Beltway Media Finally Musters Outrage – Over Rep. Issa Spokesman Leaking Reporters’ Emails to an Author

George Bush’s obviously false rationale for invading Iraq didn’t do it. Neither did the revelation that Bush senior staffers, including Vice Pres. Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, wrote a torture manual for the CIA — or that Cheney, Karl Rove and others deliberately betrayed a covert CIA program tracking the black market for weapons of mass destruction.

“Death panels” didn’t do it. The fakery of the astroturfed tea party mobs didn’t do it. Nor has the increasingly embarrassing presence of the Fox News cuckoo bird hatchling befouling the media elites’ well-feathered nest.

In fact, you’d have to go back to the Chandra Levy scandal in 2001, — in which Democratic Rep. Gary Condit was tried and convicted (falsely, of course) by the Beltway media in the murder of Levy, a young congressional intern — to find the last time the bewigged media dandies in the capitol shook off their collective torpor … until today:

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) fired Kurt Bardella, one of Capitol Hill’s top press secretaries, after he provided e-mailed correspondence with other journalists to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich.

Issa, in a statement Tuesday afternoon, said that the “information shared with Mark Leibovich appears to have been limited to Kurt’s own correspondence with reporters,” claiming that the internal workings of the committee — which include sensitive documents — had not been jeopardized.

Issa’s internal probe of Bardella’s participation in the book, which were prompted by a series of questions and a story by POLITICO Monday night, is ongoing…

The revelation that Bardella was secretly sharing emails with a Times reporter for a book has rattled the press-source relationship on Capitol Hill, as top communications aides have wondered how it will affect how they deal with reporters. Issa, for his part, said that he will “rebuild any broken trust with the journalists who cover the important work of our committee.”

See how it works? An illegitmate war in which thousands die and trillions are wasted? Ho-hum. The president turns America into torture state? Please. Killing a secret WMD program? Eh, partisan yapping.

But a press secretary leaking our reporting to another journalist who’s writing a book about the DC media elite?

Off with his head!

Issa’s rapid response here is noteworthy, too. The voluable if slightly dimwitted California multi-millionaire has taken over former maverick Sen. John McCain’s role as the biggest media whore in Congress.

Always seeking exposure, and always good for a quote, Issa can’t afford bad blood between him and his journo enablers, especially the crew at right-leaning Politico.