Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I encounter a controversy at this late stage of one-sidedness, my instinct is to develop the other side. Law school class is like that, you know. If there's a case that everyone just somehow knows is rightly decided, the way to have a discussion about it isn't to remark upon its obviousness, but to figure out how someone — someone intelligent, educated, and sane — could think it wasn't right. That's what I do.

Read Yoffe's description of Obama's eulogy, which dwells on Obama's own life, growing up in Hawaii, the state Inouye represented in the Senate. Obama talks about his family vacations, where they stayed in motels, and the motel rooms had TVs, and — "as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going" — the Watergate hearings were on TV, and so he saw Inouye, and because Inouye did not have that typical white person look, the young mixed-race Obama was inspired to imagine "what might be possible in my own life."

A funeral for a very old person — Inouye was 88 — is not an occasion for deep mourning or soothing profound shock. It can be an occasion to look back on the era, to indulge one's own personal connections to the time and the man who has passed on. And if the President of the United States speaks at the funeral, that in itself is a phenomenal honor for the deceased. The President should not read a typical eulogy, a conventional account of the dead man's achievements and wonderful personal traits. This is something different. And when the President is specifically noted for his oratory, something special is anticipated.

No one — I submit — was "twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going." They were rapt, experiencing the gift of a unique presentation, The Story of a Boy — that boy! — and how his individual history merged with The Story of America — A Story of Race. They knew, as they surrendered themselves into the hands of our storyteller-in-chief, that they would be cared for and rewarded. The threads would come together, the yarns would be knitted into a beautiful eulogy blanket, under which Daniel Inouye could be laid to rest and all would be comforted.

How dare you snatch that comfort away by counting the "I"s and "me"s in that speech?!

"What a liar" — famously muttered into an open mike.

It's the one thing I've always remembered about Daniel K. Inouye.

Dead now, at age 88.

Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy. He became the first Japanese-American to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. He won election to the Senate three years later and served there longer than anyone in American history except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in the Senate....

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson urged Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had won the Democratic nomination for president, to select Inouye as his running mate. Johnson told Humphrey that Inouye's World War II injuries would silence Humphrey's critics on the Vietnam War.

"He answers Vietnam with that empty sleeve. He answers your problems with (Republican presidential candidate Richard) Nixon with that empty sleeve," Johnson said.

But Inouye was not interested.

"It's not Watergate. It's a political witch hunt, designed to embarrass and discredit the newly re-elected Obama."

"It's a lot of Republican claptrap, another one of those conspiracy theories created out of thin air."

Whoops. That's exactly what Republicans were saying when the FBI and newspaper investigators were closing in on President Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon for covering up the Watergate break-in by his operatives. Republican defenders of Nixon described it as merely a third-rate burglary and said investigating it would be a waste of time because nothing illegal or untoward happened.

With 2 words, Drudge evokes Watergate for Obama's Libya troubles.

The linked story is "White House told of militant claim two hours after Libya attack: emails."

The famous question from Watergate was "What did the President know and when did he know it?"

In 1973 and 1974 [Howard] Baker was... the influential ranking minority member of the Senate committee... that investigated the Watergate scandal. He is famous for having asked aloud, "What did the President know and when did he know it?", a question given him to ask by his counsel and former campaign manager, future U.S. Senator Fred Thompson.

The NYT kept the Libya hearing off the front page because "It’s three weeks before the election and it’s a politicized thing..."

Why, yes, it is a politicized thing, isn't it? Oh... you didn't mean your coverage of the news, did you? The NYT managing editor Dean Baquet was explaining to the NYT public editor why the decision was made to go with the 6 stories they did put on the front page...

... one on affirmative action at universities, one on Lance Armstrong’s drug allegations, two related to the presidential election, one on taped phone calls at JPMorgan Chase, and one on a Tennessee woman who died of meningitis.

Baquet said: “I didn’t think there was anything significantly new in it.” And: “There were six better stories."

They put the story on page 3.

To be fair: The NYT put the original news of the Watergate break-in on an inside page. Was it page 18? Sorry, I'm not finding that fact as easily as I think I should. I did come up with the information that when Deep Throat/Mark Felt wanted to communicate with the Washington Post, Bob "Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times would arrive with an inked circle on Page 20."

So the myth of the inside pages of the New York Times looms large in the annals of presidential scandal.

Is the Libya scandal as big as Watergate? The substance of it may be much worse than Watergate, and the Obama administration seems not to have heeded the old Watergate lesson that it's the cover-up that gets you, but if Obama loses the election, that will limit the dimension of the scandal. If he wins the election — especially if it's very close or contested in some way — Republicans may work themselves into a frenzy going after Obama. Remember that Richard Nixon was reelected after the Watergate scandal broke. The break-in was 5 months before the election, and the first stories had come out. The next 2 years were hell for Nixon, and he was drummed out of office. And Nixon had won by a landslide.

The gap in the Romney "secret" video: Corn says "the recording device inadvertently turned off"...

... according to his unnamed source who, he says "noticed this quickly and turned it back one [sic]. The source estimates that one to two minutes, maybe less, of recording was missed."

Really only 2 minutes? You sure it wasn't 18 minutes? Could the name of the source be Rosemary?

Woodward and Bernstein on "Face the Nation" — falling short on consistency about journalistic ethics?

First, they praise their own work from the Watergate era:

WOODWARD: Well, that we were just trying to find out what happened and... we were as empirical as we could be. And, you know, it needs to be said that we work for an editor, Ben Bradley, and other editors at the Post who were not - who didn't have an agenda themselves. But their agenda was "get the f-ing story; get into it; keep digging; don't let up." And we were 28 and 29 at the time. And it is very liberating to work in an institution where they really understand what we're trying to do. And they say to you, you know, use all your resources, use all the resources of this newspaper. In fact, if there is peril, if we are not believed but we think we have good sources, continue.

Then, the interviewer, Bob Schieffer, brings up the present-day problem with national security leaks that seem to be coming from the White House and for the purpose of making Obama "look like a stronger leader."

BERNSTEIN: I think first you've got to be very careful about creating a witch hunt for sources, and a witch hunt in which you go after reporters, because now more than ever we need real reporting on this presidency, on national security, on all these areas. And the press is not the problem here. We've got plenty of laws and if somebody inside is doing things with real national security secrets that he oughtn't or she oughtn't to be doing in terms of giving them to the press, that's one thing. But let's be really careful before we start a witch hunt here.

WOODWARD: Yes, and I completely agree with that. And by having an investigation, I mean, was there real harm to the national security? I think that question needs to be addressed at a policy level. And it's very difficult, I know from doing stories like this, where you are dealing with sensitive government secrets, to modulate and be careful, at the same time hold the government accountable for what they're doing. So this is an area that needs to be handled with great delicacy and I'm not sure we have a political system that knows how to do anything with great delicacy.

BERNSTEIN: The record of the press, you know, is really quite good in protecting real genuine national security secrets which we often know about. Don't put -- you know, think of what you are carrying around in your head that you don't put on the air.

What happened to get the f-ing story; get into it; keep digging; don't let up?

"40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought..."

Woodward and Bernstein reminisce about their long-ago journalistic triumph that led the President to resign.

But was Nixon far worse than they portrayed him at the time? At the time, they did what they could to make him look as bad as possible, and there was no new media to push back.

Here's an idea for a blog project. Beginning on June 17th — June 17, 1972 was the day of the break-in — let's tap the Washington Post archive and blog the Nixon and Watergate stories from exactly 40 years ago. What would we bloggers have said each day?

But it's not a realistic project, because if bloggers had been around at the time, the events would have played out differently every step of the way. It's one of my pet beliefs about blogging that Nixon would not have resigned.

"It’s the iPads and laptops with the plausible-but-fake information that you leave out in the car. Oh, right."

Ah, yes!

And when they use that material, we will know who the thieves are. Fiendishly devious.

It's like Watergate... but with laptops and iPads.

And who knows who committed this theft?

Last Friday, two campaign aides left their rented SUV in the Horton Plaza parking garage while they got dinner. When they returned, someone had grabbed all their belongings, including two iPads, two handheld radios and two laptops with detailed information about Romney's presidential campaign.

Police said there was no sign of forced entry on the SUV and they are still not sure if the burglary was random or if Romney's aides were targeted. Luna said the laptops and iPads could be a treasure trove of valuable insider information for Romney's opponents.

I'm not a journalist. I'm an intellectual. Compared to John Cole anyway.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Deep Throat.

Deep six.

"I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat."

That's a funny way to put it, isn't it? As if we'd stopped talking about Watergate long ago and the memory of it had gone all fuzzy. W. Mark Felt is 91, and his family thinks he ought to have the experience of hearing what people say when they find out he was the historical mystery man. He says he's not proud of it himself, so maybe he wanted to avoid hearing criticism, but his family seems to have assured him he'd be celebrated and seems to have wanted to share the experience with him.

UPDATE: Anyone else having that Joe-Klein-wrote-"Primary Colors" feeling? The hidden identity was fascinating, the actual identity quite boring.

In the comments: I see I'm being sentimental in assuming the family is motivated by a desire to share a celebratory experience.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Amba finds comparisons to "Jaws" and "The Little Prince."