Andrea Mitchell Watch, Day 1

I realize there is some unwritten law that says no woman newscaster is allowed to appear on any of the NBC channels and question the network's hypocrisy relative to the Valerie Plame affair, but Andrea Mitchell's continued presence thereon is particularly grating. I for one live for those special moments when she, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews get together and "question" each other like they're all not up to their eyeballs in it. The stuff of Murrow, that.

Tom Maguire points out this little gem from the Tim Russert show on October 29, 2005:

MITCHELL: You know, I should have spoke--'cause there's been a lot blogged about all of this--I was called by the CIA because it was erroneously reported in The Washington Post that I was the recipient of the leak before Novak's column came out, and I had not been. So I was never questioned because I simply told the FBI--and, you know, NBC put out a statement that night--that I had not been a recipient of the leak; in fact, I had learned about it from Novak's column like everyone else. Then after the fact, a lot of us had gotten calls and conversations with people, you know, `Hey, how about the Novak column?' But that was after the fact.

That particular highlighted sentence is really a marvel of construction -- she maintains she was never "questioned" even as she's saying she talked to the FBI. Did a few agents just swing by to drop off a casserole and she started blathering so fast they couldn't get a word in edgewise?

Oh those nasty bloggers and their mean questions. We should all just go back to posting vacation snaps and leave reportering to the professionals.