Parry's certainly been around, and around the capital block, longer than I have, but I remain considerably more hopeful than he does about the ultimate power of the DSM revelations.

Let's recap this fast-unfolding mini-story. It begins with 'congressional hearings' held on Thursday by Congressman John Conyers, along with thirty or forty other House Democrats. Of course, they weren't real hearings, since Republicans couldn't possibly be less interested in investigating the topic under discussion, the DSM scandal. Conyers literally barely got a room in the capitol for the hearings, and what he did get was a tiny SRO box in the basement, overstuffed with cables, cameras and sweaty people. But whatever and wherever these hearings were or weren't, the important thing is that they were nevertheless held.

Next, so-called reporter Dana Milbank filed perhaps the ugliest hit-piece of so-called coverage I've ever seen, printed in Friday's Washington Post. It was a virtual primer on how not to report, a near-perfect précis which inadvertently cataloged everything wrong with that which goes by the increasingly farcical name of journalism in America today. Can you say 'vicious smear job'?

John Conyers responded with a justifiably angry letter to the newspaper's publisher, rightly complaining of bias, and setting straight the basic (and easily obtained, had Milbank wanted it) factual record (http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/299).

He was then followed most recently by Robert Parry, who addressed the entire debacle in a pessimistic reading of this affair-within-an-affair. In his article (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0618-30.htm), Parry argued that "the Post's attacks on the Downing Street Memo hearing should serve as a splash of cold water in the face of the American Left", and wound up calling impeachment a "pipedream".

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

Parry makes many excellent points in his essay, not least of which include his detailing of the thug-like behavior of America's sycophantic and self-reverential mainstream media, the free ride the right tends to get on news stories, and the breathtaking ineptitude shown by the left in recent decades when it comes to media matters. He then illustrates his points by reference to a case he knows well - having literally written the book on it - the sad tale of the Contra-cocaine importation connection of the 1980s.

But while many of Parry's critiques are well-founded, his bottom-line pessimism is not. An excavation of the differences between the Contra-cocaine case he invokes to prove his point, and the Downing Street affair to which he relates that case, serves to show why such pessimism is not (yet, anyhow) warranted.

There are many such differences, and they are not trivial. To begin with, the story Parry refers to in comparison to the present case was literally old news when it broke. That didn't make it less sensational or less significant, but the fact that a crime from the 1980s was being exposed a decade later did make a difference. By 1996, Reagan was long gone, as were the Sandinistas, and the contras were no longer murdering Nicaraguan peasants. That hardly makes the story of CIA sponsorship of drug sales to Americans irrelevant, but it does take a considerable bit of the edge off. In any case, nothing analogous to this is true in the Downing Street case. It concerns a scandal only three years old, perpetrated by the currently sitting administration, and done so in support of a war continuing to consume American soldiers and tax dollars at this very moment and for the foreseeable future. All of which makes a big difference in terms of public interest in the story. To fully appreciate how much timing matters, note carefully how assiduously the administration and its apologists keep insisting that there's "nothing new" in the Downing Street documents. Making it appear to be old news, if they can, would take a large degree of the sting out of the allegations.

The war itself also makes this very different from the Contra-cocaine case. A war is the most highly visible of national affairs, driven by an explicit policy choice made by the government. (Again, for a gut-check of the plausibility of this argument, look at how the administration tries so hard both to make Iraq invisible, and to argue that it was a war of necessity, not of choice.) The same cannot be said about the perception of drugs or drug-related violence, even should they take more American lives. Rightly or wrongly, most Americans will see drugs as a spontaneous personal or social malady, like alcoholism, which is 'just one of those things' in life. For most, it's a lot bigger stretch to hold a government responsible for drug abuse, as a phenomenon, than for the decision to go to war.

The impact of the two stories is also different because Ronald Reagan was a much-beloved president, especially by the mid-1990s, when the combination of his illness, his perceived achievements, and a whopping dose of historical myopia about his failings (much of all this the non-accidental product of right-wing hagiography) conspired to make him an American 'Immortal', halfway up Mount Rushmore even then. Bush is not that, will never be that, and is instead fast consummating the downward trajectory in popularity begun on his first day in office, and only interrupted by 9/11 and the rally-around-the-flag effect attendant to two wars. To be sure, lots of starry-eyed political Moonies of the right adore this guy no matter what, but he is now more broadly reviled in America, and its only gonna get worse from here, Downing Street or not. There is a surly mood in the country right now, and much of that biliousness is directed toward incumbent officials in government (read Republicans). Even if impeachment remains a 'pipedream' today, it may not be come January 2007 when a new and possibly Democratic congress (and possibly Democratic because of this very issue and the failure of incumbents to act on it) is seated.

Next, it's worth noting that it was the CIA, not the president, which was accused of the crimes in the case Parry compares to the present scandal. In addition to the fact that the public more or less expects the CIA to be involved in nefarious activities (albeit against other countries), there is also a very large difference in the scale and quality of the respective targets of attention. Presidential scandals are much bigger deals, and even had it been the less-excusable Department of Agriculture, say, instead of Central Intelligence, a president in trouble will always draw much greater interest, and much greater ire.

Another very big difference between then and now comes in the form of evidence. As I remember the Contra-cocaine issue, the evidence acquired was produced chiefly by means of San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb's dogged investigative efforts. Even if what he produced were to have been more substantively powerful than the Downing Street documents, not much can compare to the psychological cache of the top-secret, top-level, insider's leaked government document. As constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz noted at the Thursday hearings, to walk away from these documents would have been the equivalent of walking away from the Nixon tapes. People get this stuff, straight up, and they get the significance of documents which show government officials talking to each other, sans the spin necessary to placate the unwashed masses.

Yet another difference is that there are today 122 members of Congress who have called on the president to respond to the implications of the Downing Street documents, and that number is climbing. Admittedly, that large caucus has so far made little dent on either the White House, the official business of Congress, or the press, but it nevertheless serves as the seed for a potential cloudburst of major proportions. At some point, a critical mass may be achieved which even the media can't ignore. At some point, the reactions of the president's opponents alone make that which they are reacting to a story that must be told. Could the press ignore it if the entire Democratic congressional caucus did a sit-down strike on the steps of the Capitol? (We could only hope the Republicans would add to the spectacle with some sort of extraordinarily ham-fisted reaction, like arresting the Democrats for trespassing.) In any case, I don't think the Contra-cocaine story ever generated anything near even the current level of congressional interest given to the Downing Street documents, let alone that which may come down the pike.

Finally, perhaps the biggest divergence between the two cases concerns the twin dynamics of media r/evolution since 1996. What a difference a decade makes. The Net is everything in the DSM case, but was in its infancy for the Contra-cocaine affair. Moreover, the flip side of the Internet's growth in influence has been the concomitant fall from grace and power of the formerly monolithic mainstream media. Information consumers have vastly more choices today than they did in the past, which, coupled with the insipid work (and gaping omissions) of which Milbank's piece is not even the worst exemplar, has increasingly caused eyeballs to migrate away from the former towering pillars of American journalism and toward something more real. Next to 9/11, this war is the biggest story in America during the post-Cold War era. But if somebody wanted to accurately understand either its run-up or its current run-down, you sure as hell couldn't have done so by reading the New York Times or watching CBS. Backing the likes of Judith Miller, Dana Milbank or Dan Rather, the mainstream media is accelerating its slide into irrelevance just as the availability of alternative sources is rising to fill the gap. So much for capitalist laws of competition-driven excellence - these guys are committing suicide right before our eyes. Oh well. Good riddance.

But here's the important point. Just as Watergate was a minor blip if it had happened in a time before audio tape, so the most salient difference between Downing Street and the Contra-cocaine affair may also be technological: that is, of course, the existence and unfettered power of the Internet.

The best way to see this is by considering the greatest absurdity of this whole farce. Where and how, in the mainstream media, has this story been covered? There have been more than a few editorials on the Downing Street documents, and even a couple of news stories here and there, but a huge proportion of the 'coverage' which address this issue take the form of discussions concerning why the press isn't covering it.

Think about that for a second. The media is devoting considerable ink and chatter to reporting why it is not reporting a story, whilst continuing to not report the story. If you're thinking maybe you fell through the looking glass here, that's because you perhaps did - there could be no more appropriate media behavior in the Age of Bush than this Madhatter lunacy. Otherwise we'd have to hear that the war is a fraud that is destroying our military and thus making us less - not more - secure, that the national treasury is hemorrhaging red ink like a burst dam, that we're trashing the environment as fast as you can say 'Hummer', and that more or less the whole world now hates us. Bummer, man. Who needs that?

But as fun as mental illness can be, none of this actually gets to the more important point here. There are now scads of newspaper articles and discussions on the television shout-fests about how (and supposedly why) the mainstream media is ignoring this story. But how many such pieces or TV rants are there about, say, the absence of coverage for little Morty Rosenberg's bar mitzvah in Brooklyn last week? No matter that his parents may be livid. Not only is the media ignoring this story, they're even ignoring the story about how they're ignoring the story. Nary a word about the missing Concord Grape or Aunt Sadie's 'outfit' has made it to print.

What's the difference between the two cases? The only reason the press is reporting on their lack of reporting on Downing Street is because of the complete disconnect between what they're doing and what we real people are doing in the blogosphere. While we rant in anger about a real-life man-bites-dog story, they struggle to turn it into a dog-bites-man routine, and that only because they can no longer sustain the cognitive dissonance of their preferred nobody-bites-anybody take on this, the mother of all scandals, parked in front of everyone's collective nose.

We pushed them to at least talk about what they're not talking about, and if we can achieve that in a few short weeks, how long will it take to actually get them to do the real story, especially with public revulsion and congressional action growing exponentially?

Robert Parry makes many good points in his article. The state of the American military-industrial-political-media complex is as abysmal as it is shameful, just as he tells us. And perhaps Parry will have the last 'laugh' someday, too, as we sit commiserating on barstools in some Washington dive, both crying in our beer, him saying "Told ya.", long after this scandal has fizzled like all the rest and the neocons have conquered the planet.

But I still say now is not the time for pessimism. I don't deny that the whole disaster of American society could, in the not-necessarily-distant end, all come crashing down in a foul pile of fascist rubble.

Meanwhile, though, we have the most serious and offensive scandal imaginable just waiting to affix itself to George Bush like his own personal tar baby. We have it documented in black-and-white, just the sort of nuance-free, right-versus-wrong scenario conservatives are always squawking about. No "It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is" games going on here, folks. (Wait, what's that you say? 'Fixed' means 'bolted on' in Britspeak? Oh, that's good to know. Thanks for the clarification.) We have a context which is perfectly ripe for an angry American body politic to turn quickly and menacingly on the arrogant criminals who have deceived us in the most egregious fashion. And we have a sorry collection of media hacks who twist themselves into six-dimensional pretzels, bloviating perversely in service to their monetary masters (yep, they're just a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty), but who nevertheless have also shown themselves vulnerable to our pressures.

We have, in short, a real shot at this thing. What we need to do is crank up the pressure massively, right here and right now, not withdraw in sullen anticipation of yet another shellacking.

Now is not the time for despair or pessimism. Now is the time for hope, and that hope lives on Downing Street.

David Michael Green (pscdmg@hofstra.edu) is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. In addition to articles posted on this site, he is blogging on New York Times coverage of the Downing Street Memo at www.afterdowningstreet.org.