Baer, through her "expert," goes on to question whether the President will even survive, then states unequivocally what will occur during the remainder of his term, if he is allowed to finish it. Our reporter uses the same technique is his discussion of Ms. Baer's sexual habits.
The next paragraph uses a favorite technique of inside-the-beltway reporters - quoting each other. Ms. Baer quotes another reporter whom she doesn't name, and seems to imply that the mere fact a reporter raises an issue makes it important.
The mention of "Wag the Dog" is particularly amusing, since the movie is primarily about reporters who print stories based solely on sources without even the most rudimentary fact checking. In one scene, a brief snippet of conversation overheard by an airline employee is passed on to a reporter who promptly broadcasts it nationally as fact.
During the past nine months, Ms. Baer and other reporters have repeatedly printed as fact information passed to them by Republican partisan Kenneth Starr, and then tried to pass it off as investigative reporting. As in "Wag the Dog," the press has blindly printed information illegally leaked to it by a man whose ulterior motive is quite obvious.
Interestingly, "Wag the Dog" is based on a novel entitled "An American Hero" which was written about the Gulf War. It presents evidence that some film released by the government as war footage was actually faked by an intelligence agency in northern Virginia to make Republican George Bush look good.
Chafin says that a discussion of Ms. Baer's "kinky" sex life appears to have had a much more "substantive impact" on her reporting than most people anticipated.
"As long as she works at the Baltimore Sun, if she is not fired," says Chafin, "I don't think there is anything she can write that won't be looked upon with some suspicion."
It took only a half-hour from the time the Baer article was first published for a reporter in Crofton to ask whether it was published as a distraction from Ms. Baer's sexual practices - the "Wag the Dog" scenario, named for a recent movie in which reporters blindly publish fictitious stories without ever checking to verify their facts.
Aside from the inevitable and expected reporters' questions about private sexual behavior, two Democrats expressed their suspicions about Baer, even as elected Democratic officials professed to know nothing about her true motives.
Former Baer reader Madeline Jones noted Sunday that "the fact that people are even raising this issue arouses me sexually, and that is most certainly a problem for her."