"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
for 3 August Updated every WEEKDAY.

At Suck we've never had any objection to petulant prolixity. But the self-exonerating star turn of our old friend Renata Adler in the October Harper's sets a forbidding new standard, not merely of haughty outrage-for-outrage's sake, but for the practice of journalism as a sort of self-administered acid flashback. Adler, you may recall, had been taken to task by a battery of writers in the New York Times this spring for trotting out, in her shrill New Yorker memoir, Gone, a bizarrely unsourced slur on the reputation of Watergate jurist John Sirica, to the effect that he was corrupt, dishonest and chummy with the mafia. When Times media correspondent Felicity Barringer gave Adler an opportunity to respond, she averred, in that haughty Gothic way of hers, that she would come forward with documentation at a time and in a venue of her own choosing — adding for good measure that Barringer's clamor for some immediate documentation was "deeply silly." Now that we have Adler's labored efforts to lend substance to her cheap shot in hand, they present a set of exponentially more silly answers. As journalism goes, her waspish, 12-page close reading of Sirica's memoir is equal parts desperate Cochranesque courtroom theatrics and McCarthy-ite guilt-by-association charges — an especial irony, since another of Renata's kitchen sink indictments of Sirica in Gone was that he was a cheerful crony of Tailgunner Joe.

The evidence, you ask? It turns out that Sirica's father Fred had a barbershop frequented by mighty suspicious charcters in the Mob-happy Prohibition era, and Sirica himself had a short career as a professional boxer in Washington when the sport was illegal in the District. From that nugget of fact, Adler spins this gossamer web of insinuation: "Illegal boxing ... requires payoffs ...You simply cannot do it on your own. It requires a syndicate — notoroiusly hostile to encroachments on its own turf." Ergo the mob-enabled career of Johnny "the Jurist" Sirica. Unfortunately for this clammy bit of theorizing, the Mob never established a serious presence in Sirica's native DC, nor was Washington boxing, while illegal on the books, exactly rife with payola and dark-shadowed intrigue. On the other hand, as ardent students of Mob trivia can tell you, east coast magazine distribution has long been lousy with Mafia ties — and Adler's windy, pointless excursis in desperate self-exculpation appeared in a magazine widely distributed, and headquartered, on the East Coast! By her own standards of proof, Renata "the Rudderless" Adler herself boasts "clear ties" to the Mafia. (Of course, it's a classic Mob tactic for the guilty made guy to be the first out of the gate with blistering accusations.)

It's much the same story with Renata's other cut-and-paste juxtapositions of gaps in Sirica's 1979 memoir To Set the Record Straight (What's this? A memoir with