The Price of Disloyalty

Over at Slate, Timothy Noah discusses the trend regarding the fates of Bush defectors:

By far the greatest humiliation endured by the above-mentioned Bush defectors rained down on the earliest bird of all, Dilulio. Within seconds of the Esquire piece hitting the stands, the White House was able to wring a series of groveling public apologies. The White House achieved this, it has been whispered, by scrutinizing the Venn diagram of rich people who gave both to the Bush campaign and to the University of Pennsylvania, where Dilulio taught. Some fat-cat Bushie Penn alumnus was then dispatched to instruct the Penn administration (or perhaps Dilulio himself; this part's unclear) that Dilulio's rude comments might prove costly to university fund-raising if they weren't retracted with all deliberate speed.

But recent defectors like Matthew Dowd and Vic Gold get little more than a cold shoulder.

Presumably everyone would agree on the following, right?:

(a) The actions described above are deplorable and inexcusable. Any individual or administration who/that would employ such tactics is to be condemned, and is very likely to be unworthy of the kind of respect one ordinarily associates with the presidency.
and
(b) If the actions described above never actually happened, then people should stop "whispering" about them, quit writing about whispering about them, etc.

As is so often the case, the moral question here is fairly clear-cut; it's the facts that we lack.

[HT: Statisticasaurus Rex]