Chris Beam unfurled a beloved Beltway CW as way to prop up the breathless Blago story in terms of it being an “Obama scandal.” (And yes, in the last paragraph of his piece, Beam noted “The Blagojevich complaint leaves him pretty much untainted.” Of course, if that had been in Beam's first paragraph the whole piece would have been pointless. Nifty trick, eh?)

According to Beam, this is what everyone within elite media circles agrees about scandals, and plus it's been true forever:

The first rule of political crisis management: Tell everything. Every megascandal, from Watergate to Monica, was exacerbated by the slow trickle of embarrassing information. Better to put it all out there at once, take the heat, and move on.

Personally, I admired how Beam immediately raised the specter of previous presidential impeachments when analyzing the Blago story. But the key point was that presidents always have to release all embarrassing information. Immediately. It's the only way to make a story go away. It's the only way to get the press to back off. And if presidents (or president-elects) don't immediately disclose every morsel of information, the tenacious Beltway press is never going to be satisfied.

To that I have a two word response: Harken Energy.

Think back to when that embarrassing presidential scandal broke in 2002. Did Bush instantly reveal every Harken-related fact, figure, time and date? Did the White House do everything it could to make sure journalists had as much relevant information as possible and do it in a timely fashion? Please.

But if Bush stonewalled, that meant the press hounded him mercilessly about his fishy Harken entanglements, right? Again, don't make us laugh.

Slate claims the press rules for presidents have been carved in stone for ages. Actually, the rules being applied to the Democrat today are exactly like the ones that applied to Clinton the Democrat in the 1990's. Yet for some miraculous reason the same rules did not apply to Bush the Republican, and people like Beam play dumb about it.