When Bob Woodward wrote about President Bush, Newsmax’s Ronald Kessler was quick to attack. In an October 2006 article, Kessler highlighted how former Bush White House chief of staff Andrew Card told him that claims regarding him in Woodward’s 2007 book “State of Denial” were “not true.” (Though Kessler did approvingly quote Woodward when he expressed views about Gerald Ford that presumably mirror Kessler’s own.)
Woodward is back to being a hero in Kessler’s eyes after the release of Woodward’s book on the Obama presidency, even defending Woodward’s veracity:
Some will question the credibility of Woodward’s reporting, as they did when he wrote in his book “Veil” that Director of Central Intelligence William Casey spoke to him while hospitalized.
When the book came out in 1987, CIA officials and Casey’s widow Sophia denied that Woodward could have gotten past CIA security at the hospital or that Casey could speak after having undergone surgery for a malignant brain tumor.
But as related in my book “The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror,” William Donnelly, who was in charge of CIA administration, including supervision of CIA security officers, admitted, “Woodward probably found a way to sneak in.”
Kessler also joins the right-wing freak-out over Obama’s statement that America can “absorb” another terrorist attack, huffing that the statement means “the rest of Obama’s policies dealing with national defense make perfect sense” and that it “should help put an end to his aspirations for a second term.” Kessler conveniently ignores that President Bush said similar things.