I will admit to avoiding most news and Internet for the last week, preferring instead the streets of the towns along the west coast of Mexico and the sun deck on our ship. But CNN was on the ship TV and I caught some of the campaign speeches. Michelle Obama was wonderful. She always gives the same speech, but it’s a fine one. McCain was horrible – more arrogant, more contemptuous, embarassing. I hope the polls are right and he’s at the end of his career. On one CNN panel. the panelists couldn’t think of anything to say about his speech, so they talked about it being time for him to reclaim some dignity before this thing is over. But I doubt that will happen.
We made up a term – "rovitis" – to describe how flat all those old nasty tricks sound in this campaign. I expect that it’s only a wish on our part, but there’s some truth to it. That nasty stuff that tanked John Kerry just isn’t flying this time – at least not like it did. And what little I saw of McCain’s speeches so mischaracterized Obama’s policies that it’s hard to imagine any but the rigidly faithful even listening to them seriously.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Judith Miller, whose pre-Iraq war reporting was faulted in a 2004 apology to its readers by editors of The New York Times, has joined the Fox News television channel as a contributor.
Miller, 60, "will provide commentary and analysis on national security issues, counterterrorism, and international affairs, including the Middle East on Fox," the cable news channel announced in a statement on Monday.
Fox News, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., said Miller will also write for FOXNews.com.
Miller, the author of several books, spent 28 years with the New York Times and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for reporting on global terrorism.
But she is perhaps better known for her reporting prior to the March 2003 US invasion of Iraq of claims by Iraqi exiles that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program, claims which subsequently turned out not to be true.
The Times apologized in 2004 for its pre-Iraq war coverage. Five of the six dubious articles cited by the newspaper were written or co-written by Miller.
Miller was also in the headlines in 2005 when she was imprisoned for 85 days for refusing to testify before a grand jury over the outing of an undercover CIA agent.
Miller was jailed by a federal judge for contempt for refusing to divulge the name of her confidential source who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Her source turned out to be Lewis "Scooter" Libby, an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Miller retired from the Times in November 2005…
Somehow, having Judith Miller and Karl Rove on the staff of Fox News strikes me as ludicrous. Judith Miller wrote a series of articles based on the Iraqi Expatriot’s reports claiming Saddam Hussein had all kinds of evil weapons in the lead-up to the war. She was then receiving leaks in the Administration’s campaign to discredit Joseph Wilson. She attempted to turn her jailing into martyrdom, but it backfired and she gracefully retired from the New York Times when asked.
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