firedoglake Archive Site

Some Thoughts on Morality From Bob Dole

In a gift from the heavens, I was just reading Bob Dole's editorial in the NYT on Jailhouse Judy and thinking I really needed to blog on it when "pop!" comes and email from the spectacular David Ehrenstein alerting me to the fact that he has already done so, and far better than I could:

The New York Times, as part of its ongoing campaign repair the public image of "journalist" Judith Miller, and indicted co-consirators in our famously "free press" has seen fit to engage the services of one Bob Dole, "the Republican candidate for president in 1996, was a senator from 1969 to 1996," for an op-ed hand-job equipped with the breathtakingly specious title The Underprivileged Press.

Like many Americans, I am perplexed by the federal investigation into the alleged leak of classified information that exposed Valerie Plame Wilson, the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, as a Central Intelligence Agency officer.

I'm perplexed by Plame-o-rama too Bob. But not in the way you are. And there's nothing "alleged" about it.

So far the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has achieved one notable result: putting a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, in jail for refusing to break her promise of confidentiality to her sources in response to a grand jury subpoena. The incarceration of Ms. Miller is all the more baffling because she has never written a word about the C.I.A. flap.

And here we get to the central lie, the New York Times and the rest of the "mainstream press" is ceaselessly promulgating. As Judy Miller has "never written a word about the C.I.A. flap" there is no "source" for her to "break" that most sacred of all political spins, "her promise of confidentiality." In investigating the revelation of Valerie Plame's identity, Patrick Fitzgerald (a Total Babe, by the way) has a considerable number of questions to ask Judy Miller, "Was in Scooter in the Library with the lead pipe?" being in all likelihood the least of them.

I think they're hauling out the big carpers because Fitzgerald is, as James Carville speculated, ready to start making the Times answer some questions. Like, was she on assignment at the time she spoke to Libby? Who was she reporting to? Rumor has it that it was no one less than publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. who was giving Judy cover to indulge in her specious, fact-free war mongering, so expect no end to the parade of this kind of mewling crap.

Which will hopefully also bring the added benefit of more David E., so I suppose we must look on the bright side.

Update: Arianna caught something from the Times that neither Bob Dole nor the the Times themselves seems to be mentioning: an editor's note which said that "The Times's policy does not permit the granting of anonymity to confidential news sources 'as cover for a personal or partisan attack.'" Wonder how that fits into Big Bob's Campaign for Justice?

posted by Jane Hamsher @ 8/16/2005 08:28:00 AM