After months of staying out of the limelight amid scrutiny in the CIA leak investigation, Rove is back and circulating...

--Holly Bailey in this week's Newsweek

Cokie Roberts said pretty much the same thing this morning on NPR (audio here). So I guess this well-publicized speech in November didn't count as a comeback? (Headline at MSNBC.com at the time: "Rove re-emerges at conservative lawyers' group.") In other words, the Beltway press is so lazy that when Rove's handlers decide to say he's coming out of hiding after months in seclusion, that just goes right into the story, regardless of the facts? He gets to declare that a page has been turned as many times as he wants to, and the press just meekly goes along?