America/Conor O'Clery: The complaint by Gerry Adams that the Taoiseach would not take his telephone calls brings to mind the time in 1995 when John Major refused to take calls from Bill Clinton, so furious was he that the US president had admitted Adams to the White House and permitted Sinn Féin to raise funds in the United States.
In the intervening decade, however, it has become routine for the president - whether Clinton or Bush - to entertain all parties at St Patrick's Day events in the US capital in the interests of the peace process. Whether this year will be any different following the Northern Bank raid is up in the air.
The advice of the London and Dublin governments will be important, but the likelihood is that without something dramatic happening, Sinn Féin could get snubbed by Washington, too.
The attitude in Washington in the wake of the Colombia case and the bank robbery is "come back and see us when you've got rid of the arms", said a long-time Sinn Féin supporter in the capital.
The White House is committed to the usual shamrock ceremony with Bertie Ahern on March 17th but apparently hasn't yet worked out the St Patrick's Day arrangements. So far there is no indication that the administration will revise the ruling on visas and fundraising.
Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly and Rita O'Hare are expected in the US next week and may have to do some explaining.
America is now more of a "cold house" for Sinn Féin, many of whose supporters are - ironically - more inclined to believe the head of the NI police than Gerry Adams about who pulled off the robbery.
Adams's credibility rests on his supporters in the US being convinced he did not know anything about the raid and that it was carried out by a rogue group.
An editorial in Wednesday's Boston Globe underlines the problems for Sinn Féin. "The IRA has morphed from a terrorist gang into a Hibernian version of the Tony Soprano organisation with one twist - it is closely aligned to the second-largest political party in Northern Ireland," it said.
Another organisation whose credibility has taken a beating this week is CBS, one of the three big television networks in the US and a giant player in what is known as the "mainstream media". Four top journalists were fired for their role in broadcasting a report at the height of the US presidential election campaign based on apparently forged documents critical of President Bush's National Guard service.
An independent investigation found that a "myopic zeal" led CBS to air the story, which was fronted by CBS presenter Dan Rather. It is now open season, for partisan columnists and mainstream commentators alike, on the veteran anchorman. He has been pilloried as a "liberal" broadcaster desperate to find a story to damage Bush. No one really disputes that Bush did not complete his national service - it has come up at every election - but the documents purported to show he had disobeyed a direct military order to report for a medical check-up. This was more serious.
Pat Buchanan went so far as to suggest a criminal conspiracy at CBS to unseat a president. The independent inquiry found no evidence of political bias, however, a conclusion dismissed by detractors, despite the fact the inquiry was led by a former Republican attorney general, Dick Thornburgh.
The debate about Rather centred on whether he wanted to be first on a big story, or first on a story that undermined a Republican president. Whatever the case, the anchorman is stepping down in March, a decision he astutely announced before the Thornburgh report came out.
In the wake of a series of scandals at the New York Times, USA Today and now CBS, the mainstream media is losing its credibility as an independent Fourth Estate, charged with holding politicians accountable. In the opinion of Washington Post media commentator Howard Kurtz, it is dropping in public esteem and is seen by more and more people as having a liberal bias - though Bill Clinton never got an easy ride over Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky and a host of other media-driven stories.
Howard Feinman at Newsweek suggested the mainstream media is being "destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards".
It's not just the mainstream media that has credibility problems. On the right, the scandal over star pundit Armstrong Williams taking a quarter of a million dollars from the administration in exchange for promoting its "No Child Left Behind" education programme may get bigger. "This happens all the time," said Williams, raising the possibility of a "No Pundit Left Behind" policy.
President Bush confesses! In a round-table interview with reporters on Thursday Mr Bush expressed misgivings about goading Iraqi insurgents with the taunt: "Bring 'em on."
"Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean," he said. "'Bring 'em on' is the classic example."
And after declaring he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive", he said his wife Laura had chided him, asking "Why did you do that for?" Bush said it was "just an expression that came out" and that he had learned a lesson. "So put that down," he told the reporters. "I don't know if you'd call that a confession, a regret, something."
Senate majority leader Bill Frist himself took care of news management when in Sri Lanka to inspect tsunami damage last week.
Associated Press reported that as an aide took pictures, Frist ordered: "Get some devastation in the back."