http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=tujNKJBJ6GYxXlH%2FAML5EG%3D%3DHours before President Bush announced his Supreme Court nominee, a White House reporter from a major daily newspaper was on the phone with one of "the four horsemen." The horsemen--former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, Federalist Society pooh-bah Leonard Leo, and Jay Sekulow, best known as Washington's most prominent Jew for Jesus--had earned their nickname because they were the four outsiders who worked most closely with the White House on the Supreme Court nomination. If anyone knew who Bush was about to pick, it would be one of them.
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This is partly the White House's own fault. The Bush administration has promoted an explosion in the use of "sources close to the White House"--or scttwh. The phrase shows up in news databases more times for Bush's four and a half years than it does for the eight years of the Clinton presidency. This White House's stinginess with information has sent reporters scurrying to find knowledgeable outsiders, even if those sources don't always know what they're talking about. "They fill a vacuum," says Richard Wolffe, who covers the White House for Newsweek.
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The first name to come rolling off the tongues of reporters when it comes to scttwh is Ed Gillespie. "He is the top guy I would put on that list," says a newspaper correspondent. Gillespie is Washington's omnipresent GOP operative. His core business is his multimillion-dollar lobbying firm, Quinn Gillespie, but he spins through the revolving door between the Bush world and K Street at a dizzying rate. Over the last few years, his lobbying career has been interrupted by stints on Bush's first campaign, as party chair, and, most recently, as a strategist working out of the West Wing on the John Roberts nomination.
<snip>
The longer Bush is in office, the more sources close to the White House there seem to be. The culture of fear that the Bushies have instilled in Republicans who speak ill of the administration--or who speak candidly--has forced more of them to hide behind veils of vague attribution. In fact, the epidemic has now migrated into the White House itself. At least one reporter recently granted a White House official the cover of a scttwh. Reporters say that this practice of officials inside the White House trying to disguise themselves as outsiders is becoming more common.
Which means there's a whole new category of sources close to the White House: liars.
...more at link...
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