"the other thing that's really absurd is granting anonymity to someone who says something positive about, say Bush. That's enough to make me scream. loudly."
Let me be the first to say what needs to be said here: It’s only through the fortitude and personal sacrifice of whistleblowers like this, who anonymously read Administration boilerplate to reporters over the phone, that our democracy survives. Imagine, if you will, a world in which the media did not routinely shield the identities of White House sources in exchange for a quote about how smart and handsome the president is. Why, we’d either get stories entirely devoid of talking points posing as reportage, or We The People would know which senior administration official is going on and on about the potency of the presidential pen strokes, and then Bush would know how much the source liked him, and he’d have all the hand in the relationship, and would probably be all ignoring him in the halls and at Cabinet meetings, but start making drunken booty calls to the source at three in the morning.
So you can see why our traditions of transparent governance and the free exchange of ideas rely upon the uncompromising principle of source confidentiality."
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