TIME FOR SOME RESULTS?

Coleen Rowley, Sherron Watkins and Cynthia Cooper, the whistle-blowers, were very courageous in their actions (and hmm, all women telling the truth about the abuses of mostly men, in the FBI, CIA, Enron and WorldCom). Because of the example they have set, I'm very cool with Time designating them as the persons of the year.

There's just one problem, well-expressed in today's Krugman:

They deserve to be celebrated. After all, thanks to Ms. Watkins and Ms. Cooper, Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers have been indicted, and the politicians who did their bidding have been disgraced. Thanks to Ms. Rowley, incompetent officials at the F.B.I. and C.I.A. have been removed from their posts, and we've had a searching inquiry into what went wrong on Sept. 11.

Oh, I'm sorry. None of that actually happened. The bravery of the whistle-blowers was real enough, but Time seems to be celebrating what should have been, not what was.

That such things didn't happen as a result of the whistleblowers' actions, I must note, should not take anything away from what they did. They are still very deserving of Time's recognition. It's still a bummer, though, that about six months after Rowley's memo went public, the Bushies chose Henry Kissinger to head up the independent 9/11 commission. Sometimes it just sucks too much to think about.