The 6,000 words that the New York Times devoted yesterday to explaining (if that’s the word) Judith Miller’s involvement in the Valerie Plame affair have, predictably, provided ample fodder for hundreds of bloggers — after all, it’s not every day that one of the masters of the MSM takes a rifle to its own foot.

Most are shocked by the portrait of Miller that emerges, in her own account and the longer Times story, of a domineering loose cannon in the newsroom, and a complacent pushover when dealing with the administration. The Liquid List takes the condemnation to its natural partisan conclusion: “Judith Miller is a shill for the Bush Administration and a friend to those under closest investigation by Fitzgerald. She deserved her 85 days in jail, if for anything because of her complicity in the duping of America in regard to Iraq.” It goes on to call her a “Fox reporter embedded at the Times.”

Plenty of folks are just plain confused by the Times report, which opened up nearly as many questions as it answered. To take but one, why has Miller conveniently forgotten who gave her the name Valerie Plame (or Flame, as it turned up in her notebook)? As The Moderate Voice notes, “It is certainly QUITE unusual for a journalist to forget who gave them a KEY part of info in a major story — let alone one that has legal implications.”

Others wonder about some of the more glossed-over aspects of the stories, like Miller’s mention, in passing, that she was granted a security clearance during an assignment in Iraq. John Aravosis at Americablog speculates that “Not only does this mean the government is in essence licensing journalists, but Miller is agreeing to muzzle herself should she receive...

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