Jane Hamsher: A Few Questions For Viveca Novak

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20051205/cm_huffpost/011720;_ylt=A0SOwmXMx5RD6VsAHxn9wxIF;_ylu=X3oDMTBjMHVqMTQ4BHNlYwN5bnN1YmNhdA--

Well Viveca, your good friend Robert Luskin seems to have catapulted you into the middle of political bedlam. How exactly does one get through this present situation with one's journalistic integrity intact? Judy Miller and Bob Woodward have subsequently rendered their credibility insufficient to hawk the Popeil Drain Buster and offer no guidance. Matt Cooper, having had the foresight to understand that the leak was a "War on Wilson" and having written the first (and best) account of his grand jury testimony, offers a road map.

Your friend David Corn admirably leapt to your defense, referring to you as "my old friend Viveca Novak, a kick-ass reporter for Time magazine." He claims that Luskin was a longtime source of yours and "not a close friend (as has been wrongly reported)," without mentioning that the day before he was the one who wrongly reported it. Never mind the fact that Corn, approaching 50, uses the phrase "kick-ass" without irony as if he were still lighting a match at a Foghat concert.

We applaud his chivalry and are willing to overlook the fact that his blog now appears to be written by Harriet Miers. But it does raise the awkward question -- what exactly was your relationship with Robert Luskin? We will do you the courtesy of presuming you were not buttering each other's toast at the St. Regis like Scooter and Judy, but where does it fall along the contiuum, say, from narc/snitch to "let's load up on Manhattans and hit the handbag sale at Barney's?"

So in the spirit of being helpful we offer up a few suggestions for questions it would be nice to have answered in your upcoming piece for Time, which we read will be forthcoming after your tell-all to Patrick Fitzgerald:

Do read the questions.

I sometimes think it is the Bush Cartel's intention (besides robbing us blind) just to smear us, as a people, as a country, to dirty our institutions in every way possible, to corrupt as many people as possible--directly with money, or with intimidation (purging the honest, and those with higher principles, and creating a culture of toadies and yes-men), flinging slime in every direction, destroying good government (as any kind of power that could control corporate behavior), splash mud and bodily excrement over our most revered laws (the Geneva Conventions, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the First Amendment), crush any sense of honor or generosity anybody has, kill our hopes for peace and justice, kill them where they stand, thoroughly demoralize us, make us feel filthy and powerless and in disgrace before the world (just like the torture victims of Abu Ghraib), and then rub our noses in it, by sending Condi off the Europe to teach them our torturing ways, and, finally, when our self-image as in the gutter and gasping for life, to announce that they have a "plan' for "victory in Iraq."

Will this people ever rise again, to be the sovereign powers of this land, "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"? Will we ever be able to look ourselves in the mirror again? Can our pride in our democracy ever be restored? Can America--where the world's "tired and poor" and its yearners to "breathe free" sought refuge and a new life--ever be that kind of beacon again? The land of enlightenment? The people who put men on the moon? The "can-do" people energized by democratic ideals, in a country where tyranny had been locked out by the highly revered Constitution, 200 years ago?

Journalists--the Fourth Estate--aiding and abetting treason. Slime and excrement all over the landscape. Collusion, corruption, and endemic mistrust of everything that we thought we were, including even our election system, compromised and made non-transparent by Bushite corporations, worming their way in so sneakily that people didn't even notice the "trade secret," proprietary software for 'tabulating' our votes that these criminals were peddling to the states, corrupting our election officials everywhere they went.

Sullied, "damaged goods," that's what we are as a country. And I think it was and is their intention (besides robbing us blind): to make us not trust ourselves any more.