A Rehabilitation Project

Ironic.

The New York Times gave Maureen Dowd the task of trying to restore some credibility to the floundering paper.

The assumption is that having Maureenie come down hard on Judith Miller will somehow exonerate the Times for all of its failures that have been unearthed since Miller left the clink.

True, Maureenie is rough on Miller, but she pledges allegiance to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller and the Times. As usual, she contradicts herself repeatedly in the space of a single Op-Ed piece, one of Maureenie's special talents.

She criticizes Miller's jail stint as a "career rehabilitation project."

I find that particularly ironic since Maureenie's column is no more than a feeble attempt at rehab for the Times.

She writes:

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

If anyone is operatic it's Maureenie. That's probably why Miller's annoying traits don't bother her.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times's seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

All these years later and Maureenie needs to tell that story. Gee, maybe some of Miller's traits didn't sit too well with Maureenie after all.

I would bet that Maureenie wanted to write: "It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. Bitch."

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

Judy's stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that Senator Bob Graham, now retired, dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Remember, the White House's case for war fit perfectly with the Clinton administration's reasoning for taking out Saddam.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D. issues. But he acknowledged in The Times's Sunday story about Judy's role in the Plame leak case that she had kept "drifting" back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she "got it totally wrong" about W.M.D. "If your sources are wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But investigative reporting is not stenography.

Blame it on the intelligence gathering that spanned administrations.

By the way, the Times did some positively stellar investigative reporting when it came to Hurricane Katrina. Rape, murder, and thousands and thousands dead in the aftermath of the hurricane--yeah, that was really great reporting.

Earth to Maureenie....That was nothing but the stenography of rumors and falsehoods.

The Times's story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said yesterday in an e-mail note to the staff, Judy seemed to have "misled" the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.

She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer" because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

So, Miller is a liar. Et tu, Maureenie?

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy refused to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Ah, hindsight!

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Dramatic, isn't it? Typical Maureenie.

The title of Maureenie's column, "Woman of Mass Destruction," kills me.

It has a dual meaning. The obvious one is Miller's plethora of articles citing the presence of WMD in Iraq. The slightly more subtle meaning is Maureenie's opinion that Miller has had an effect at the Times equivalent to that of deploying a WMD in its newsroom.

Unquestionably, Miller has played a role in further damaging the credibility of the Times. However, it should be noted that the paper has been an absolute, worthless mess for years.

The whole dysfunctional crew at the Times is in desperate need of intensive, in-patient rehab.

I don't think even that would be enough to boost readership and restore believability to its "news."

Of course, the diehard libs will cling to it as the paper of record. That is symptomatic of their delusional state and further indication that they, too, are in need of rehab immediately.

The fact is the reputation of the Times as a credible news source is beyond rehabilitation.

Even a tough column by Maureenie, (no doubt, she donned her Emma Peel black leather catsuit to write it), can't put the Times back together again.