Judith Miller Exposed

OK, not really. Thankfully, there's not even a naked centerfold of her (bless you God!).

But New York Magazine does offer a portrait of the woman at The Times who helped so heartily to take us to war - not that Mr. Bush and Halliburton exactly needed their arms twisted - and try to justify it through all those wrong reports about the presence of WMD (Weapons of Miller Distraction).

Ms. Miller, who channels Ahmed Chalabi and has not offered anything even approaching an apology for her behavior, her tactics, and - not to mention - her fucking errors, makes for an interest case study. For example, from the piece:

The Judy Miller problem is complicated. That is, the very qualities that endeared Miller to her editors at the New York Times—her ambition, her aggressiveness, her cultivation of sources by any means necessary, her hunger to be first—were the same ones that allowed her to get the WMD story so wrong.

Miller is a star, a diva. She wrote big stories, won big prizes. Long before her WMD articles ran, Miller had become a newsroom legend—and for reasons that had little to do with the stories that appeared beneath her byline. With her seemingly bottomless ambition—a pair of big feet that would stomp on colleagues in her way and even crunch a few bystanders—she cut a larger-than-life figure that lent itself to Paul Bunyan–esque retellings. Most of these stories aren’t kind. Of course, nobody said journalism was a country club. And her personality was immaterial while she was succeeding, winning a Pulitzer, warning the world about terrorism, bio-weapons, and Iraq’s war machine. But now, who she is, and why she prospered, makes for a revealing cautionary tale about the culture of American journalism.

But the piece is just that. It's an interesting look at a diva, the one who tried to order the military around, threatening to tattle to Donald Rumsfeld on anyone who tried to say no to her, without really giving us a greater look at how such a mistake was allowed to pass her editors. Ultimately, her editors should have caught and stopped her. They did not.

It also really failed to explain why her ass hasn't been fired.