File Under: What Liberal Media?

Or, alternatively, "Why Pinch Sulzberger, Bill Keller, and, in this case, Sheryl Gay Stolberg are Destroying Democracy" (3,215th in a Series).

Take a look at the headline of this NYT White House Memo:

White House and Lawmakers Alike Face Risks in Executive Privilege Fight. (emphasis mine)

Writer Stolberg describes the deafening silence from the White House in the face of subpoenas for Supreme Court justice wanna-be Harriet Miers and the Tracy Flickesque Sara Taylor. Here are the risks she outlines for the White House:

If Mr. Bush reaches an accommodation with lawmakers on testimony from Ms. Miers and Ms. Taylor, Democrats will inevitably demand similar terms for Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser. The last thing Mr. Bush wants is the image of Mr. Rove going up to Capitol Hill to submit to questions from Democrats.

But if the president does take the legal route, invoking executive privilege to protect his right to receive unfettered advice from his aides, he risks looking like he is stonewalling — at the very moment that he is trying to salvage his domestic agenda by working with Democrats on issues like immigration and the reauthorization of his signature education bill, No Child Left Behind.

And the "risk" for the Democrats: "run[ning] the risk of looking like they are waging a fishing expedition."

Oh, dear.

I guess Ms. Stolberg was absent the day multiple polls showed that Americans support such fishing expeditions (which, when your party is doing the fishing, are known as "investigations").

No matter. Stolberg has a very unbiased source in former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, who thinks the subpoenas make "everybody look bad."