Is Time trying to bury the attorney general scandal that's seized Washington, D.C., for the past three months? In just the last week, new documents emerged contradicting Alberto Gonzales's account of his role in the firings, a low-level Department of Justice staffer announced her intent to plead the Fifth if asked to testify before Congress, and Justice officials admitted that it had misled Congress when it denied last month that Karl Rove played a role in deciding which U.S. attorneys got the boot. Yet the new issue of Time, on stands today, contains precisely zero stories on the scandal. Nothing. As though it's not happening.

You could chalk it up to atrocious news judgment, or laziness perhaps, but then there's the bizarre hostility that Time's editors have expressed regarding coverage of the firings. Back in January, Washington bureau chief Jay Carney dismissed them as run-of-the-mill "partisan hackery" and suggested that Josh Marshall, the proprietor of Talking Points Memo, was peddling conspiracy theories in pushing the story.

And just last weekend, Time's tight-faced managing editor, Richard Stengel, bemoaned the Democrats' insistence on investigating the firings on The Chris Matthews Show: "I am so uninterested in the Democrats wanting Karl Rove, because it is so bad for them. Because it shows business as usual, tit for tat, vengeance. That's not what voters want to see.... It's small-bore politics."

Both comments have generated heated reaction from left-wing blogs; Carney was forced to eat crow on Time's political blog (which he did graciously), Time's Ana Marie Cox fearlessly (foolishly?) took her boss Stengel to task, and Salon's Glenn Greenwald produced recent polls demonstrating that no less than 72 percent of the public is more interested than Stengel in the ongoing congressional investigations into the Justice Department.

You'd think that, given the flak Stengel and Carney have taken, they'd at least own up to their oversight in the new issue. Then again ... Aww! Penguins!