Miss Lonelyhearts

Anybody who knows a little about women can speculate on the motivations that led Judith Miller to act as a shill for the Bush administration’s campaign to build support for an invasion of Iraq.
Having survived almost thirty years as a Times staff reporter, she had seniority that superseded almost anybody in the corporate hierarchy, including her editors or the newspaper’s publisher. The Pulitzer Prize she won certainly enhanced her prestige and added to the hubris that normally builds up in a woman with so much authority, so much so that she felt no compunction about referring to herself as “sharp elbows” or “Miss Run-Amok,” though she was self-aware enough to defend some of her more objectionable behavior with the caveat, “I am not a jerk.”
This writer, once working in a corporate environment, inquired of a bluntly aggressive female colleague; did she ever consider the use of charm to achieve her ends? She replied sharply, “That would be phony.” She explained that she saw no reason to be any more charming than the men in that environment, who were, frankly, uncouth boors and philistines.
Without ever having personally met Ms. Miller and knowing her only from Times articles and television film clips, one can nevertheless deduce that she is not a person of exemplary grace or poise. She comes across as a little bit of a mess. Assuming that impression to be on the mark, and attributing to her the aforementioned traits of egotism and hubris to which she has herself alluded, one can infer a personality profile that would pretty much amount to a loose cannon rolling unimpeded across the deck of a ship manned by novice sailors and commanded by a captain and officers who were themselves untested and green.
A woman like this, bold and authoritative yet uncouth, unimpeded by any firm, guiding leadership, is bound to arrive at the conclusion that the men around her are a bunch of squishy, liberal wimps. It’s a guaranteed fact that any male with the least masculine characteristics would be immediately excluded from consideration for employment at the Times, so Ms. Miller has probably been barreling through its corridors for years seething with the attitude that no man is good enough for her.
So she probably reacted to meeting the neo-macho specimens representing the Bush administration, Bush, with his unreconstructed frat boy posturing; Cheney, with his heavy industry hard hat image (Cheney has never had an industrial job); Scooter Libby with his tight jeans and cowboy hat, with the relief of a lonely woman who finally finds a really good bar and exclaims, “Finally, some real men!”
She probably really dug their aggressive approach to the use of American power, enough to overlook the fact that these top Republican tough guys were all draft dodgers. Look, nobody’s perfect!
For their part, Cheney, Libby, Rove et al, sensing immediately that they had Ms. Miller eating out of their hands, played her like a fiddle with sweet talk about WMDs, security clearances, embedded status in Iraq and plenty more that we don’t know about, though it must have been a regular Cyrano de Bergerac story with Libby reciting her poetry from beneath her balcony in the moonlight with Cheney and Rove feeding him his lines from the bushes.
Whatever Libby told her, must have been strong stuff for her to spend three months in jail rather than speak his name, and then, when she got out, she dissembled and misspoke, infecting the Times like a Typhoid Mary leaving chaos and destruction in her wake.
This is just the beginning of the story, not its end. Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald still has to announce the indictments and there is an excellent chance that in addition to Libby and Rove, Chaney himself will be charged. Then the pressure will be on him to either absorb the punishment himself (and Cheney is a very sick man), or to disclose any discussions he had about Wilson and Plame with the other half of his Odd Couple act, namely Bush.
Then the central question will be: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It?
“There you go again!”

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Posted on 10/25/2005 ( Permanent Link )
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