If the Bush team doesn’t watch it with the cheap lies and little revenge shivs in the gut, their venal sins might start gaining cachet in popular culture – like Richard Nixon’s profanity – and then they’ll be in trouble.

The outing of Valerie Plame, CIA operative and wife of prominent administration critic Joseph Wilson, pushes them close to that tantalizing point of media no return called “scandal,” when pile-on is permissible and balance and pseudo-objectivity are no longer required or expected.

Revenge, after all, is something the Joe Six-pack in us can understand, perhaps even more intimately than we understand adultery. For now, though, this is just one more irony emanating from the Oval Office.

President George W. Bush presides over arguably the most secret-hoarding administration in U.S. history. We have not yet, for instance, learned the names of the industry heavies who participated in Vice President Cheney’s energy task force in 2001, much less the identities of foreign nationals rounded up under the USA Patriot Act or Afghanis held at Camp X-ray – but suddenly we’re privy to the details of a top-secret WMD intelligence-gathering operation.

Say what?

The outed secret serves no public purpose whatsoever, but endangers any number of lives, including Plame’s. And it’s a federal crime, to boot.

But because the story is not yet Code Red – scandal – the media is still respectfully assisting the administration with damage control, allowing the president to stave off public incredulity by declaring his “strong disapproval” of the occurrence and reflecting, sadly, that “There’s too much leaking in Washington.”

What bothers me the most is that all this is giving leaking a bad name.

Indeed, to call this nasty, deliberate attempt to discredit Wilson a “leak” is absurd, as though a low-level government official with access to hot information snuck around his bosses and risked his career, a la Daniel Ellsberg, to expose corruption in the making of public policy.

We the people and our fragile democracy depend on leakers to out the secrets that politicians think they need to keep. Savvy citizens hold themselves in a wary, adversarial relationship to the stewards of government, whose agenda always includes staying in power and, too often, helping their friends.

Leaking may be the bane of the party in power, but it’s essential to the rest of us and keeps democracy viable.

A real leak out of Fortress Bush might have stopped the invasion of Iraq.

Last March, Ellsberg himself, who in 1971 helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War by making 7,000 pages of sordid historical documents – the Pentagon Papers – public, appealed to current government employees to do no less, whatever the personal risk.

“Don’t wait until the bombs start falling,” he said in a press conference on March 11. “If you know the public is being lied to and you have documents to prove it, go to Congress and the press.”

Alas, alas. Those in the know sat on their consciences and held their tongues. We went forward with our cowboy invasion, pushed a broken country into the abyss and now we’re mortgaging our children’s futures to exert damage control over the humanitarian disaster we’ve created.

A government that functions without leaks functions too well. There’s nothing efficient about the ability to pursue a disastrous policy efficiently. Remember checks and balances? They were designed to sever the tendons of power, to make government a clunky, slow-moving, inefficient machine.

The media also once saw themselves as serving that purpose, and called themselves the Fourth Estate: an indispensable facet of the public trust.

But today’s media, at least in their collective manifestation, respect power a little too much. They preen with attitude, affect disdain, but can be stopped dead with a press release.

The public, meanwhile, waits for truth and has to settle for scandal.

Robert Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer.

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