Swopa's blog characterizes it this way,
Tenet's "slam dunk" came in garbage time. Following from
praktike's blog, Swopa's timeline starts with this fact:
...the conversation happened in late December 2002.
What does this mean with respect to Booby's attempt to help the WH stage manage the CIA's culpability in deceiving dear leader?
And the response -
In other words, after Big Dick Cheney gave a speech in August saying that "we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." After the famed WHIG "product rollout" in September, with Condoleezza Rice talking about smoking guns and mushroom clouds. After Dubya gave a speech in Cincinnati in October saying that Saddam Hussein " could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
Oh, and after Congress has already surrendered voted to authorize the use of force, and the troop buildup in Kuwait was already in the works.
In other words, Tenet supposedly "convinced" Dubya and his crew long after everything had already been decided. And Woodward wrote it up with a straight face.
This is not unlike the the deathbed Casey interview, I'd say. As Attytood points out in Bob and Me:
But he and Bernstein were American heroes to me. And I very much wanted to do what they did -- to wrestle the powers that be from the bottom position, and win.
Well, at least that's what I thought Woodward did.
Looking back, I can't tell the exact moment that I realized that Bob Woodward wasn't the crusader and role model that my generation of eager-beaver journalists so foolishly thought he was. Maybe it was when he wrote his only non-political book, "Wired"-- a John Belushi bio that had all the charisma of a World War I-era anti-pot film. Or maybe it was his 1987 CIA book "Veil," with its reeks-of-phoniness-or-worse deathbed confession by Bill Casey of his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, because "I believed."
This gets it said for me (Christopher Hitchens is good for something):
You want a muckraker? Go read some old I.F. Stone, or some recent Seymour Hersh.
And after 1974, being Bob Woodward became way too easy. Who needs cement parking garages when Washington's top players will call you onto their plush carpets, and spill the beans in broad daylight. Most people only hustle when they have to, and Woodward didn't have to anymore. He became what Christopher Hitchens called "the stenographer to the stars" -- a role that seemed to not trouble him in the least.
A few people started to see through Woodward's schtick -- the trade of access for a chance to sway an early draft of history, and his almost pathological refusal to analyze or interpret what he was told by the politically powerful. Joan Didion wrote that his books are all characterized by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."
Everybody, so it seems, is
Piling On Booby