March 14, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- You've just gotta hand it to Howard Kurtz.  He's a corrupt jerk, and I'd count my fingers before and after shaking hands with him, but as a spinner and twister of words -- and of knives in people's back -- he is without parallel.

Mistah Kurtz is the master of the oblique insinuation. What Maureen Dowd does crudely but effectively, Kurtz does with such a subtle smoothness that, unless you're familiar with how he operates (such as, for example, his penchant for pointedly ID'ing folks like David Corn as "left-wing" writers and journos, whilst not using the words "right-wing" to preface a description of any FAUX News employee), you don't see the fingerprints he leaves behind.

However, there are signs of late that the Slime Master is slipping a tad:  Witness the mistake he made in his otherwise ever-so-subtle trashing (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12992-2002Mar12.html) of honest and hardworking journalist Joshua Micah Marshall's hard-hitting and factually accurate article on Robert Ray's final OIC report.

Now, Mistah Kurtz starts out in finely subtle fashion: He opens by mocking Josh Marshall for daring to care about this miscarriage of justice, implying that Josh, instead of being the careful researcher that he truly is, is in fact nothing more than a partisan Clintonite who never "got over it", to use the mantra of the election-thieves of 2000.

But then, the Slime Master slips up, by making the mistake of quoting Josh Marshall, whose entire article can be found at http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/03/12/ray/index.html at length and in context.

Worse yet, Kurtz compounds the error by including a paragraph of Marshall's that shows that the OIC is now finally admitting what serious students of CoupGate knew all along: Kathleen Willey, the OIC's "Starr Witness", was about as credible a witness as O.J. Simpson is as a detective.

And how does Mistah Kurtz react to this bombshell? How does the Slime Master react to discovering that Faire Willey, the Widow who Cried 'Grope'!, was in the final analysis not considered to be a purveyor of useful testimony?

Remember, the Washington Post is crawling with people like Kurtz, people who defended Willey's honor in print, people who just somehow didn't want to spotlight -- or even mention -- such nastiness as the fact that Willey lied so blatantly about so much that Starr wound up giving a second grant of immunity after she'd violated the terms of the first one. They wanted to see Clinton destroyed, and Kathy Willey was, as one of Ken Starr's favored weapons, someone whose credibility had to defended in print at all costs.

So what does Mistah Kurtz have to say, now, about the tattered veracity of the woman for whom he and his paper stooped to such ridiculous lows for over five years? What does he have to say about the woman for whom the WP pawned its honor in order to support her and Ken Starr?

Simply this:

"The Willey finding is kinda interesting."

That's it. In toto.

Hmmmmm.  I wonder if perhaps Mistah Kurtz isn't in too big a hurry to run away from the mountain of crap he and his fellow Clinton-haters spent over a decade building?