As it turns out, poorly crafted, soft-core pornography seems to be quite the cottage industry among America’s conservative chattering classes.

For the full story, see:

“Hard Liners, Soft Porn: The Perverse Prose and Titillating Text of Team Bush”

She was sacked ironically for something that in fact was an attractive characteristic, but made her unfit to hold her job – she held personal views so passionately that they led her to compromise her integrity.

The bottom line is that she lied and people died. It doesn’t matter that she believed they were white lies.

The WP reporter apparently did not find it pertinent even to ask whether Miller supported the war – in the buildup to the war, was she convinced that the U.S. should go to war against Iraq? Miller was a stenographer, but only for one side. That the press refuses to examine in any serious way its role as a great amplifying machine for the pro-war forces is related, if you ask me, to the fact that the press is loosing its paper readership. These were great liberal dailies, and their switch to great neo-con dailies was obviously not well received by the readership. Plus, the arrogance of the press, once that readership made its discontent known – the scorn about people, for instance, who took the Downing Street Memo seriously, which was peculiar insofar as it wasn’t even a dispute about the fact of the Downing Street Memo, but about who was allowed in, who was to be taken seriously, in the discussion of the War.

If the NYT and the Washington Post think their future readership is going to come from the demo served by the Washington Times and Fox, I think they are slightly demented. It is a dementia that comes from the delusion that they are actually players in the capital, movers and shakers, which naturally means allying with the real power in D.C. – the conservative establishment that owns the town.

Given that the administration didn’t even plan or try to secure any of these suspected WMD sites, it’s clear which scenario was most likely. At that point, they should have sat her down and ‘debriefed’ her. If there was any question at all that she wasn’t 100% open in what she knew, the NYT shouldn’t have trusted her at all.
They might have had to keep things quiet, to avoid embarassment, but they shouldn’t have backed her in the investigation, and they definitely should not have staked the NYT’s position on her side.

When the anthrax letters were being investigated, the investigation quickly turned domestic, Miller was adamant about blaming Sadam and Iraq for the letters. Even when it became painfully clear that the motives for the attacks were purely domestic and purely right wing.