Under the broad auspices of "news", both local papers today have stories out this afternoon featuring the police report from the DUI McGavick revealed last week.

In what looks to be a fierce rush to judgment, both the Seattle Times and Seattle PI stories spin McGavick's confession last week as "dishonest" and "misleading". The Times RSS headline even claims that McGavick "lied" to police--an interesting claim because the report never quite reached that conclusion. The headline appearing over the story backs away from that claim--"McGavick stumbled, fell asleep after DUI arrest, 13-year-old report says."

Now I'm not trying to minimize the severity of McGavick's transgression--surely driving drunk ranks up there alongside the worst of offenses. But what started out as a confession about personal failings has quickly become the persecution of a candidate for being less than perfect.

Leading local bloggers like Goldy at Horse's Ass and David Postman have both played a key role in keeping the story in the limelight. (See here, here, and here for HA, and here and here for Postman) The former's intentions and motives couldn't be clearer--he's well-known as a partisan hack--but why would the latter, a respected journalist for the region's leading paper be so keen on keeping the light on McGavick?

True, when a candidate runs for office, they subject themself to a higher level of public scruitny. But McGavick not only freely copped to the DUI charge--he put did so in a humble and forthright way on his blog. Therein lies the problem. As Don Ward mentioned in an earlier post, there seems to be a certain amount of contempt for McGavick (and the blog post where he released the infromation) by the press for taking this pre-emptive action.

In this case, it's beginning to look like McGavick can't win for losing. But if the undeserving persecution keeps up or builds--I'm willing to bet this will come back to bite Cantwell. Nobody likes jackasses that keeps harping on someone else's failings--especially when it was the someone else who confessed it as a failing to begin with.