Congress has drafted and frozen the consensus agreement reached this morning on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The House is set to vote tomorrow. Now would be the time for supporters to at least briefly indulge the naysayers, especially given the weak recent state of opposition politics in this country. Elven Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich has had his brief say on the House floor. And within the media? In 2006 it was a reporter for This American Life playing the contrarian, asking basic questions about then-popular subprime mortgages. "Sometimes, if you want the real answer, you have to ask a dumb question," Times columnist David Carr writes of the reporting in Monday's paper. Today , the person asking the "dumb" question is David Cay Johnston, until recently the Times' aggressive tax reporter. He's wondering whether we're in a crisis at all!

David Cay Johnston, the New York Times tax reporter most recently heard calling Wesley Snipes a coward, is already upset about something else! Seems that his own paper published a less-than-loving review of his new book, and Johnston is desperate to correct the record. He does not love lawsuits! He does not hate corporations! He's a registered Republican, for chrissakes! Google it, why don't you? To be fair, we haven't read his book, so he may be making perfectly legitimate points. The thing is, Johnston does the "How could you possibly criticize a genius like me?" routine all the time. He got in an identical argument with the National Review over his last book, and then got one of the most hilarious reamings of the past decade from that magazine's media critic, Catherine Seipp, for being a sanctimonious ass. Even Dan Okrent, the NYT's first public editor, basically called Johnston an "asshole" (as commenter Seeräuber Jenny noted). Maybe he should learn to let some things slide. DCJ's full letter after the jump [via Editor & Publisher].

Movie star Wesley Snipes is certainly a stupid loathsome plutocrat after refusing to pay any taxes whatsoever on $58 million in earnings, a little scheme he devised after facing a measly $2 million tax bill . But the New York Times' dogged tax reporter David Cay Johnston has no business repeatedly calling Snipes a "coward" in the following video clip, taken outside the Florida courthouse where Snipes just evaded the worst criminal charges against him. Snipes brazenly stood up to the IRS, the most feared agency of the most feared government on the planet, and not only dodged taxes but also had the stones to ask for a $7 million refund, issue three hot checks for $14 million and Photoshop an IRS form to read "under no penalty of perjury." Johnston, who wrote the awesome book Perfectly Legal, should know better than to choose his words so poorly.