Some editorial staff member at the WaPo has an image of him/her self wearing a blindfold and holding a scale aloft. That's the only reason I can see for the editorial this a.m. of "Political Spectacle", advising that both Congress and the executive branch should back off.

Now that makes sense. A crime seems to have been committed, the cretin in chief makes a stand that he's not going to allow investigation of the crimes of his staff, and Congress ought to make nice? Sure, that would serve the country. We could just relax and enjoy it.

While admitting that the maladministration has given wrong and misdirected information thus far, your editorial pose of even-handedness can't give to the Congress its due role of enforcement. Instead, it wants to throw a sop to the urinary, oh, sorry, unitary presidency pretense.

Lawmakers would do well to demonstrate more understanding of the legitimate institutional concerns at stake here -- is the President not entitled to confidential advice on personnel matters? --and to remember that the tables could easily be turned, as they were not so many years ago, with a Republican Congress eager to rifle through the files of a Democratic administration.

So on the assumption that the GOP is always to be run like a street gang with no interest but to disrupt the operation of government, the Dems should bow to an absurdity, according to this reasoning. That the president claims he can't receive confidential advice if that advice doesn't include the potential to break the law sort of makes the point, that getting to the bottom of this will show that a crime has been committed. That a crime shouldn't be prosecuted because the GOP has shown it gleefully disrupts the country by, say, a preposterous impeachment medicine show, on the precedent set is to approve that childishness substituting for sound governing. Also, the precedent has already been set.

In the Clinton term, the president himself and his aides testified, under oath. The claims of this criminal regime that it has to have cover for its crimes has already been disproved.

While the backhanded slap at both sides concludes If Mr. Bush is serious about wanting the truth to come out, he will relent on this issue, the absolving of an argument that holds no water whatsoever doesn't give the 'balance' it's held out to give.

When an editorial staff has to blind itself to injustice to be even-handed, it is not performing its function as a purveyor of disinterested news. The WaPo staff needs to take a serious look at the role it has assumed, as apologist for the criminal regime.