Jeff,

Good catch. But there's a deeper logic at work here.

Since the default setting of lightbulbs at WaPo is "off", one has to go off (ie, go bad, stop working normally, etc.) in order to go on.

Hope this clears things up for you.

After the Downing Street Memo story broke, I went back and interviewed a couple of USA Today reporters who collaborated on one of the best articles written during this period--a first anniversary story on Sept 11, 2002. It was all about how the Bush Administration had decided to go to war with Iraq within weeks of 9/11--and how there was no formal decision-making process, that it just happened by osmosis:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-09-10-iraq-war_x.htm

Lede paragraph:

President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.

They had some unidentified sources, of course. But they also had Condi Rice handing them a smoking gun:

The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis."

"There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem."

It was an incredible piece of reporting. It wasn't a stand-alone, either. Gannet may not have been quite even with Knight-Ridder, but they were close in terms of critical reporting throughout this period, as one of the reporters I interviewed reminded me.

Now here's point number one. Unlike Knight-Ridder, USA Today gives Gannet a national platform. Once this story was published--on the anniversary of 9/11, no less, it was common knowledge that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made in late 2001. This became public knoweldge a month before Congress voted to give Bush authority to invade. Yet, everyone pretended--and continues to pretend to this day--that (A) Bush really hadn't made up his mind yet about invading Iraq and (B) Congress had no idea Bush was going to go to war no matter what.

These are not minor points. They are central structuring assumptions underlying the whole mainstream discourse about the war. If there's one thing one cannot do and be considered a "serious" person, its to claim that the whole Bush sales job on Iraq was precisely what Andrew Card said it was in August, 2002: a sales job.

This is, in fact, a deeply intersecting point to the one that Glenn is making. The atrocious reporting at the time was both premised on and enabling of accepting the lie that the sales job was not a sales job at all, but the only prudent course of action given what the Bush Administration knew and what it believed about the world.

Now to point number two: I asked the USA Today reporter who spoke to me the longest if they were going to revisit their earlier reporting, in light of the Downing Street Memo, which opened up a whole new line of evidence in support of their earlier reporting. She told me, "no." She said--echoing perfectly the conventional wisdom of everyone else who would even acknowledge the Downing Street Memo at the time--that it was "an old story," and that they had no plans at all to write about it, or investigate further on their own. She differed with her colleagues only in thinking that it was significant, since it bolstered the reporting her team had done. But she didn't think it was a matter of concern for journalists anymore. Instead, it was something to be "left to the historians."

Now I must say that I found this inteview nothing short of amazing. Despite having done work that was directly in opposition to the NYT and the rest of the Beltway-centric media, and despite having been proven 100% right, she then proceeded to repeat the same, seemingly pre-fab soundbites--"an old story" "leave it to the historians"--that one would hear from the worst offenders, if one managed to get them on the ropes.

Needless to say, this experience was powerful piece of evidence that Glenn is 100% correct. If even those who didn't drink the kool aid won't look back critically at the kool aid drinking, then how can we expect the kool aid drinkers to do so?