Gaggle is a daily comic strip about the Washington press corps and Larry the press secretary. Larry deals with the shenanigans of reporters who couldn't imagine anyone voting for a Republican.

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Newsweek's Howard Fineman and Eleanor Clift could hardly contain their excitement over the "Power Outage" of the Republican Party. (Oct. 10 Issue). Indeed, by the time the first paragraph was finished, the GOP "Leadership" (put in quotes by Newsweek) was described as one that supposedly promotes a feeling of "awe and fear" by the "flock," the members not in the "Leadership." The meeting of "The Leadership" was dark and secretive enough to be analogously compared to the Baath Party:

"In the Tom DeLay era—now at least temporarily ended—a meeting of the House Republican Conference usually was a ceremonial affair, at which "Leadership" (always a single word, spoken with a mixture of awe and fear) clued in the flock on Done Deals. The proceedings had the spontaneity of a Baath Party conclave."

On Friday, the New York Times once again slammed Karen Hughes on her tour of the Middle East. (Subbing for Clay Waters at TimesWatch, Ken Shepherd questioned the trend Wednesday and Friday.) In Friday's piece, Times reporter Steven Weisman mentioned the views of retired diplomat Edward Djerejian, who issued a report two years ago on America's failed efforts at public relations (or public diplomacy, as the goverment calls it).

But while Weisman uses Djerejian to whack at Bush's low standing in opinion abroad, Djerejian's report (see here in PDF form) raises questions about what on Earth was going on in the Clinton years. Djerejian's answer: they let the public-diplomacy apparatus fall apart. Or, as the report states in Section I, "A process of unilateral disarmament in the weapons of advocacy over the last decade has contributed to widespread hostility toward Americans and left us vulnerable to lethal threats to our interests and our safety."

Editor and Publisher notes that just days after the New York Times "sort of admitted it had erred in a blast at Fox News' Gerald Rivera during the Katrina tragedy," the paper has now finally ran a "full correction" for a "miscue by columnist Paul Krugman, while announcing a new policy on noting errors on that page."

Krugman had admitted on three occasions that a part of his August 19 column regarding media recounts of the 2000 presidential race were incorrect, "but critics kept claiming that he still hadn't gotten it quite right." On Sunday, the paper issued a fourth correction.

Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins called it a "correction run amok."