What are you, incapable of reading English or something? It doesn’t matter who revealed the affair. It doesn’t matter whether it was Larry Flynt, Matt Drudge or Mighty Mouse. After it was revealed, Livingstone admitted it, realized that he would be a hypocrite to accept the Speaker position after his criticism of Clinton, and resigned from the Senate.
Actually the Cecil column on Bush is outdated. Subsequently, additional evidence did come forth, in the form of the memoirs of a deceased state dept official, who had written that they took a room together during a certain diplomatic negotiation. But the person who wrote it was no longer alive at the time that the account was published.
Y’know, that’s even better! I guess I’d have to give Livingstone his due here, in that, unlike some other politicos, Livingstone was decent enough to admit what he had done. (Compare Lt. Col. Oliver North, who blamed the Iran-Contra mess on his political adversaries, instead of admitting he was a secretive, power-hungry demagogue who hid behind a cloak of blamelessness.)
Actually, I maintain that the general credibility of a source is critical. For example, if a celebrity tells us that an asteroid is likely to hit the earth in the next ten years, who would be more credible–Steven Hawking or Dennis Rodman? If an economic downturn is predicted in the next X number of months, whom are we more likely to believe–Alan Greenspan or Jerry Seinfeld? (Although it’s vice versa when we are talking about basketball or stand-up comedy. I might even consider Larry Flynt an unimpeachable source–in the matters of marketing, pornography, and magazine publishing.)