Questions raised in the passive voice (II)

Michael Tomasky nails it in the Guardian:

So there are still some things that we legitimately have a right to know the answers to. To me, they boil down to these three:

1. What were the contacts between the Obama camp and the Blago camp on the senate seat issue?
2. Did the Blago camp say anything that sounded potentially illegal?
3. If “yes” on 2, did the Obama people go to law enforcement?

That’s it. Everything else is mush — the kind of nonsense journalism too often gets into about “perceptions” and “a culture” that just tar people with broad brushes. Journalism often operates only at the level of ridiculously simplistic extremes. If something isn’t completely “put behind” a person, then by cracky it must be a “scandal.” But there are a lot of things that are neither and occupy the gray space in between the poles.

In Salon, Joe Conason warns of a possible return to the Clinton era, when “the right-wing propaganda machine and their enablers in the mainstream media” spent years trying to bring down Bill Clinton. Their efforts would have fizzled entirely if Monica Lewinsky hadn’t come along late in the game.