Wasn't At Her Desk, Eh?

Jesse Walker | November 9, 2005

More good news: Judith Miller is finally leaving The New York Times. My favorite line in the Times' account:

Ms. Miller could not be reached for comment.

Not everyone has turned their backs on poor Judy. Next week she'll be keynoting a shindig at the Rainbow Room for Pajamas Media, a batch of bloggers who bill themselves as an alternative to the unethical and error-prone Old Media.

Comments

|11.9.05 @ 5:14PM|#

Will that Wonder Woman babe be there?

|11.9.05 @ 5:44PM|#

Did she take her flying monkeys with her? :)

|11.9.05 @ 7:14PM|#

"Next week she'll be keynoting a shindig at the Rainbow Room for Pajamas Media, a batch of bloggers who bill themselves as an alternative to the unethical and error-prone Old Media."

Must...reach...irony antidote.

Growing blurry...Grampa, is that you?

|11.9.05 @ 7:33PM|#

Sounds like she was so insistent on protecting the confidentiality of her source because she knew that only if she was in jail would the Times continue to pay her her salary.

I really like the line about how "I respect her decision to retire from The Times and wish her well." Which I take to mean: I respect her great judgment in leaving now and not making us call the cops to have her arrested for trespassing.

|11.9.05 @ 7:50PM|#

Ah, yes, Pajamas Media, anchored by such luminaries as the ethical, error-free Michelle Malkin and the ethical, error-free Charles Johnson. Truly shall a new era in top-notch reporting emerge.

|11.9.05 @ 7:50PM|#

Seamus,

In other words, don let the door your your ass on the way out. :)

|11.9.05 @ 9:59PM|#

Hakluyt,
The phraseology is: Don't let the door hitcha where the good Lord splitcha.

P.S. I'm not gay. At least I'm pretty sure I'm not.

|11.10.05 @ 1:36AM|#

joe, you really oughta go easy on the blogging until you empty that big bottle of codiene. That stuff always makes me hallucinate after a week or so.

|11.10.05 @ 1:37AM|#

I suppose this leaves room for them to hire back Jayson Blair.

|11.10.05 @ 1:58AM|#

She was willing conduit for the neocon's lies for war and then, for a while, was confined in the belly of the beast.

|11.10.05 @ 7:42AM|#

Jeebus Cripes, Rick, will you ostrich lefties get off the "bush lied" meme already? Do you have any idea how tired and pathetic you-all are sounding?

Just go read:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Production/files/podhoretz1205advance.html

|11.10.05 @ 9:38AM|#

Doug,

How do you get it to last a week?

Especially with those three heads you've got.

Yeah, Rick, you big lefty, you. The Pod says that some Democrats believed what Bush said, too.

Jesse Walker|11.10.05 @ 10:23AM|#

Kevin Drum responded sensibly to Poddy's piece here.

As for calling Rick a lefty -- you're new to these parts, ain't you?

|11.10.05 @ 11:01AM|#

Kevin's piece, while showing some people were skeptical, doesn't show lies. If Bush said what he believed, and for which there was some support, then HE WASN'T LYING, even if it turned out to be wrong later.

For the record, I'm not one who doesn't want an investigation, but I thought there were already a couple.

You're right, Jesse, I don't spend much time in the comments here, so I'm not familiar with Rick's political persuasion. However, the term "neocon lies" doesn't seem to me to be in heavy use on the right side of the aisle...

R C Dean|11.10.05 @ 11:03AM|#

Drum points out that there wasn't perfect unanimity on the WMD issue before the war. Fair enough, but Podhorets never claimed there was.

If there wasn't a consensus that Saddam had either live WMD or an easily resurrected program, it was damn close. If you wait until every single crackpot intelligence nutball agrees on every jot and tittle before taking action, you will be paralyzed forever. I think its fair to say that the view that Saddam posed a negligible WMD risk was very much a minority view.

Bush was relying on the majority/consensus view. And its hard to see how doing so is either bad faith or lying.

|11.10.05 @ 12:26PM|#

"However, the term "neocon lies" doesn't seem to me to be in heavy use on the right side of the aisle"

There ya go. Don't hesitate to ask if you need any help browsing these sites.

www.amconmag.com
www.antiwar.com
www.lewrockwell.com

Trying third time now sheesh.

|11.10.05 @ 1:51PM|#

Your search - "neocon lies" site:amconmag.com - did not match any documents.

The other two are libertarian sites, which don't register well on the left/right so I didn't bother to google. Nevertheless, I take the larger point, that the phrase "neocon lies" isn't limited to liberals.

|11.10.05 @ 2:35PM|#

We know for a fact that when Condi Rice said the aluminum tubes could only be used for nuclear purposes, she had received reports from the nation's top experts contradicting that opinion. She lied.

When Cheney said there was "no doubt" that Hussein had WMD's, he had received reports from various CIA experts which expressed doubt. He lied.

When Bush said that the IAEC reported that Iraq had a nuclear program when that report referred to Iraq prior to the first Gulf War, I don't know that he was lying because he's a willfully and proudly ignorant man. Same thing for when he said that Hussein wouldn't let the inspectors in. I don't think he lied so much as I think he's a moron.

I am NOT arguing against the war. That's a different subject.

R C Dean|11.10.05 @ 6:08PM|#

We know for a fact that when Condi Rice said the aluminum tubes could only be used for nuclear purposes, she had received reports from the nation's top experts contradicting that opinion. She lied.

Not necessarily. If I receive two expert opinions, one saying X and one saying Y, and I decide the expert opinion saying X has the better of the argument, am I lying if I then go forth and say X?

When Cheney said there was "no doubt" that Hussein had WMD's, he had received reports from various CIA experts which expressed doubt. He lied.

Same response. Cheney had to sift through a lot of inconsistent material. Maybe he found the experts saying Hussein had no WMDs to be unpersuasive, to the point where he had a very high degree of confidence in the contrary conclusion. Just because someone else has doubts doesn't mean Cheney does.

Of course, this takes us down the road of parsing the nuances of what they said. Parsing nuances nearly always is an exercise in convincing yourself the evidence says what you want it to say, whether you are claiming they lied or they didn't.

|11.10.05 @ 8:32PM|#

If I receive two expert opinions, one saying X and one saying Y, and I decide the expert opinion saying X has the better of the argument, am I lying if I then go forth and say X?

Not at all. But when Rice said that "the only use" for these tubes was nuclear, most every nuclear expert she'd asked had told her already that wasn't the case. So that was a big, fat lie.

Cheney had to sift through a lot of inconsistent material. Maybe he found the experts saying Hussein had no WMDs to be unpersuasive, to the point where he had a very high degree of confidence in the contrary conclusion.

Then the honest and appropriate response would have been "I have no doubt..." and not "there is no doubt..."

I think that this matters more than just in a sense of "nuances" because they were arguing for war. If those on the right were as particular in their demands for objective truth in regards to the statements made by administration officials to gain support for the war as they were in regards to Clinton's dishonesty (and he was a liar, too!), then I wouldn't be so persnickety about it.

Maybe we're discussing "honesty" more than the explicit act of "lying." I believe honesty (removed of nuance) is essential when making a case for war.

|11.10.05 @ 8:35PM|#

I should add that the kind of honesty I'm talking about is probably unprecedented in the history of government.

|11.11.05 @ 2:27AM|#

Paul,

Just to be clear, recent bumper stickers on my cars have included: "Lower taxes thru less government" and "Capitalism is Freedom". Friedman and Hayek are among my fave economists. You get the point.

The neocon's (Podhoretz) defense of the charge that Bush lied (when he repeated the neocon's lies) in that neocon journal that you linked to is weak. He talks about Niger document without even speculating on the origin of the forgery! And he does not address the pack of lies that Powell presented at the UN, which came from the Pentagons OSP and Messrs Wolfowitz and Fieth (who's recent creds include the AIPAC/ Israeli government spy scandal) and included a plagiarized and dated grad student thesis that we were assured was "valuable intelligence".

It's the neocons who are a variant of lefties.