Did You Know...

The Washington Post sends a reporter to cover President Bush’s Middle East trip and what does he do? What important breaking news does he file?

He writes 851 words about Maureen Dowd’s stomach bug and how a White House doctor was kind enough to treat her.

He gave her Pepto-Bismol.

I think you’ll needs some, too, after reading that crap journalism. A snippet:

Presidential aides, including press secretary Dana Perino, made clear early on that Dowd could see Dr. Richard J. Tubb, the Air Force brigadier general who oversees the White House medical office and takes care of the president at home and abroad.

But Dowd declined. With no medication, she tried to soldier on by grabbing whatever rest she could in her hotel room–not easy to do in a trip of constant movements. By the time the presidential entourage moved to Bahrain from Kuwait on Saturday, she felt even worse. She was so sick, in fact, that she could not write her regular Sunday column.

Dowd finally decided to take up the White House on its offer.

A young press aide, Carlton Carroll, helped arrange for Dowd to visit Tubb at the Emirates Palace, the over-the-top $3 billion luxury hotel where the president and his aides were staying. The hotel is so vast that Dowd and her escorts got lost twice in the marble and gold hallways. She finally found herself in a fully-staffed doctors’ office with a trunk full of various medications, a solicitous nurse and a super-competent White House physician.

Tubb gave her a few tablets of Cipro and some Pepto-Bismol and told her to check back with him the next day. She turned down Tubb’s offer of an IV (so there was no chance of an “accidental” poisoning, she joked).

“He was wonderful–just really sweet,” Dowd said in an interview Tuesday afternoon in the press filing center in Riyadh, where she appeared to be on the mend and said she was feeling much better.

Hey, WaPo: I’ve got a hangnail. Send a reporter! I’m in nearby Maryland, so no need to buy your intrepid investigavie sleuth a plane ticket. I’ll give you the exclusive on my backache, too.