WP's Tina Brown: This Time, the Prosecutor's a Corker

[Pirate Smile]

This Time, the Prosecutor's a Corker

By Tina Brown

Thursday, October 27, 2005; Page C01

It's one of the ironies of our media culture that the mystique of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case, grew to mythic size simply by virtue of Fitzgerald keeping his mouth shut until he has something to say.

Manhattan media circles have been so excited by Fitzgerald's silence right up to the eve of the grand jury's term tomorrow that they've forgotten his casting as a First Amendment assassin and turned him into a cross between Philip Marlowe and the Shadow: fearless, honest, independent, laconic and unstoppable. Especially laconic -- and on that point they're demonstrably right. Unlike Kenneth Starr's late, unlamented operation, neither Fitzgerald nor anyone around him leaks.
"Incorruptibility by money is the old story," the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier commented to me this week. "Now it's incorruptibility by media."

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Meanwhile, Fitzgerald's powerful silence has made him a blank canvas on which Democrats have projected their fantasies, Republicans their anxieties. We are living in an uneasy moment of moral crisis and institutional disintegration in politics as well as journalism. No administration as tightly wound and paranoiac as the Bush regime could hope to hold together after five years of supremacy and sectarian ruthlessness, governing only for its base.

Fitzgerald has been thrust into the role of the un-George W. Bush -- the gritty cop vs. the rhinestone cowboy. In this corner, the scholarship kid from Brooklyn who worked summers as a doorman and went on to be the stellar student mentoring the less gifted. In the other, the son of privilege who goofed off at school, ducked the draft and always fell back on his dad's influential pals to -- in the memorable phrase of Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, writing this week in the Los Angeles Times about Powell's role in the Bush White House -- clean all the dog poop off the carpet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602524.html