Neo Gonzo

Neo-Journalist Judy Miller has finaly left the New York Times. After what appears to be a stormy 28 years as a maverick reporter, her behaviour and appalling lack of journalistic ethics finally caught up with her. It was Judy who decided to go to bed with the neocons, and like their Keystone Kops method of governing, her reporting became a very damaging and grotesque joke.

Throughout the lead-up to and then the course of the Iraq War, Judy was the cheerleader for the hawks. They passed their faulty intel and bad guesses along to her, and she published them as insider information. Every lie whispered to her at the White House was a 'scoop.' By the time everybody had given up on the WMD fiction, Judy was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the propaganda arm. She was completely their girl.

So it came as no surprise that when Scooter and the guys decided to smear Joe Wilson by outing his CIA spouse, they hit speed-dial #1 for Miller. Scooter whispered his venom to her, even though she reportedly wasn't writing a story on it (and never did write the story).

When prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald came calling, she was already on the outs at the Times, and her colleagues were calling her out for her ethical transgressions. Fitz wanted her to testify about the Scooter conversations.

But Judy needed cover. She was already part of the Junta, and she knew it. Loyalty was prized by the clownish cabal, and she also needed to rebuild some journalistic cred. So she went to jail, helping to put her friend Georgie back into the White House.

See, Fitz has stated publicly that if Judy had talked instead of needlessly going to jail, he would have handed down his indictment of Libby in Fall of 2004 - before the presidential election. By stonewalling Fitz, Just kept that indictment from torpedoing Georgie's election.

And why exactly did she go to jail? She says it was to protect a source as a journalist. But she never wrote a story. Aside from the other questions that arise from the incident, can a journalist claim source confidentiality for a story they never write? Can a journalist, simply by dint of being employed by a media company, protect a source? Or should that protection only apply when they produce a product of journalism to the people? If somebody tells national security secrets to a journalist on background, can the journalist claim privilege if the information is never used in a story? In that case, isn't the journalist just another citizen? After all, the idea is to protect people who are furthering our right to be informed as citizens, not the right of reports to help government cover their lies.

In the end, Judy took a half page out of Hunter S. Thompson's book on Gonzo journalism by becoming part of the story. But she never had the Doctor's guts to actually stand by it. Dr. Duke never backed away from anything, and he never lied for the bastards.

Judy Miller joined the Junta and applied their ethics and efficiency to her own profession. It's made her a pariah among her peers and cost her her job and reputation.

Such are the wages of conservatism.