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Sunday, June 22, 2008

Our Little Clubhouse

Well, ain't this cozy? Looks like Pravda's eternally beleaguered ombudsperson has her mitts full with a couple of overpaid hacksesteemed journamalists wetting their beaks on company time. Not that anything will actually be done about it, mind you. After all, accountability is always for other people, whether you work in the White House or, like Woodward and Broder, under it.

Howell acknowledges that Broder and Woodward broke the Post’s own rules and “did not check with editors on the appearances Silverstein mentioned.” She extracts an apology from Broder, and says the Post “needs an unambiguous, transparent well-known policy on speaking fees and expenses. . . . Fees should be accepted only from educational, professional or other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and politics are not a major focus–with no exceptions.”

But Howell goes very easy on Broder—who has been flagrantly dishonest with his own employer and with Howell–and Woodward, who is allowed to glide away from some very embarrassing matters. Also, Howell deals with only a few speeches by Woodward and Broder, even though Woodward gave dozens and Broder gave roughly a score. I understand that she could not deal with each instance individually (nor did I), but she could have mentioned prominently the fact that the two men, and especially Woodward, are regulars on the talk circuit and that the problem is not restricted to the few speeches she discusses in her column.

Broder first told Howell, “I have never spoken to partisan gatherings in any role other than [that of] a journalist nor to an advocacy group that lobbies Congress or the federal government.” That turned out to be false, as Howell discovered, so Broder came back to say, “I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper.”

Broder told Howell he attended an event at the American Council for Capital Formation, “but did not give a speech.” So apparently someone at the ACCF made up this account of Broder’s speech to the group?

I reported that Broder gave a speech at a meeting of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors (which paid him, he now admits, $7,000), which was a PAC fundraiser. Howell writes: “Mary Beth Coya, the Realtors’ senior vice president for public and governmental affairs, said the event was not a fundraiser but was attended by elected officials ‘to promote our government affairs programs’.” The event in fact was clearly promoted as a PAC fundraiser. And by the way, “government affairs program” is Washington-talk for lobbying.


Oh noes, this will certainly affect Broderella's rep on the appletini circuit. Who will now step forward to funnel unfounded gossip that the next Bush bounce is just around the bend? When in doubt, there's always Karl Rove. He's got the real math.

Woodward's bullshit is even better, as is Howell's own reluctance to demand the same accountability from her own employees as they might expect from their subjects.

Howell doesn’t mention this—Post reporters, it seems, will call people to ask about their actions but won’t take calls about their own. More outrageous is that Broder specifically denied to Howell that I had sought comment from him (which I know only because Howell told me during a phone conversation), even though I contacted him several times, by phone and email, beginning forty-eight hours before posting the first story.

Meanwhile, Woodward told Howell that he turns down “lots” of speech requests and gives “many” for free. That’s nice, but irrelevant, he’s still broken Post policy by receiving payment for a number of the speeches he did accept. He also called Post policy “fuzzy and ambiguous.” So why didn’t he ask anyone at the paper to clear things up for him before accepting so many speaking appearances for fees that apparently top (easily) $1 million?

Finally, Woodward told Howell “all his speaking fees — which range from $15,000 to $60,000 — go to a foundation he started in the 1990s.” He added, “It’s a straight shot into the foundation that gives money to legitimate charities. I think that’s doing good work.”

St. Woodward can don his halo and gaze in the mirror all he likes, but he really shouldn’t treat Post readers with such contempt. The facts are clear. He reaps significant tax savings by giving the fees to a “charity” that gives away a small fraction of its assets, and by far the biggest beneficiary of his foundation is Sidwell Friends, the elite private school sitting atop a reported $30 million endowment and attended by his own children.


[emphasis mine]

Coolness. So these guys, who have clearly spent far too long living off the fat of the land rather than producing anything even remotely useful, have copied the tried-and-true schtick of the hack politician -- go out and line your pockets on the rubber-chicken circuit. The amount of money these people make to show up and burble about who-knows-what -- it's an alien world.

Who shows up to these things? Are these the corporate conventioneers and PACmen who are simply too dumb or old or fat to head for the bar and look for strange? Really, why on earth would anyone pay money to sit still and listen to Broder or Woodward or Rudy Giuliani or any of these buffoons? The only thing I can think of is that it's someone else's money. It has to be. These putzes are all just paying each other exorbitant sums of money to carry each other's water. Imagine if they had to work for a living.

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