Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward received a "veiled threat" from the White House last week, The Politico reported on Thursday. What as the "threat"? "I think you will regret staking out that claim." Chilling! The threatener, Ben Smith later reported, was White House Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, who'd emailed Woodward over the origins of tomorrow's government sequestration: Woodward claims it was the Obama administration's idea; Sperling disagrees. (Other sentences from the email: "I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today," "But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here.") Surely, you can see the Nixon parallels? The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin could: "Obama will never be Reagan,"she tweeted last night, "but he could be the Dems Nixon." Probably not, and if he is, Woodward—whose journalistic practice, once so fun and unethical, is now mostly just writing down what important people tell him in his kitchen—certainly won't uncover it. "There is nothing less important about 'the sequester' than the question of whose idea it originally was," Salon's Alex Pareene wrote yesterday. "So, naturally, that is the question that much of the political press is obsessed with, to the exclusion of almost everything else." Not everything else: also the question of the proper tone in which one is allowed to speak to Bob Woodward. You'll be able to catch him declaiming on the topic tonight on the Sean Hannity program on Fox News. [Politico | CNN | BuzzFeeᴅ | Salon]