Revive The Sixties' Paranoid Style

Max Boot doesn't like Seymour Hersh's investigative reporting that much:

It's hard to know why anyone would take seriously a "reporter" whose writings are so full of, in Ted Kennedy's words, "maliciousness and innuendo." That Hersh remains a revered figure in American journalism suggests that the media have yet to recover from the paranoid style of the 1960s.

The actions of the Bush Administration, based on non-stop fanciful fictions, merit precisely such skepticism, however. If the press weren't such a scurvy band of lick-spittle eunuchs, we wouldn't have seen the Plame scandal, or had to read the insidious lies of power-currying Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie. The press are a target. Paranoia is appropriate! And what does Seymour Hersh say?

...we all deal in "macro" in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists.

Is that paranoia, or is that an apt description of reality? Speak Truth to Power!