'Slick Wolfie' Caught Dissing Brave War Reporters

By: Greg Mitchell It's been a rough week for Paul Wolfowitz, our No. 2 man in the Pentagon.

First, in the movie of the moment, "Fahrenheit 9/11," he gets caught sliming down his hair for a TV appearance by spitting into his comb and dragging it across his scalp.

Then he undergoes a grilling before the House Armed Services Committee, in which he is forced to admit that U.S. troops might have to remain in Iraq for very many years.

Now he is being denounced by journalists ranging from moderate Howard Kurtz to liberal Maureen Dowd, for implying during that same testimony that war reporters in Baghdad were sissies who were "afraid" of a little gunfire and so stayed in their cushy enclaves printing "rumors."

E&P posted an item on Wolfowitz criticizing the journalists Wednesday after we noticed that this element of his testimony had been overlooked or buried in press accounts to that point. Our item quickly got picked up on the Drudge Report, guaranteeing even wider exposure, and many other sites. I'm not sure how much we had to do with it, if anything, but lo and behold, there was Wolfowitz on MSNBC's "Hardball" that night, defending himself, and then he was denounced by Kurtz, Dowd and war reporter Christiane Amanpour of CNN on Thursday.

Wolfowitz had told the House committee that "part of the problem" the United States faces in Iraq is that "a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors, and rumors are plentiful. Our own media have some responsibility to try to present a balanced picture, instead of always gravitating for the sensational."

On "Hardball," Campbell Brown asked Wolfowitz about the quote, after observing that during the 10 days she recently spent in Baghdad, numerous car bombs went off and three of her colleagues had been kidnapped in Fallujah.

Wolfowitz denied that he was "blaming the media," saying he only meant "the media picture seems to be unbalanced. And I'm not the only one who's saying it ... I'm not media-bashing."

This morning, the normally mild-mannered Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post angrily charged that Wolfowitz was "basically accusing journalists of cowardice." After admitting that it was true that journalists curtailed travel in Iraq due to violence, Kurtz said that Wolfowitz's "suggestion that they are too cowed to leave Baghdad ignores the great courage that many of these journalists have shown." He then cited some examples.

Worse (for Wolfowitz), he also quoted an e-mail he had just received from former Pentagon spokesman Charles Krohn, a retired Army colonel: "It's bad enough that Wolfowitz makes such a statement. What's worse is the motive of the person who put the bug in his ear."

Also this morning, Maureen Dowd complained in The New York Times that Wolfowitz was "sliming journalists ... who are risking their lives traveling around Iraq to cover the cakewalk that became chaos."

And CNN's Amanpour weighed in, calling the Wolfowitz charge a "blatant" misrepresentation, noting that she and her colleagues traveled in Iraq at "great personal risk." She added that she wouldn't get into the kind of "character assassination" that Wolfowitz had employed.

Forget "Slick Willie" for a while. Now we've got "Slick Wolfie" to contend with.

(Thursday night, Wolfowitz issued an apology to the war reporters. See news story posted at E & P now.)