If I were a reporter for the WSJ, I'd be up in arms about Judy writing again about WMD. Afterall, the WSJ shouldn't be stooping to the NYT's lax journalistic standards!

In the face of recent revelations that the Bush administration has been tracking billions of phone calls, has no solution to the Iraq travesty and can only offer a photo op with some war ravaged Guardsmen in Arizona to solve a serious immigration problem, why don't we wonder why our fearless news reporters asked why Whitehouse hack Snow is sporting a yellow wristband. NPR has already treated me to a tearfelt explanation of how he survived colon cancer while those close to him fell to that ignomious terrorism of the anus. No word on whether the NSA will be data mining his ass for further evidence of terror inducing cancerous cells.

While I am sure FOX will run this as its headline, would anyone be surprised if the so called MSM rushed through it's other leads, reading them like the warnings on a bottle of Paxil or the true cost of that zero interest financing on the H3, to do an indepth study on Snow's ass and colon cancer in general ("Colbert" question for Katie Couric: Why do only assholes get colon cancer?)

During the late eighties and nineties the rightwing wacko bumper sticker groups warned us never to trust the media. I'm beginning to believe they were actually being facetiously honest. As in don't trust the media because if all goes well, many will be on our payroll.

What we are seeing is unique in the free world. In places like Iran, Cuba, the USSR, people knew where their media stood. It stood for the state. When Tass welcomed them to a brand new glorious day, the citizenry knew they were going to be fed a bunch of shit but then, by dessert time, get the local hockey scores and tomorrow's weather. We in America have for years thought we were going to be given honest objective news then fed shit about the weather and our hockey team's prospects of making the playoffs.

Now we know we know what it is like to be a Soviet citizen in 1972. Except our weather news and hockey team still suck.

Miller's article in the Wall St. Journal was excellent. It's the perfect rebutal for all the crap she's taken from hacks like Tim Grieve. There are not 10 people in the world who could have written that story. Her sources are excellent. She tells a complicated story. It's important. When was the last time Tim Grive contacted a source, reported on something complex, reported something important?

Judy Miller, Woman of Massive Disception.

Ordinarily I don't respond to other posters, but rather only comment on the articles. However, I just want to say, "No Name Given," that your courage in castigating Tim Grieve is pretty much nullified by the fact that you declined to give a name. Quite aside from the fact that Ms. Miller has an unbelievable amount of chutzpah to think anyone would take her seriously when writing about the exact same topic on which she was previously so spectacularly wrong.

While I am not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page it is a widely-respected paper as a news source, and I must say that I'm astounded that they would take a totally disgraced reporter from no less a "MSM" outlet than the New York Times and allow her license to "report" on the very same topic that she was so easily gulled on previously. And anonymously calling Grieve out for pointing out this absurdity is pretty weak tea.

The estimate that there are less then ten shills for a corrupt and incompetemt administration passing them selves off as "journalists" is perhaps too kind.

However....when a disgraced journalist continues to peddle repudiated material in an effort to deceive the American people, while regaining her reputation, and one of her groupies calls Tim Grieve a hack does little to persuade me that Ms. Millers defenders are little more than a sad and deluded and marginalized.

"How and why did Col. Gadhafi, the despotic, still dangerously capricious leader, decide to abandon a lifetime of revolution and terrorism and abandon the WMD programs he had pursued since seizing power in a coup in 1969?"

An amazing sentence that sets down a lot of historical pretext as given. Has Gadhafi had a lifetime dedicated to revolution and terrorism? No. Is he a despotic leader? Both Yes and No, since the tribal councils of Libya have a high degree of autonomy in local matters. Dangerously capricious? What does that mean? Miller is a propagandist, not a journalist, and this sounds like more tripe spewed forth by some newsbiteconstructing person in the administration... Dangerously capricious indeed.

Is Fox News for people who can read. Everyone knows that. On any given day that column is given over to shrill noise about evolution, the separation of church and state, the persecution of Christians in America, the doubleplus good job of our Lord and Savior George Bush, evil evil evil Democrats, the wonderous and magical stock/housing market, how drug companies need massive subsidies to develop drugs for diseases that don't actually exist and why Hillary Clinton is Stalin and angry. One can safely ignore virtually everything on the last 2 pages of section A in the WSJ and be none the worse for it.

From the story: "...Times Editor Bill Keller tried to stop Miller from continuing to write about Iraq and weapons issue. It didn't work."

What the fuck?

When I was working as a newspaper editor (though not THE editor--I was a couple rungs down on the newsroom food chain) editors pretty much told reporters what to write about. Several times our education reporter insisted on researching and pitching stories that our editor was not interested in.

The reporter felt strongly about the issue, and insisted on writing and turning in stories on this subject, a somewhat divisive and controversial one. Small-town politics being what it is, and our editor having the power to decide what appeared in the paper, these stories never saw the light of day.

I guess things must be different in the big city.