New York Observer - June 2, 2004
Off the Record by Tom Scocca
Habits of mind can be tough to break. Judith Miller, for instance, can still cling to an assertion in the face of contrary evidence.
"Who bothers to read New York anymore?" Ms. Miller asked on Tuesday afternoon.
The day before, New York magazine had posted the contents of its latest issue on the Web. And the likely answer, at the moment, would have been: Just about everybody. At least, just about everybody who knows Ms. Miller, or who holds any sort of opinion about her work at The New York Times.
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You know, this Judith Miller stuff is very amusing and while I suppose it’s important to deconstruct the role she and her over-praised employer played in hyping the war, I find the fuss to be a bit puzzling.
Not because her fabrications and the support they received from the very top weren’t outrageous, of course they were. It’s more that her Iraq articles, from the very beginning, were so easily see-able as the piles of crap they are -- if only folks had the eyes to see.
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I remember one pre-war article Miller penned, perhaps the key NY Times piece on the WMD question, in which she described how an anonymous Iraqi weaponeer, standing across the street from Miller (somewhere in-country, the precise location is not in-mind at the moment, Baghdad I believe) pointing at the ground before him at what was supposed to be the location of some hidden site full of banned materiel. She described this fellow as an ‘Iraqi weapons expert’, wearing a baseball cap pulled down tight over his eyes to (clumsily) protect his identity.
At the time, people like comedian Harry Shearer and writer Neal Pollack made great fun of Miller’s mystery date with destiny – not a hard thing to do since the article was both laughable and absurd.
Only the ideologically blinded could fail to see how stupid Miller’s work was. And yet here we are at this late date, reading a torrent of words from luminaries who bring their late-to-the-party analyses and send ups as if none of this was do-able seconds after Miller put fingers to keyboard.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly something to be said for better late than never. But still, I must admit to being unimpressed by this after-the-fact attention Miller’s idiocy and dishonesty are finally receiving.
.d.