"We wouldn't have had to go through all this if we had done our job right in the first place. The media should have pressed harder for documentation and should not have allowed sources to remain anonymous. It's just amazing what we let people get away with saying" (Geneva Overholser, journalism professor at the University of Missouri).

"The problem is that follow-ups as a rule are treated like stepchildren. You go with the big story when you got it, and if it's contradicted later, you try to ignore the contradiction." (Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Washington office of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy). 

"Probably most papers are wishing they had paid a little bit more attention" (USA Today White House Editor Gwen Flanders).

What are these giants of journalism talking about?  Dick Cheney's energy policy?  The run up to the invasion of Iraq?  The Justice Department's purge of US Attorneys?

None of the above.  These are all quotes from an archival piece in the July/August 2001 issue of the American Journalism Review about the reporting of "Vandalgate."  We remember Vandalgate as the reports of outgoing Clinton administration's White House vandalism, planted by Ari Fleischer in the days following George W. Bush's first inauguration, and when the dynamics of the Bush White House-news industry relationship were established once and for all.  Unfortunately, about all that has apparently changed since then are the stakes.

In a Jewish Republicans forum directed by House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Deputy National Security Advisor and Bush administration Democracy Czar Elliott Abrams may have tipped the Oval Office's hand a bit too far regarding the efforts of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to establish standards of mutual accountability in the Israel-Palestinian peace process.  Rice's benchmarks are in synch with a report by Paul Wolfowitz's World Bank, stressing economic hardships imposed on Palestinians by Israel in the territories regarding the use of roads, freedom of movement, forbidding Palestinians from entering roads used by Jewish settlers and closing off areas around settlements.

As reported in the Forward on May 10, 

Abrams described President Bush as an “emergency brake” who would prevent Israel from being pressed into a deal; during the breakfast gathering, the White House official also said that a lot of what is done during Rice’s frequent trips to the region is “just process” — steps needed in order to keep the Europeans and moderate Arab countries “on the team” and to make sure they feel that the United States is promoting peace in the Middle East.

...Rice’s renewed drive to promote an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is seen in Washington not only as a desire to calm America’s allies in Europe and the Middle East but also as part of the new thinking within the State Department, which views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an obstacle that deters Arab countries from joining the United States in its attempts to stabilize Iraq.

This view was recently reinforced by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who in a conversation with nationally syndicated columnist Robert Novak accused Abrams of preventing the administration from having a “coherent Middle East policy” which would engage Iran and Syria in an attempt to stabilize Iraq. “I do know that there are a number of Israelis who would like to engage Syria,” Hagel told Novak. “They have said that Elliott Abrams keeps pushing them back.”

Who do we trust in order to understand what is really going on?  Rice?  Abrams?  Hegel?  Novak?  It is a sorry state of affairs when these are the options dealt to us by the keepers of the common wisdom. 

But there are rays of light, if not encouraging signs, that there are some at important levels of leadership with a degree of sanity and vision.  Nancy Pelosi's delegation to the Middle East is promising, and hardly the harbinger of defeat and failure as declared in administration statements and beltway punditocracy circle jerks -- including, notably, Secretary Rice herself.

And there are signs of life among the leadership of the principal parties as well.  With Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert making interested noises regarding the Arab League's Beirut/Riyadh initiative in Jordan ahead of the upcoming World Economic Forum, Ha'aretz reports,

Vice Premier Shimon Peres will meet with Jordan's king separately next Sunday during the World Economic Forum conference which will take place in Jordan. Peres will discuss with the king his plan to build a channel stretching from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea and to establish economic and tourist enterprises along it, with the cooperation of Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.