Congressman Dave Reichert's role in the capture of the Green River Killer is coming under tough scrutiny. Reichert talks about it often as a dominant piece of his law enforcement career and his time as King County sheriff.
Today, Michael Hood at blatherwatch — which normally focuses on talk radio — has two posts on Reichert and the Green River case. You can read them here and here.

"Reichert used the serial murder case to move forward," (Tomas) Guillen told BlatherWatch. "It was a travesty." Photos released when Ridgway was arrested show Reichert in a suit posing in the bottom of a ravine near the Des Moines Highway.

"He used the grave site of a murder victim for personal ambition," he says.

Guillén is a Seattle University professor and former Seattle Times reporter who covered the Green river case from its beginnings.

Hood also relies on reporting in Lewis Kamb's story on the same subject in last week's P-I. Reichert did not talk to the paper for the story but did give reporters a written statement responding to questions.

When Reichert ran and won two years ago he talked a lot about the still-fresh Green River case. But hardly a question was raised then about his role. Hood explains that Reichert's Democratic opponent had been told to stay away from any criticism of the portrayal of Reichert as the man who caught the killer.

"My standing orders were that we were going to campaign on issues," says Dave Ross. "Rumors I got about Dave or the Green River killer or the release of the book — we weren't going to touch them."

Hood is clearly no fan of Reichert's and does not hide his left-leaning political views. (His Reichert posts are also on horsesass.org, so he's at least an ex-officio member of Bloggers for Burner.) But in addition to blatherwatch he is a freelance writer and his reporting here relies mostly on named sources and the written record.

But really, enough about the hair now.

UPDATE: Turns out Hood's story was supposed to be in The Stranger. But when the PI ran its report they spiked it.

That strikes me as too bad. I know the daily papers are so competitive that sometimes they do nutty things, but The Stranger shouldn't be worrying so much about the Times or PI.