The Washington Post haven't yet gone to naked women on page three like the British tabloids, but if they did, it would probably improve the overall content, given what they've been doing in the last week. What's worse, they seem to be all but ignoring the really, really bizarre and funny stuff that the Republicans have been doing out in the cornfields....

So, fresh, new Democrats, and old hands, too--some advice. Shut your mouths and do your jobs. Let your subpoenae speak for you. Dig into that simmering stew and make the press and the public smell it, taste it, sense the genuine awfulness of it. Make `em gag on it. Especially the Beltway pundits and the Chatty Kathys on cable news. If they're busy retching, they're too occupied to clown around trying to make you look silly.