Many of you are smitten with Juan Cole’s roasting of Judith Miller at Salon. Cole calls Miller’s WMD reporting “embarrassingly bad” and says she became a “stenographer to a motley crew of neoconservative hawks and Iraqi expatriate wheelers and dealers.”


Then there’s Jane Hamsher’s grotesque BBQ image in her excellent “Grand Jury Barbecue Time.” That image is nowhere as obscene as CNN’s ghoulish “gimme-an-R-for-ratings!” fixation on the NOLA hospital “mercy killings” and that whacked-out doctor CNN keeps interviewing who said, after he walked out before outside help arrived, that it was better to abandon his patients than help them die. (Huh?)


Take in Arianna’s “Advance Word on the Times’ Judy-Culpa.” “[It’s] definitely coming on Sunday … Judy’s camp is worried that it’s going to be very hard on her.”

… I’ve been told that Miller has been “ordered” to write a first-person, what-I-told-the-grand-jury account.


[Judy heads] west this weekend to attend a conference at Cal State Fullerton called, I kid you not, “Power to the People: Unlocking Government for the Public and Press and the Blogs!” Provide your own punchline. … Miller will present a special award on Saturday honoring Mark “Deep Throat” Felt. …


You’d think Miller would be in New York, working on her first-person story and helping the Times team close its piece (I mean, it’s not like there’s not a lot riding on it).


No shit. Just like there was a lot riding on “President Bush’s staged TV event with U.S. soldiers.” (Read Pat Lang’s condemnation.) I keep thinking that if only Rove hadn’t been prepping for his four and a half hours of testimony today, Bush’s staged event would have gone off seamlessly. Cry me a river….


BYO — and PLEASE SHARE! Then let’s kick back and watch Bill Maher and his guests, “Sen. Max Cleland, editor Tina Brown, and comedian Larry Miller, Sen. John Edwards, Chief Richard Pennington, and author Tom Wolfe.” (Here’s hopin’ Catnip and Olivia bring us some of that high proof Canadian brew!)
More on the Bush staged event:

The biggest surprise … following President Bush’s recent staged TV event with U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq was the media’s newfound willingness to expose the facade. Bush has been conducting similar staged events for years now, and he rarely gets called on them.

… Paul Rieckhoff, the Iraq war veteran who organized Operation Truth[wrote] a devastating critique …

[T]he President again used our troops as political props in an event so scripted that it basically turned into a conversation with himself. I wish the White House had put this much effort into post-war planning when my platoon hit Baghdad. ….

When I was an Infantry Platoon leader in Iraq, I was interviewed by CBS 60 Minutes. As the tape was rolling, my commanding officer stood behind the camera carefully listening to my every word with his arms crossed. I knew it wouldn’t be fun for me if I strayed from the prescribed talking points. That incident was one of the motivating factors that led me to create Operation Truth … The Commander in Chief has no right to use America’s sons and daughters as a defibrillator for his ailing Presidency.

Read all of PRWatch’s superb analysis.