Who cares?

How to threaten Bob Woodward

Posted by Alexandra Petri, WashPost, on February 28, 2013 at 1:48 pm

When is a threat not a threat? Or when is a “threat” not a threat?

Well, consider what all the abominable Twitterati are trying to nickname Woodwardgate.

First, Bob Woodward wrote an op-ed in the Post noting that the sequester — with its automatic, draconian spending cuts without tax increases — was the president’s idea, not, as the president has been saying, the brainchild of Congress. Shortly thereafter, all Inside Baseball Hell broke loose. The White House was unhappy. Officials pointed out that Everyone Knew At The Time that this was never ACTUALLY supposed to take effect, because Washington was supposed to come together and act like grown-ups and reach compromise. It took them several tries to say this, because midway through the phrase about how everyone seriously expected Washington to act like grown-ups and come together to reach a mature compromise, they kept bursting into hysterical laughter.

Politico ran a piece that started off like this. I am not making this up:

“Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about — and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half-hour,” Woodward told us in an hourlong interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets.

(More here.)