the terrier as terrorist

Bought a book today, Chain of Command, by Seymour Hersh [one interesting response here], which promises to be a ripping read. Reading the intro, was amused by this description of the term muckraker , a term Hersh would happily apply to himself:

Theodore Roosevelt had adapted the term from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – the man ‘who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor’ – in order to criticize ‘reckless journalists’ [who threatened to expose corporate dealings in his administration].

A more modern endorsement comes from that well-known peacenick Richard Perle. ‘Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly’. Ah, the renovation of language – they used to call them communists.