By the end of the weekend, Mr. Urbahn, 27, had become a minor celebrity in the media storm that surrounded the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and his Twitter feed had jumped from a few hundred followers to nearly 7,000—and counting.

The reason for his newfound fame was a 140-character message that Mr. Urbahn typed out on his BlackBerry, amid the mad speculation over what President Barack Obama was going to say in a surprise news conference on Sunday evening.

“So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden,” he wrote. “Hot damn.”

Mr. Urbahn, a top aide to former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, had moments earlier been lying in bed alongside his wife, taking a rare evening off from the endless news crush to watch the NHL playoffs. (His previous tweet, from an hour before, read: “[Washington Capitals left winger Alex] Ovechkin defines clutch. Unbelievable goal to tie it up w #Caps goalie pulled. Heading to OT now.”)

As reporters—still foggy from the White House Correspondents Dinner parties that had stretched into the wee hours—scrambled to figure out the subject of the news conference, Mr. Urbahn fielded a call from what he only described as a “connected network TV news producer” who asked him to be put in touch with Mr. Rumsfeld for an on-air interview. Bin Laden, it seemed, had been killed, and the network wanted reaction.

Mr. Urbahn waved off the request—it was too premature—and turned on the news, where there were still shots of the White House and network anchors who seemed to know very little about what was to come.

“I mentioned it offhand to my wife, and just threw it down on Twitter thinking there surely have to be a couple of dozen other people who have heard the same rumor and thought of [doing] the same thing,” he told The Observer.

“But apparently not. The tweet went viral and it was off to the races at that point.”

Indeed it was. Mr. Urbahn’s tweet was read and retweeted by some of his friends in D.C.’s  young right-wing policy-maker circles, and then a few more, before it was read by Brian Stelter, the hyperactive New York Times TV reporter, who then sent it out to his 54,000 followers, just as the social media site was undergoing an unprecedented crush, with more than 5,000 messages being sent every second.

“I had no idea who he was. He just popped up on my Twitter feed,” Mr. Stelter told The Observer. “There was a lot of guessing about bin Laden but no one wanted to say it out loud. He allowed people to take that idea seriously.”

Mr. Urbahn is careful to say: “I’m not a journalist. I was watching the news; they were very careful not to report things that were rumor or single-sourced, and that was the right thing to do.” But he knows his way around a newsroom, and has some experience with the way that lone scribblings can ricochet around the Internet. As an undergraduate columnist for the Yale Daily News, Mr. Urbahn earned a degree of blog notoriety for a piece titled “Radical Un-chic: Think Before You Wear,” which decried the uptick of Marxist paraphernalia on campus.

“In casually walking around campus Monday and Tuesday, I saw no fewer than three pre-frosh wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Che Guevara’s pensive black and white face; another proudly sported the Soviet hammer and sickle,” he wrote. “While hardly evidence of a Red invasion of the Yale campus, the approval of communist [sic] emblems as acceptable pop culture icons is nothing short of disturbing.”

A summa cum laude in religious studies, Mr. Urbahn is remembered from his days around New Haven as an earnest and unapologetic motorcycle-riding conservative—a rarity on a campus where, according to one classmate of Mr. Urbahn’s, transvestites outnumber Republicans. After an internship with the Department of Defense, he was hired by Mr. Rumsfeld’s office. He survived a brief interregnum on Capitol Hill after his boss was sacked, then returned to Mr. Rumsfeld’s orbit when the former secretary set up the Rumsfeld Foundation on M Street in downtown D.C. He helped Mr. Rumsfeld write his memoirs, Known and Unknown—the book debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, before falling from sight a few weeks later—at which point, FishbowlDC named him one of the capital’s “Hottest Media Types.” He is now safely settled down with his wife, Kristen, of Louisville, Ky. (Mr. Urbahn graduated high school in New Canaan, Conn.)

In Mr. Rumsfeld’s office, he developed a reputation as a fierce defender of his boss. He once criticized the Pulitzer Committee for honoring the New York Times for a piece that smeared Mr. Rumsfeld. “Does the Pulitzer give prizes for works of fiction?” he said. “Perhaps they just got the wrong category.” He also took shots at luminaries like Sy Hersh and Bob Woodward for what he deemed biased and inaccurate reporting.

(After Mr. Woodward wrote a harsh review of Mr. Rumsfeld’s memoir, Mr. Urbahn sent out a statement which read, “The well known story about Bob Woodward is that he practices what is derided as ‘access journalism,’ whereby he favors those who provide him with information and gossip and leak against their colleagues. Those who refuse to play along, such as Donald Rumsfeld, then pay the price.”)

Before his famous tweet went out Sunday night, official Washington had been in a kind of frenetic standstill. Cheryl Bolen, a White House reporter with BNA, a trade publication for government professionals, had been on pool duty earlier in the day, which included live reports on Mr. Obama’s half a round of golf, until the White House press office had given the lid—journalism-speak for the notice that the president would have no more avails for the rest of the day. When the lid was suddenly lifted, she hustled back to the White House from her home in suburban Maryland, but administration officials remained tight-lipped. She was emailing and calling around to her sources when Mr. Urbahn’s tweet went live.

“Apparently a few minutes later it hit Twitter, and a colleague of mine, a reporter friend of mine emailed me, and said I believe bin Laden has died,” Ms. Bolen said.

Sam Stein, the Huffington Post’s man in D.C., was packing up to attend his grandmother’s funeral in Connecticut when he went back to work and started scrolling through Twitter, listening to cable news and emailing his editors. A reporter on staff who knew Mr. Urbahn reached out to him, and the rest of the staff now at least had a more specific, yes-or-no question to ask to their sources.

Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush, got a Washington Post news alert on his BlackBerry.

“I immediately went into Defcon One,” he said, fearing that news of a biological attack was about to be announced. He sat down in front of his television with his Twitter.

“I saw Keith’s tweet, and it made perfect sense to me,” he said. “And I started tweeting, retweeting him, sending my own messages out. Nights like last night, Americans go to Twitter. And that’s where the news broke.”

Part of the reason for this was, of course, Mr. Urbahn’s bio, listed right on the top of his Twitter page: “Chief of Staff, Office of Donald Rumsfeld, Navy Reserve intel officer, and owner of two miniature dachshunds.”

It was naturally assumed that Mr. Urbahn’s “reputable source” was none other than his boss, Mr. Rumsfeld.

“It was a pretty definitive statement, and I think it just clicked in people’s minds that, given who Keith works for, he wasn’t just making shit up,” said Noah Pollak, a fellow young conservative thinker in Washington and friend of Mr. Urbahn’s. “And that’s also not Keith. He wasn’t prone to exaggeration. He is a pretty straight-shooting guy.” 

Mr. Urbahn disputed the notion that his proximity to Mr. Rumsfeld may have led the rest of the universe to assume that he had gotten the information from someone who maintains close ties with the Defense Department.

“If you look at my Twitter feed, it’s very detached from my job,” he said. “I think they are separate. It’s more personal. I don’t see them as linked.”

Mr. Urbahn said he wrote it, in fact, without regard to how it would be perceived.

“It didn’t give me pause at the time simply because I thought it would be repeated many more times and there was no chance in God’s green earth that my tweet would in fact be what broke the news,” he said.

Still, when Mr. Fleischer, for one, saw the post, he said that he just assumed that it was sent out with the former defense secretary’s sanction, not least because of the Rumsfeldian sign-off “hot damn.”

“I can only presume that Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s office made the judgment before they hit tweet that they were not going to have egg on their face. Whether you are saying something live on the air during an interview or you are tweeting, if you are wrong about something famously prominent in an area where it is your expertise, people will take notice.

“He had to know he had it right before he hit the tweet,” Fleischer continued. “He had to know. Keith and the secretary. Frankly, I don’t think people who work for Donald Rumsfeld would mess with something that important without the boss’ approval. I don’t know that, because I haven’t talked to Keith, but knowing Rummy.”

Added Mr. Fleischer, “I am always conscious of my former job when I tweet.”

Told by The Observer, however, that Mr. Urbahn did not in fact clear the 140-character message with Mr. Rumsfeld, or, by his own account, give much thought as to what it would mean, Mr. Fleischer sat in silence for several seconds.

“Wow. I am startled. He didn’t clear it with Rummy? Wow. Wow. Well, that puts it in a different light. … I think you are onto a really interesting story because that was how the world learned.”

Mr. Urbahn said that had Mr. Rumsfeld provided the information, he would not have sent it out into the world.

“It would not be his style to do that, and if he would have told me, I would have kept it in confidence, for sure,” he said.

Mr. Urbahn acknowledged that it was, in fact, his relationship with Mr. Rumsfeld that sent high-ranking news executives calling him late on a Sunday evening, and he said that his boss seemed unconcerned, despite next-day stories about it in The Times, Politico and the Daily Caller.

“We’ve laughed it off,” he said. “We haven’t had long conversations about it, and I think it is what it is.”

Mr. Urbahn added: “He is 78 years old, but he understands social media. He is on Twitter himself and he tweets things and comes up with ideas for things to throw on Facebook, and you know he gets it. I didn’t have to explain to him what it was. He knew.”

(As for Mr. Urbahn’s other job, as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, a spokeswoman declined to say if the tweet was inappropriate, directing The Observer instead to a part of the Navy’s guidelines for social media usage “best practices.”)

Mr. Urbahn seemed anxious for his newfound celebrity to pass. He is not, he said, interested in a second career as a breaking news Tweeter. He said that the real story is about the journalists who stayed up late working their sources, and, of course, about the Navy SEALS who performed the operation, and the intelligence agents who tracked bin Laden, and the president who authorized the strike. He doesn’t know what it means now that journalists have to compete against their sources to break stories.

“I mean, I can’t really wrap my head around all of this so I may not be the best person to analyze why this has become the story,” he said. “This is a bit of a distraction, and it reaches a little bit to the level of media navel-gazing for my taste.”

And although there has been some snickering that an aide to an Obama antagonist stepped on the president’s message before he could address the nation, Mr. Urbahn is quick to point out that he only beat the Twitter feeds of the White House’s top correspondents by a few minutes. Reporters and flacks—and, well, everyone—he said, would have to get used a to a new social media world without the same rules and standards.

Still, the question remains: Hot damn?

He laughed.

“It’s got a Southern ring to it,” Mr. Urbahn said. “Maybe something I picked up from my wife’s family being from Kentucky, but it’s not a known phrase of mine. At least I don’t think so.”

dfreedlander@observer.com, nfreeman@observer.com

NBC should have reported whether its employee, Gregory, agrees with Fleischer's account (According to Fox News, the other reporter, John Dickerson of Time, disputes it).

(In Fleischer's defense, Hall seems to be a bit of a cue-ball now, too.)

Let's add the caveat here that Fleischer hasn't actually said anything publicly about running. The rumor seems have originated from a story on the conservative magazine Human Events' webpage, in which "friends" of Fleischer note that he "has done just about everything congressional" except run for Congress. But the speculation that Fleischer might make a run has followed him ever since he announced he was quitting his White House job and planning a move back home. All of which leads us to this story from April 2001, from the New York Times' Westchester Weekly, "Native Son: Pound Ridge Still Beckons." It's behind the TimesSelect wall now, so let's summarize a few key details:

--Fleischer hung framed prints of Bedford Village on the wall of his White House office.

--The Westchester County Republican Committee named him its 2001 "Man of the Year." (Come on--Al Pirro can't win every year!)

--Fleischer's parents are avid Democrats. Of her son's Republicanism, his mother says: "He'll grow out of it."

--During his years as a Washington up-and-comer, he often "brought 20 of his Washington friends up [to Westchester County] for a July 4th party at his parents' house and fireworks in the town park."

Hmmm... Sounds like someone's been laying the groundwork for a while.

--Andrew Rice

Everyone seems a little on edge. People keep coming in to get lawn signs, and the lady who runs the office, Crunch Reyna, tells them that if the signs get stolen, they are to call the police, report the crime. A farmer comes in and talks about the Bush office in Cincinnati being bombed.

"These are weird times we’re going through," he says. "I thought the hate was over in 2000, but it keeps getting deeper and deeper."

"They’ve got a grudge from 2000," says Will, a young guy from Washington who’s working the phones with me.

"It’s a bogus grudge," says Kevin. "They lost."

Kevin’s older, from Tennessee. He’s former military with a strong voice and reminds me of a lean Dick Cheney, but excitable. "I absolutely struck gold," he cries out when he signs up four volunteers, and he says he knows Kerry is lying when he says he never met Jane Fonda because he, Kevin, managed a hotel in Washington during the demonstrations in 1971 when Jane Fonda and a guy "with long scraggly hair in an Army jacket" showed up at the same time and went into a meeting room together. That was John Kerry.

Will has given all of us name tags, then he and Kevin get metal elephant pins off the front table to wear on their collars. The elephant feels a little military, but I feel naked without one and I graze the front table looking for a button. There’s one of George and Laura Bush on a painterly clouded landscape. "LEADING AMERICA," it says. It looks somewhat American Gothic, like they’re my parents. I put that one on.

A red pickup truck pulls up and a guy with a beard comes in with two Bush-Cheney lawn signs, dirt still on the stakes. "These were on private property," he says quietly, and leaves. He’s wearing a Kerry-Edwards T-shirt. Everyone is quiet. The enemy in our midst, and he didn’t have horns.

Then a kid comes in and asks if he can have a lawn sign. We tell him to take one.

"I think we just made that kid’s day," Kevin says.

"I think we did," Will says.

I drive down to see the office that got attacked in downtown Cincinnati. Someone smashed a glass window and looted some cash, but the window had been repaired since. I’m put to work on phones again. First I’m confirming volunteers for the final weekend. Then there’s a nervous stirring at 4, and I’m to help test a phone system the campaign has set up to monitor turnout and challenged ballots. A bunch of us are to dial as often as we can, to mimic the crush of calls on Election Day and see whether the system crashes.

Mollie gives us long, fresh sheets of P.I.N. numbers and vote totals. We’re to call the 800 G.O.P. number, then type in the P.I.N. number, then type in made-up vote totals that come from the sheet. The kids next to me are hired high-school kids. It’s numbing work. We move down the lists, one column of "Votes Cast," the other of "Votes Challenged" or "Provisional." The campaign is obviously anticipating huge numbers of challenged or provisional ballots; it’s getting ready for war. Mollie keeps handing out new sheets and announcing every 15-minute interval, when we move on to the next column of fake numbers.

I do it from 4 to 6. My neck aches.

A lady comes in for a lawn sign, and the woman who gives it to her makes a cross sign over it so it won’t get stolen. Then a guy with a yarmulke comes in and asks for a ticket to the Ari Fleischer event. Huh. Before I go, I ask for one too. It’s a fancy printed ticket for an event the next day.

As I leave, Mollie gathers up all the pages with P.I.N. numbers. "These have to go to the shredder," she says. But I walk out with the one I’ve written Mollie’s phone number on the back of.

In my hotel that night, I read a piece being given out at Crunch’s headquarters in Butler County. It’s called "Don’t Close Your Blinds" and is an unsigned parable supposedly narrated by a war vet’s mother. (It has also been on the Internet.) A 9-year-old kid asks his parents why we’re at war, and the father brings him to the window and tells him to pretend that the neighbors’ houses are other countries and that "our house and our yard is the United States of America and you are President Bush."

Then the father tells the boy to pretend that the man across the way is Saddam, who comes out with his wife, "he has her by the hair and he’s hitting her." She is "bleeding and crying … then he starts to kick her to death." The man’s kids come out but are afraid to stop him. "‘What do you do, son?’

‘I call the police, Dad.’"

But the police are the U.N. They say it’s not their place or the son’s to get involved. The woman dies.

"Now he is doing the same thing to his children," says the father.

"He kills them?"

"Yes, son, he does."

The son wants to call the neighbors for help, but the father says the neighbors refuse to help.

"‘WHAT DO YOU DO, SON?’ Our son starts to cry," the mother says.

Next the man goes into a neighbor’s house and kills the old lady there. He sees the son through the window and puffs out his chest and smiles.

The son tells his father he wants to close the blinds and pretend he’s not there. O.K., but then the man is at his door.

Now the son tells his father that he’s going to fight.

"He balls up his tiny fists and looks his father square in the eyes," the mother recounts. "Without hesitation he says, ‘I DEFEND MY FAMILY, DAD! I’M NOT GONNA LET HIM HURT MOMMY OR MY SISTER …. ’ I see a tear roll down my husband’s cheek, and he grabs our son to his chest. He hugs him tight and cries, ‘It’s too late to fight him. He’s too strong and he’s already at YOUR front door, son. You should have stopped him BEFORE he killed his wife. You have to do what’s right, even if you have to do it alone."

When I get back to Butler County headquarters in the morning, Crunch doesn’t want me to work: "We have all the volunteers we need." I can tell she’s on to me. Her voice is different. I go and sit in my car and read the paper and wonder what tipped her off. Then Kevin and Crunch come out across the parking lot. I lower the window. They’re standing there like stern parents.

"We don’t trust you," Crunch says. "What are you doing here? Why did you just show up? Who sent you here?"

I give an evasive answer. "I came out from New York because I can’t make any difference there. I wanted to work in a battleground state."

"Well, a lot of Kerry people are coming around," Crunch says. "They’ve been taking pages and phone lists from offices. That’s a felony."

Kevin asks for my ID and peers at it. "Are you from The New York Times?" I say no.

I drive away, and Rush Limbaugh is urging Republicans not to give way to panic and fear. He calls John Kerry a "phony baloney plastic banana." I eat lunch and head for the Ari Fleischer event when I start freaking out that they will arrest me. I pull over and root around in the trunk for the pieces I took with me, then trash everything: the thing off the Internet about "Close the Blinds," the page of P.I.N. numbers for vote challenges.

The Ari Fleischer event is at a factory called Standard Textiles, in a meeting hall on the second floor. There are maybe 100 people, and the tables are piled with a Bush piece that shows him visiting Auschwitz and talking about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Ari Fleischer is solid and appealing. He says his parents have never voted for a Republican, but that his mother just might this year because the Iraq war was good for Israel.

A guy asks him about Iran. Will Israel have to handle Iran alone if there’s a threat?

"Not so long as President Bush is President," Ari Fleisher says. Then he says that nuclear material in the hands of countries like Iran could be the "spark of World War III." An exchange of nuclear weapons between smaller countries could lead, he says again, to "World War III." That’s why Churchill acted alone in World War II, to try and stop the Nazis. Ari Fleischer says that Eli Wiesel told him that if Churchill had gotten help, the Holocaust might have been averted.

I walk out into the strong sunlight and wonder how many times Ari Fleischer used the phrase "World War III" in the White House.

It takes me an hour to get to Wilmington. The Vice President is going to be speaking at a hall outside town, right off I-71. About 20 Kerry demonstrators are on the grass near the overpass. They’re jumping up and down and laughing, holding up signs. No one’s questioning anyone’s bona fides. They seem joyful compared to the other team.

At the Roberts Center, a thin line of people leads up to metal detectors. There are a crew of kids at tables checking out printed invitations like the one I had to the Fleisher event. They all wear khaki pants and white shirts, though a couple of the boys have long scraggly hair.

Lots of people don’t have a ticket; still they get in. I don’t have one either, but when I get to the table, they ask me for an ID, and when the guy sees I’m from New York, it creates a problem.

"What are you doing here?" I motion at my lapel button, George and Laura. "I came out to help in a battleground state," I say.

A Secret Service guy talks to me, then a guy with the campaign. They confer in the parking lot, then confer again. The last people are going into the rally. Finally the Secret Service guy comes back and says, "It would be O.K. with me, but staff doesn’t want anyone who isn’t local." He shrugs nicely.

I walk away and take the lapel pin off. My career as a plastic-banana Republican is over. In a way, I’m glad that I didn’t get to hear the speech. Seek darkness and you’ll find it.

But in the end we decided to do a wish list. Television is nothing if not an instant-gratification business-so if we're not instantly gratified by what's currently out there, in a 500-channel, digital cable, HBO-on-Demand, Bill Maher–gets-one-show-after-another universe, then something's amiss. So here's 10 wishes:

1. We wish for peace in the Middle East-and on cable news. We've enjoyed the mean-spirited missile attacks between Fox News and CNN and MSNBC as much as anyone-probably more-but it's time to stop. Guys: You all have your positives and your negatives, and as great as you think you are, twice as many people watch an average episode of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter than anything on your respective channels.

2. We wish television news in general would stop being so crazed about being live. Live coverage is easily the most overrated journalistic innovation going. It's one thing if it's Ted Koppel by the Euphrates, but the vast majority of live coverage is merely "live from the scene where such-and-such happened a long time ago, and the only reason we're doing this is because we can." It'd be great if news organizations cut their live coverage in half and devoted the saved resources to enterprise, investigative journalism.

3. We wish television writers wouldn't confuse verbosity with intelligence. One of the more irritating developments of the past decade in TV is the growth of the 78 R.P.M. drama: shows in which characters speak faster than kindergartners who have to go to the potty, and always do it so grammatically and exquisitely-Blake references! Teddy Roosevelt quotes!-and launch smart comebacks every time. We'd really enjoy it if, every once in while, a super-smart character on a super-smart show said, "Huh?"

4. We wish David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Kilborn and Jimmy Kimmel would do one week a year where not a single one of their guests had something to plug. And Bobby Short was the musical guest every night. We guarantee it would be the most interesting week of the year-and, probably, the worst-rated.

5. We wish someone would give Monica Lewinsky a reality show. Wait: done !

6. We wish the Friends could live forever. We really do. And by the end, the world will have run out of money to give them, so instead of giving them cash, we'll have to award them vast tracts of land-literally, nations-so people living in, say, China, will instead live in "Lisa Kudrow" and have to answer to Lisa Kudrow if she wants to do anything, like redecorate the Great Wall for InStyle magazine or something.

8. We've moaned about this before, but we wish Six Feet Under would knock it off with the dream sequences. It's gotten to the point where when anything interesting happens, you automatically assume it's a dream-just like you do with the CBS Early Show .

8. We wish there'd be a reality television dating series which followed the love lives of the people who create reality television dating series. Why do we get the feeling it wouldn't exactly be Shampoo ?

9. We wish there was a sign on the right-field fence in Yankee Stadium that read, "Hit This Sign-and Michael Kay Shuts Up For Three Innings."

10. We wish Larry David ran everything.

Tonight on Fox, the finale of American Idol . [WNYW, 5, 8 p.m.]

Thursday, May 22

Found: media defender of Jayson Blair! In the person of Ted Faraone, a loquacious, no-nonsense local television consultant and public-relations rep. Mr. Faraone, of course, has a Big Fat Reason for sticking up for Mr. Blair-he's angling to help his client, former Current Affair executive Ian Rae, land the reporter's life rights for TV/film/book-but it's worth noting he was also an occasional source for the disgraced ex- Times scribe, and said he was never burned by inaccuracies or cooked-up info.

"He did well and he got everything right," Mr. Faraone said. "He impressed the sources I introduced him to."

Mr. Faraone said it was a "big surprise" to find out Mr. Blair had been fabricating/ripping off stories. He called him a "very intelligent, very good reporter, very creative, good turns of phrase, good writer-all of the above."

"If he had applied to all of his work the standards he applied to the stories he did on which I helped him as a source, this whole scandal wouldn't have happened," Mr. Faraone said. "And it really infuriates me, all the people who go around saying, 'See what happens when you start giving preference to black people!' That really pisses me off."

We smell an "executive producer" credit for Mr. Faraone somewhere down the line! Tonight on WPIX-one of Mr. Faraone's other clients-it's Sabrina, the Teenage Witch . Isn't Sabs post-pubescent at this point? [WPIX, 11, 8 p.m.]

Friday, May 23

NYTV Left Coast correspondent Alexandra Jacobs took time off from her packed schedule of writing, editing, hosting media salons and couching with Jenny Aniston to weigh in on last week's epic Dawson's Creek finale:

Fans of the young-adult television drama Dawson's Creek -indeed, citizens of the world-can be divided into two camps: the "DJ"ers and the "PJ"ers. "DJ"ers are the cerebral, sexless idealists who thought that Joey Potter should wind up with that insipid broad-browed beta-male Dawson Leery. "PJ"ers are quick-pulsed emotional types who kept hoping, against all reason, that Joey would find a way to be with that handsome devil, Pacey …. What was his last name, anyway?

Well, no matter. The series finale last Wednesday marked a resounding victory for the "PJ"ers, still basking in the afterglow on the show's teeming on-line message boards. After an excruciating two hours- during which that soporific blond chick took waaay too long to die (with obligatory plastic tube up her nose) and there were more same-sex clinches than in The Hours-Joey, now a sophisticated book editor, is spotted in her improbably luxurious Manhattan high-rise watching TV with … Pacey!

Phew! One might venture that Dawson's Creek is this generation's Philadelphia Story , with the tomboyish, holier-than-thou Katie Holmes in the Kate Hepburn role, James Van Der Beek as a bumbling Jimmy Stewart (albeit with a big forehead and zero charisma) and Joshua Jackson settling Cary Grant's ermine mantle over his shoulders. Thanks for six special years, guys, and this Janey-come-lately fan will see you over on TBS.

Thanks, Jake! Tonight, Jake takes Precious and the cats to an early buffet at Asia de Cuba as TBS force-feeds us a Mets loss to the Braves. [TBS, 8, 7:30 p.m.]

Saturday, May 24

Kurt Andersen's a great talk-show guest-we caught him the other day on Charlie Rose talking about the Matrix phenomenon, even though he hadn't seen The Matrix Reloaded , and he managed just fine, much better than we ever did when we blew off the Faulkner before American Lit and tried to skirt by using the words "sweeping" and "Gothic."

The point is Mr. Andersen's a pro at this stuff, and he now has his own talk show, which ought to be good, and it is. It's called Face Time , and it's on the Trio network-growing in reputation as the Thinking D-Girl's Digital Channel-and for its upcoming season Mr. Andersen's gone out and interviewed a bunch of comedians, among them Dennis Miller-another professional talk-show guest-Bernie Mac and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the latter of whom has a paw up his hindquarters belonging to SNL /Conan O'Brien genius Robert Smigel.

Trio president Lauren Zalaznick raved about Mr. Andersen and Face Time . "Talk shows fall into two categories," she said. "Fairly uninteresting people talking to all different kinds of people, and in Kurt's case, an interesting person talking to all sorts of interesting people."

Ms. Zalaznick, who used to work for VH1 before it became the " Us Weekly Channel"-seriously, one of these days that Cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs network is going to run out of "sexy" pop stars to build cheap compilations shows out of, and it'll be just as grisly as the day they ran out of drugged-out Behind the Music bands-said that Mr. Andersen's show benefited by not having to do the usual talk-show pumping of "Friday movies" and so on. "That takes the lid of publicist pressure off and you end up with a more genuine conversation," she said.

In other words, it may be a conversation with a rubber-dog hand puppet, but at least the rubber-dog hand puppet isn't whoring an American Pie sequel! Face Time premieres June 1. Tonight on Trio, Perfect Pitch , a documentary about the art of convincing executives like Ms. Zalaznick to burn money. [TRIO, 102, 8:30 p.m.]

Sunday, May 25

Jeff Zucker-we mean, Ari Fleischer-has decided to step down as the White House's spokesman, and you can hear the crocodile tears in Washington, D.C., all the way up here. Mr. Fleischer, of course, was hardly Mr. Revelatory-the guy was scripted as tightly as a Mamet moll-but we'll miss his nice glasses, his occasionally spooky answers (hypothesizing the Iraq war could be avoided with a single bullet) and, of course, his important siege upon international freedom scourge Bill Maher.

Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer-who's been around one or two White House spokesmen in his time-agreed that Mr. Fleischer wasn't forthcoming with the press, but wondered if the young charge was simply following orders from on high. "He never gave you much information beyond the talking points," Mr. Schieffer said. "But I always had the idea he was operating under such tight restrictions that maybe he just couldn't go beyond that."

Mr. Fleischer said he's quitting the White House to move on to work in the private sector. Cable news networks, start your contract departments!

This morning on Face the Nation , Mr. Schieffer kindly begs some of his audience to go watch This Week with George Stephanopolous , "just to buck the kid up a notch." [WCBS, 2, 10:30 a.m.]

Monday, May 26

We couldn't get out of here without giving local loon/ Pop-Up Video guy/NYTV mascot Tad Low a final chance to sound off, and we were lucky to catch him at the airport, en route to Italy to attend the wedding of Rick " Cad " Marin and Ilene " Swell " Rosenzweig (hope Mr. Low brought his bear suit for the reception!).

We wanted the Tadster to talk about the future of television-we were hoping he'd sketch some kind of hilarious dystopia in which we'd all be downloading reruns of Silver Spoons into our optic nerves-but he was actually pretty thoughtful about it (the guy went to Yale!). Mr. Low predicted a not-so-future future in which the principal television delivery devices would be hand-held phones and P.D.A.'s (hey!-didn't we read about that in the "Circuits" section?) and there'd be no such thing as nailed-to-your-couch destination viewing (as in, "Everyone gather around at 9 p.m. on NBC and watch the season finale of Frasier !").

Mr. Low thought TV would soon be a free-for-all.

"The only thing people will watch en masse anymore will be sports and helicopter car chases!" Mr. Low said. He suggested the sitcom would soon be dead, and advised all sitcom writers-boy, Mr. Low just loves sticking it to those guys-to go out, buy cars and try to induce police chases if they wanted to see their work on the telly.

Television as we knew it would soon be dead, Mr. Low said.

"Les Moonves is a guy with a nice suit riding a dinosaur!" he said.

We have no idea what Mr. Low is talking about. Tonight on CBS, Yes, Dear . [WCBS, 2, 8:30 p.m.]

Tuesday, May 27

Tonight on YES, it's the Boston Red Sox Versus the New York Yankees in a game of professional baseball played in the Bronx, N.Y. [YES, 80, 7:05 p.m.]

Thanks everyone for the e-mails, anger and encouragement. Now shut that thing off, go outside and take a walk. Courage!

Even Trent Lott is learning that it's possible to wake up one morning as head cheerleader and fraternity president, greeting an endless parade of friends-and then wake up again a few days later as Piggy, the unfortunate victim in Lord of the Flies , with that mob of friends sharpening their spears.

The most important difference between high school and Washington is that national politics requires discussion of "issues" as well as poll-measured popularity. What observation reveals is how much the latter tends to influence the political handling of the former, even in a White House that affects to disdain the ebbs and flows of public opinion. Consider the changing attitudes of press secretary Ari Fleischer (and his various unnamed associates) during the days that followed Mr. Lott's unguarded endorsement of Strom Thurmond's 1948 Presidential candidacy.

At his briefing on Dec. 10-four news cycles after those unwise comments-Mr. Fleischer sounded staunchly supportive of Mr. Lott. On that subject, he was unusually clear in his responses to questioning: "I think that from the President's point of view, Senator Lott has addressed this issue. He has apologized for his statement, and the President understands that that is the final word from Senator Lott in terms of the fact that he said something and has apologized for it …. The President has confidence in him as Republican leader, unquestionably."

That confidence wasn't widely shared, as the President appeared to realize on Dec. 12, when he edged away from Mr. Lott. "Every day our nation was segregated," said Mr. Bush, "was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals." His demurral was eloquent and, according to his aides, deeply felt. But immediately after that speech, Mr. Fleischer made a point of telling a New York Times reporter that "emphatically and on the record, the president doesn't think Trent Lott needs to resign."

By Sunday, Dec. 15, The Washington Post reported that the White House "is hedging its bets." Senior aides were divided about whether to defend Mr. Lott against restless conservative pundits and rivals in the Senate. "Compassionate conservatism," already discredited by the comments of former Bush aide John DiIulio in Esquire , was endangered by the specter of a burning cross. Over the days that followed, Mr. Fleischer returned to non sequitur mode, refusing to repeat his earlier endorsements of Mr. Lott. His White House associates were whispering off the record that since the Republican leader seemed doomed to demotion, the President wouldn't intervene to rescue him.

Executing Piggy won't necessarily expiate the sins of the rest of the tribe, however. It may only call further attention to them.

Mr. Lott's incautious comments at the Thurmond birthday party were a symptom of what has been wrong with the Republican Party, but they weren't the disease. Removing him from leadership is a necessary act of moral hygiene, but it isn't a cure. Dating back to Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy," which first attracted Mr. Lott from the ranks of the Dixiecrats into the modern G.O.P., Republicans have appealed in various ways to "seg" sentiment across the nation. At the same time, they have tried to convince blacks and moderate whites that their party is too modern and too tolerant to countenance racism.

The political result has been a form of racial schizophrenia. The President's father sided with Barry Goldwater and the National Review against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A few years later, the senior Bush voted for an open-housing law. When he ran for President in 1988, his supporters employed the inflammatory racial symbolism of the Willie Horton ad to win over white voters.

Leading figures in the Republican hierarchy today carry heavy racial baggage. As a Supreme Court clerk, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote memoranda supporting the notorious "separate but equal" jurisprudence of Plessy v. Ferguson . As governor of Missouri and later in the U.S. Senate, Attorney General John Ashcroft maintained ties to "white power" advocates in his home state and displayed little concern for racial equality. The President himself, and many of the conservatives who now demand the ouster of Mr. Lott, have never evinced much concern about the blatant bigotry of Jesse Helms, another ancient symbol of the bad old days.

And now, conservatives such as George Will are furious with Mr. Lott not only for what he said about Mr. Thurmond, but for what they regard as the groveling tenor of his apologies.

Dumping Trent Lott won't be the end of this discussion, nor should it be. With or without him, his fellow partisans still have a lot of explaining to do.

By the close of business on Monday, Dec. 2, there seemed almost perfect agreement between White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and John DiIulio, the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Both were advising everyone, in almost identical wording, to pay no attention to the troubling tales about the Bush administration that Mr. DiIulio had told writer Ron Suskind for the January issue of Esquire .

The sequence of events during that day gave off an extraordinary Orwellian odor, as if the loquacious Mr. DiIulio had been subjected to a swift but thorough course of Republican thought-reform. The news cycle began with a story in The New York Times previewing Mr. Suskind's long, engrossing investigation of how Karl Rove and his minions grind out policy sausage in the West Wing.

The paper reported that Mr. DiIulio had nicknamed the White House boss and his minions the "Mayberry Machiavellis." He had given Mr. Suskind a vivid, detailed view of the political evisceration of domestic policy; the intellectual vacuum on the President's staff; the absolute authority of the fearsome Mr. Rove; the dominating influence of the "religious right and libertarians"; and, in short, the Bush administration's failure to achieve anything of significance on the home front.

That morning, Mr. DiIulio made matters slightly worse when the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of political science, issued a brief statement on his behalf. He apologized for any hurt feelings and quibbled with two minor errors, but affirmed the Esquire story's substance.

The White House quickly reasserted its will to control the news. At his noon briefing, Mr. Fleischer crisply informed the press corps that "any suggestion that the White House makes decisions that are not based on sound policy reasons is baseless and groundless." Although Helen Thomas tried to press the issue, the questioning instantly reverted to Iraq, where Mr. Fleischer wanted it. He did reveal, however, that Mr. DiIulio "has spoken with officials in the office-the faith-based office, and talked with them."

Within less than two hours, another release emerged from the Penn press office: "John DiIulio agrees that his criticisms were groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples. He sincerely apologizes and is deeply remorseful." He promised never again to discuss or write about his frustrating experiences in the White House.

Can we now put all this behind us and forget we glimpsed that man behind the curtain? Not this time.

When a former government official is interviewed, and later retracts or denies what he or she said, that may create a reasonable doubt about a story. Frustrated people sometimes speak in haste and say things that may be inaccurate. Misunderstandings and

misquotes happen too often. That's what the White House claimed when Mr. Suskind's last Esquire article appeared in July, with candid quotes from chief of staff Andrew Card about his fear that the departure of Presidential counselor Karen Hughes would mean unchecked power for Mr. Rove.

But Mr. DiIulio did more than speak candidly with Mr. Suskind over a period of months. In late October, after mulling over their conversations, he sat down and wrote a seven-page, nearly 3,000-word letter that began with the words "For/On the Record." (Its full text can be found at www.Esquire.com.) The devastating remarks and anecdotes faithfully quoted from that letter in the Suskind article were not ill-considered quips delivered on a barstool. They were the written recollections and reflections of a widely published and quite conservative academic.

Nor is Mr. Suskind a writer "with a notorious reputation"-as Robert Novak quickly said in attempting to discredit him-unless the 1995 Pulitzer Prize he won for feature writing at The Wall Street Journal lent

him a certain notoriety for skill, accuracy and polished prose. For all its negative aspects, his portrait of the Bush White House is nuanced and painstakingly fair. He quotes Mr. DiIulio at length on the finer qualities of George W. Bush. And he opens with a charming sketch of Mr. Rove putting up Christmas decorations with a group of children at the home of a former Clinton aide.

Consider for a moment how the national press corps would have treated such a story from within the Clinton White House in December 1994. They habitually gave far more attention and credibility to material of far less substance during the eight years of that administration. And there is no way that Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart would have been able to shut down questioning about an article like Mr. Suskind's as curtly as Mr. Fleischer did.

Then consider, after reading the Esquire article, which will soon appear on newsstands, what the press apparently cannot report (and probably doesn't know) about the inner machinations of the Bush White House. The new occupants have changed the tone, indeed: It's either happy talk or dead silence.

Beyond those immediate observations, we know far less at the moment than we need to know about the events leading up to the coup and countercoup in Venezuela. Who was killed in the violent street demonstrations of April 11? Who did the shooting? When did the State Department learn that a coup was imminent? What did our diplomats (and military attachés) say to the plotters? Why did the White House and the National Security Council ignore our treaty obligations to oppose the unlawful overthrow of an elected President?

These are not rhetorical questions. The establishment of democratic institutions, civil society and human rights in the nations of Central and South America is by no means assured. Continuing conflict over the region's extreme disparities of wealth-and the reluctance of powerful interests to surrender their political privileges-continue to threaten the development of freedom and constitutional order. In theory, at least, U.S. policy seeks to encourage that development, and to discourage the recrudescence of dictatorship and despotism.

Yet the wind from Caracas carried a pungent, unwholesome aroma of earlier military interventions against elected governments-and the traditional complicity of the United States and the mainstream media in those criminal conspiracies. That smell intensified with the release of comments from the Bush White House, where press secretary Ari Fleischer seemed to welcome the forcible removal of the twice-elected Hugo Chávez and the installation of a "transitional civilian government" which "has promised early elections."

As Mr. Fleischer uttered those words, Pedro Carmona, the oilman anointed as "dictator for a day," was attempting to dismiss the National Assembly and the Supreme Court so that he could rule by decree. Only a sudden mass uprising by Chávez supporters and the turnabout of the military rank-and-file frustrated the schemers.

There was something surreal about the official U.S. response to this chaotic situation, coming as it did from an administration that had actually lost the popular vote in the last election here and only attained power by judicial intervention. Of course, no one is supposed to dwell on the 2000 election and its disputed aftermath anymore, irresistible as such comparisons may be.

Anyway, there were plenty of other ironies in the American response to the coup attempt. Among the most notable was Mr. Bush's proclamation of "Pan-American Day" and "Pan-American Week" on April 12-the very same day that his administration was failing so miserably in its responsibilities to its southern neighbors.

His proclamation was intended to honor the growing hemispheric commitment to those shared values, and so on. In glowing terms, it describes the strong response of the Latin democracies to the terrorist assault on the Twin Towers last September.

Coincidentally, on Sept. 11, 2001, all those liberty-loving friends of the United States were in Lima, Peru, with Secretary of State Colin Powell for an important ceremony. They were there to approve the Inter-American Democratic Charter, a document meant to strengthen the multilateral commitment to protecting constitutional democracy in the hemisphere.

Last week, on the very first occasion that the new charter was invoked, the U.S. was not merely unsupportive but actively obstructive, according to an excellent account by Karen DeYoung in The Washington Post on April 16. The nations that rallied behind us when we were attacked are disgusted, to put it very mildly. That they helped to undo the coup in Venezuela without Washington's assistance only emphasizes the poor performance of the Bush administration.

Once again, the supposed masters of foreign policy serving Mr. Bush have displayed their own arrogance and incompetence. In this episode, they proved that they believe in multilateral diplomacy only when it serves the interests of the United States, and that they honor constitutional processes only so long as those processes produce the desired result. A single day's duplicity has revived every ugly memory of the U.S. role in Latin America during the Cold War.

Those memories encompass the conduct of the mainstream press during that era, when newspapers often behaved as propaganda adjuncts of the Central Intelligence Agency. When The New York Times published an editorial endorsing the Venezuelan coup on April 13, the paper of record sounded weirdly anachronistic. It was as if the editors had forgotten everything they ought to have learned in the last four or five decades. The Times grudgingly acknowledged its error on April 16, in an editorial that denounced Mr. Chávez as "autocractic." The editors confessed that in their enthusiasm, they had "overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed."

North Americans often regard themselves as paternal teachers of democratic values to the underdeveloped countries. But evidently it is our elites who have much to learn about liberty from the people of Latin America.

cried "vandal," is in a world of trouble. The clever ploy he executed last

January to demean the White House's former occupants and thus dignify his

boss-all the while feigning high-minded disinterest-looks more and more like a

lowdown frame-up. His accusations about the damage done to the executive mansion by Clinton administration staffers

have lost credibility, and so has he.

After months of media hyperbole about felonious behavior and

hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, the only "evidence" put forward to

substantiate Mr. Fleischer's charges is a couple of photographs. At most, they

show an office littered with boxes and files. To date, there is no evidence of

severed phone lines, wrecked keyboards, obscene graffiti, busted furniture,

stolen plaques, pilfered doorknobs or any of the assorted awful delinquencies

ascribed to the departing Clinton staff in stories attributed to anonymous Bush

sources.

Of course, the veteran

scandalmongers of the national press corps required little or no substantiation

for this thrilling story. By last January, broadcasting and exaggerating such

tales about the Clintons, their staff and their associates was an eight-year

media addiction, and its ill effects were exacerbated by the related habit of

ignoring or burying exculpatory facts.

These old journalistic

patterns persisted for a while, even after the General Accounting Office's

investigation of the supposed vandalism, demanded by Representative Bob Barr, a

Georgia Republican, revealed no incriminating data. According to the General

Services Administration, "the condition of the real property was consistent

with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after

an extended occupancy." Likewise, the G.A.O. informed the kooky Congressman that

the White House had provided "no record of damage that may have been

deliberately caused by the Clinton administration."

Despite the typical reluctance to properly correct lurid,

baseless headlines, the official contradiction of Mr. Fleischer's fantasies was

too sharp to be suppressed by the Washington press corps. At long last, some of

these Elmer Fudds, stumbling around with their notebooks and tape recorders,

started to suspect that they'd been duped. This suspicion grew when, upon being

asked a few elementary questions, the press secretary responded with blusters

and evasions. His answers were less plausible than a dot-com business plan.

Consider Mr. Fleischer's

claim that the alleged damage was "catalogued" by the White House staff. It

quickly turned out that he hadn't meant that term to be taken literally, as no

one had physically recorded any act of vandalism until June 1. Instead,

according to him, an outraged Bush aide was maintaining full and complete

"mental" notes for four months.

(Mr. Fleischer insists

that the Clinton gang threw away all the pencils and paper, a nefarious act

that may have precluded traditional methods of compiling information. Or

perhaps, as he has hinted more than once, the Bush staffers and their boss,

George W., were just too noble to write down those bad things.)

Fortunately, the young

Republicans have prodigious brains. They remember everything perfectly! How

else to account for the highly detailed set of "facts" provided to The Washington

Post by Mr. Fleischer last weekend?

Suddenly, he had nice round numbers for the disconnected or damaged telephones

(75), pornographic phone messages (15), discarded binders (6,000), tampered

keyboards (100) and booby-trapped fax machines (six).

Concluding with a few tart words about the Bush

administration's unappreciated "graciousness," Mr. Fleischer told the Post that he now hopes "everyone can go

on with the policy and business of the government." That may not be possible

just yet, however, much as he would like to get back to prevaricating about

bigger issues.

The unstraitjacketed Mr. Barr has demanded another vandalism

probe by the G.A.O. (although one of his calmer aides apparently told United

Press International that he doesn't really want "a full-blown investigation

with subpoenas and hundreds of interviews." Maybe just enough to refurbish the

original smear, if possible.) And Mr. Barr's request has been endorsed by many

former Clinton staffers, who believe it will vindicate their innocence of

anything more destructive than minor pranks.

Meanwhile, the media pack might press Mr. Fleischer with a

few more belated inquiries: Do any requisitions, orders or other documents

exist to confirm the vandalism story? Are there any photographs of skanky

graffiti? Will anyone on the White House staff speak on the record about what

they found in late January?

If this fiasco drags on much longer, the Oval Office

masterminds who pull Mr. Fleischer's strings could decide that their flattened

flack is no longer worth the embarrassment. There is a traditional solution to

problems such as this.

The press secretary can be "promoted" to handle "other

responsibilities" that don't require any skeptical adult to believe what he

says. From a White House that never apologizes, that might be apology enough.