Judy's Vanity
The bloggers were without editing, without a way for people to understand what was good, what was well reported–to distinguish between the straight and the slanderous. Things would get instantly picked up, magnified, and volumized. . . . I was appalled, not by the blogs–that would be like getting appalled at the Industrial Revolution–but by my colleagues, who believed what they read on the blogs.
So says Judy Miller, a reporter famous for her ability to elude the editor’s pen, or even the editor’s authority. A reporter also famous for magnifying (and probably volumizing, whatever that means) discredited nuggets of intelligence on the front page of the nation’s leading newspaper. So she says in a Vanity Fair article that paints a rosy picture of the events surrounding Judy’s own involvement in the Plame Affair.
There are already several good accounts of this article. Arianna delivers her rebuttal here. E&P’s Greg Mitchell provides a good overview here. Larisa joins the fun here. And I know Jane is working on it, because she kindly shared her copy with me, stay tuned for it on the new FDL site. I’m actually going to take two stabs at the article. Today, I’ll review the kind portrayal Judy’s good friend Marie Brenner painted of Judy’s involvement, which obscures all the remaining questions. And sometime in the next few days, I’ll look at the purpose such obscureness serve–a very sloppy claim that the Plame case is all just an attack on journalism.
My Armitage as Mr. X Scenario
Well, I offered a scenario for how Ari could be Mr. X last week. Now I’m getting to the hard part–exploring how Armitage could be Mr. X, the source of Plame’s identity for both Woodward and Novak.
But before I do that, let me clarify what I’m doing and why I’m doing it (and why I did the Ari scenario). I’m putting together what I consider a plausible scenario. I don’t mean to claim this (or the Ari scenario) is true. Rather, it’s a scenario in a futuring sense, an attempt to tell a possible story, to weigh how plausible it is and to explore what it might mean. Frankly, I’m writing this Armitage post from an awkward position. After eyeballing the Fitzgerald filing from the other day, I’m convinced that Armitage fits in the redactions better than any other name (here’s a more recent attempt at the eyeballing we did 10 days ago for those who want to see the scans side-by-side). At the same time, I’ve been a confirmed Armitage skeptic, believing that Dick or Hadley or any number of other people are much more likely and that Armitage is very unlikely. And I don’t believe anyone–certainly not the chief purveyors of the Armitage theory–have provided a plausible scenario for his leaks at all. So I should say I’m definitely not convinced of what follows; I’m just trying to understand how Armitage could be plausible.
