Woodward has gone downhill

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Well, boo-hoo-- too bad, so sad! It looks like Woodward brought Gore's reaction on himself....
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Woodward: Al Gore was “unpleasant” to me
Posted by Joel Connelly, April 8, 2013

Bob Woodward has taken to regaling audiences that Al Gore is a lousy dinner companion.

It was “taxing” and “to be really honest, it was unpleasant” to sit next to the former vice president at a Washington, D.C., Woodward told a Youngstown State University audience in Ohio last week, as first reported by the Youngstown Vindicator.

Why?  Apparently, Gore got on Woodward’s case for his succession of uncritical insider accounts (“Bush at War,” “Plan of Attack”) on President George W. Bush, the 9/11 terrorist attack, and the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Apparently, Gore “thinks he invented (reporting) too,” said Woodward, referring to Gore’s much-lampooned 2000 statement that he invented the Internet.

But Gore had a point.  After the Watergate scandal, and books that probed the dark underbelly of the Nixon administration (“The Final Days”) Woodward has settled into insider,  you-are-there books.  Access drives these books. Woodward has become, in the words of Salon.com, “the most flatterer of Washington’s career elite and writer-down of whatever they tell him.”

The flattered include those who become Woodward’s insider sources, most famously Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Upbraid Woodward, as Gene Sperling of the National Economic Council recently did, and the hard-boiled Watergate reporter delivers a public hissy fit.

Woddward has, Joan Didion wrote in a New York Review of Books essay, become a specialist at writing the “insiders’ inside story,” with an “eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him.”  The result, she notes, are books where  “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

Doesn’t that also describe some of the decision-making by America’s 43rd president?
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More about Woodward's... shall I say "falls from grace"?
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Regrettable: The troubling things I learned when I re-reported Bob Woodward’s book on John Belushi.
By Tanner Colby, March 12, 2013
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Bob Woodward makes himself the story
By Peter Canellos, March 17, 2013
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Woodward's a Shadow of What He Was
By Dusty Rhoades, March 20, 2013
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