There are few sights more unedifying than a politician - or a political party - trapped in a web of its own construction, trying to bluster or bully a way out. The most abiding image of the disgraced Richard Nixon is his spitting and uncomprehending rage at the conspiracy that brought him down. That conspiracy was a newspaper which insisted on printing the facts.
But there is often more to the technique than simple anger. There is a cunning, deliberate strategy, when caught in a corner, to try to shift the onus back on the perceived accuser. It is the defence of the desperate, as many a lawyer will know. If it works, the focus will move from those under scrutiny to those who insist on answers to inconvenient questions.
Mr Charlie McCreevy gave a fine rendition of the technique yesterday on RTE's Morning Ireland - and not for the first time. The issue upon which the public ought to be concerned, according to Mr McCreevy, is not whether Mr Ray Burke was investigated by the Taoiseach or whether Mr Burke has questions to answer over why he took £30,000 from a man he didn't know. It is not whether the Taoiseach has kept his promise to confront corruption. Mr McCreevy would far prefer to have the public concentrate upon The Irish Times and how it runs its news operation.
This newspaper and its political staff will not be drawn into diversions devised by Fianna Fail's counter-insurgency strategists to take the spotlight off its self-inflicted grief. Nor will its readers expect it or want it to. Nobody in the media has had £1.3 million from Ben Dunne or taken envelopes stuffed with thousands of pounds in cash from strangers. Nobody in the media has had the power to dispense favours, or issue passports, or grant licences, or issue export cover or rezone lands. The Irish Times will not go on trial because Charlie McCreevy cranks out his single-transferable spiel about media conspiracies.
But Mr McCreevy has raised one question which will be answered. He is curiously transfixed on the content of the Cole report. Why, he asks, if The Irish Times had the report, did it not publish it last Saturday? The imputation being that Cole somehow diminishes Mr Burke's culpability.
This is an irrelevancy and a brazen bluff by Mr McCreevy. The Cole report neither accentuates nor diminishes Mr Burke's role in the issuing of the passports as adumbrated in The Irish Times's report of last Saturday. It confirmed that there were serious departures from procedure in issuing the passports and set out Mr Cole's findings at some length. It was decided to publish it in Monday's editions after the Taoiseach declared over the weekend that he did not have a copy of it. He was kind enough to acknowledge on television on Monday that he had now read it "courtesy of The Irish Times".
Mr McCreevy has something of a fool's pardon from this newspaper by now for his regular threnody on its iniquities. But Ms Mary Harney should know better. She describes last Saturday's reports as merely a regurgitation of last year's news. This is not good journalism, she solemnly warned. In fact, last Saturday's reports told the public that Mr Ahern had investigated Mr Burke three times, including one occasion after he had been appointed as a Minister. They revealed that Mrs Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, when Minister for Justice, had expressed her "very serious concern " about the case. They revealed the findings of the Departmental inquiry. They revealed that £3 million of the money due to be invested by the Saudi Arabians had yet to be traced and is still missing. Ms Harney has not distinguished herself so far in this affair by her great grasp of detail. Last Saturday was, in fact, rather an enriching day for the general public's right to know how the national assets are husbanded by those in power.