I listened to a White House "press conference" held by Ari "The Egg With Eyebrows" Fliescher on 2/12 . What a joke! Listening to "X the Owl" interviewed by Henrietta Pussycat in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood would have been less boring and offered more insights. THIS is the American press corps? But maybe I tuned in 2 minutes too late and somehow missed all the "good questions" -- you know, the sort that haven't already been answered by 10 carefully scripted press releases and 5 recent AP stories passed out (fries included ) to TV, radio and newspapers! What I heard were real zingers like "Do you know where Osama Bin Laden is?" or "Do you think maybe some time soon Homeland Security might be able to get just a bit more specific about their "terrorist alerts"?

---- Really sockin' it to em, eh?

---- But Bush has pussy-whipped the newsfolk into a sorry cowed cluster of sycophants afraid to even ask a watered down question in a tone that might sound too challenging to His Royal Heinous. This administration's control over the news is very closely akin to the short leash Hitler kept on the German press. We hear Bush even dictates to the "Washington Post" what photo of himself they should run, calling in complaints if they don't show his good side or if the tint of the print makes his shirt look the wrong color.

---- Do you ever wonder why you never see a single question ever posed to Dick "Where's Waldo Now" Cheney these days? The answer: Who would want to? His head News Fraulein, Mary Matalin, is known to all as a vicious Valkyrie who makes sure that any reporter who displeases the White House is made to suffer for it, but good. She appears to be an unfunny version of the old Saturday Night Live character "Susan the Shemale" (the mannish dominatrix of "Sprockets" played by Phil Hartman). One reporter says she puts that "something extra" into her work; not content to be just a defending guard dog, she apparently goes out of her way to be "truly vindictive."

---- But in general the White House treats the press corps as if D.C. were located in Stalinist Russia. Ask a challenging question, and your name goes onto a "to be watched" list. Ask anything approaching a real reporter's question, and you will likely be bounced and blacklisted. Which leads me to wonder just WHAT may have happened to Danny Pearl, one of the only really courageous and probing journalists in Afghanistan.

---- This White House has not only placed itself above the law --refusing to cooperate even to the smallest degree with questions about its energy task force, dealings with Enron, and many other matters --it has also placed itself above the press. Worse yet, the "press" is promoting this autocratic regime and its outrageous behavior in every way it can by dancing to Bush's insane and spiteful tune. The only press reps let anywhere near the White House now are either mealy-mouthed wimps or totally insane rightwingnuts. Case in point: Les Kinsolving a rightwingnut made only slightly less odious by the fact that he is apparently half-senile and can't help himself, is a welcome regular at the White House. At the 2/12 news conference, he was allowed to make a blatant plug for Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias" which makes a Swiss-cheese like case for "liberal slant" in the media. Kinsolving was allowed --in fact encourage --to ask a staged question that of course, was neither cut short nor censored (in fact, I wondered if Ari and Goldberg were paying by the minute for a primetime ad slot!).

---- "What book has Bush been more supportive of than any other book besides the Bible?" cranked Kinsolving. "What book does he CARRY AROUND UNDER HIS ARM so cameras can be sure and see the cover.? Has there ever been a president who had a book they liked as much as this one?" (I am NOT exaggerating! These comments --a close equiv. at least --were actually made at a presidential press conference! Kinsolving went on like this for about 3 minutes, "bantering" senilely with the Egg Man.

---- Btw --while we are on the subject, the reader may be interested to know that Goldberg is a former CBS network toady --the LAST person whose claims about the media I would take seriously. Rumor has it he was offered a wheel barrow full of money in exchange for crafting a rightwingnut "poser" book designed to further the myth of the liberal media. That all of the hard statistics do not support Goldberg's claims about the liberal media does not worry him in the least. All he cares about is that he was showered with cash before, during, and after penning his "masterpiece" of self-serving twaddle. It should also be noted that the book was published by Regnery, a second-rate publishing house so far to the right its foundation posts lie parallel to the ground. Some of their GOP-sponsored titles include "At Any cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election," "Sell Out: The Inside Story of President Clinton's Impeachment," etc.

---- Al Regnery, the founding father of Regnery, is involved in all sorts of rightwing causes, including a grandiose crusade to "Save Western Civilization." (Hear that, you folks in Europe and Russia? Al is gonna "save you!") He is one manipulative and devious son-of-a-poser. He once offered Dan Moldea, an unabashed liberal Democrat $100,000 to write an investigative book about Vince Foster's death. Regnery's scheme was, of course, to get a LIBERAL to prove a case against Clinton (i.e., show that Foster's death was actually a "hit"). What Regnery didn't figure on was that Moldea saw the $100,000 as payment for REAL services rendered, as in writing a well-researched book --not, as Goldberg did, as a bribe to produce what Regnery wanted. When Moldea wrote a book that PROVED Foster's death was a suicide, Regnery basically just deep-sixed the results.

---- If you want to see just what sort of guy Al Regnery is, you should hear his views on how to treat juvenile offenders (paragraph 8).

---- Once more (I've said this several times), if you want to read a real book on media bias, by a real reporter and not a corporate con artist, read "Drive-by Journalism: The Assault on Your Need to Know" by Arthur "Ted" Rowse, a real journalist who has written for the Boston Globe, U.S. News and World Report, NPR, and many other diverse outlets. Rowse's lifelong cause has been the promotion of journalistic integrity --in fact, the National Press Club presents an annual award on media criticism in his name. Rowse did not take armloads of cash for his book. In fact, he took almost nothing at all and went with a tiny but high-quality publishing house in Maine called Common Courage Press to make sure the book made it to press because he felt the truth needed to be told. He had the public's well-being in mind, unlike Goldberg, who had only his bank account and a few friends in high places in mind. Rowse doesn't have the mainstream media giving his book free coverage and pumping it up artificially to create an instant best seller. But then, Rowse isn't trying to peddle a sow's ear disguised as a silk purse. Rowse's book IS a silk purse, and filled with gold.