<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/tripp05062006.html" source="Counterpunch" author="Ben Tripp">Press This! No News is Good News</a> idly ponders the complete and utter failure of the fourth estate. As proof, he offers a long---but woefully incomplete---list of scandals currently flitting from loose lip to loose lip in Washington. It could be argued that the collapse of the press is not complete, else we wouldn't know of the scandals in the first place. That is purely wishful thinking, however, as it is far easier to report these obvious scandals <i>but not press the issue to conclusion</i> than it is to ignore them outright. That way, both sides are assuaged: those that need to be outraged, but not have anything change (Democrats) and those that want scandals to be as effective as bullets against Superman (Republicans). Tripp compares the relatively innocuous (lying about a hummer) to almost completely fabricated (Whitewater) scandals that rocked Clinton's presidency to the world-class ones of Bush: <bq>If Clinton, that prurient pork-swordsman, had sodomized ten thousand interns, perhaps the weasels of the press couldn't have kept up with it all and they would have abandoned the whole thing. Maybe that is Bush's genius: there are so many juicy flies swarming around the filth-caked nostrils of the dying wildebeest of his presidency that a journalist hardly knows which one to swat first.</bq> That explanation is so depressing that it almost has to be right.