Typhoid Judy

The widows and orphans of the troops slain in Iraq can blame Judith Miller of the NYTimes. This neo-con jock-sniffer peddled all of the lies and crap that the Dickster, Turd Blossom, and Scooter fed her. Then, Miller had the chutzpah to go to Iraq as an embedded journalist; she posed for a picture in borrowed fatigues. The Cobra nails this sleazy successor to Jayson Blair at the NYTimes. The pity is that thousands (our troops and Iraqi civilian victims) have died because of her duplicity. If this is (fair & balanced) contempt, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Woman of Mass Destruction
By Maureen Dowd

I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.

The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.

Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times's seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing.

At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat."

It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.

She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet "Miss Run Amok."

Judy's stories about W.M.D. fit too perfectly with the White House's case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq, and I worried that she was playing a leading role in the dangerous echo chamber that Senator Bob Graham, now retired, dubbed "incestuous amplification." Using Iraqi defectors and exiles, Mr. Chalabi planted bogus stories with Judy and other credulous journalists.

Even last April, when I wrote a column critical of Mr. Chalabi, she fired off e-mail to me defending him.

When Bill Keller became executive editor in the summer of 2003, he barred Judy from covering Iraq and W.M.D. issues. But he acknowledged in The Times's Sunday story about Judy's role in the Plame leak case that she had kept "drifting" back. Why did nobody stop this drift?

Judy admitted in the story that she "got it totally wrong" about W.M.D. "If your sources are wrong," she said, "you are wrong." But investigative reporting is not stenography.

The Times's story and Judy's own first-person account had the unfortunate effect of raising more questions. As Bill said yesterday in an e-mail note to the staff, Judy seemed to have "misled" the Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, about the extent of her involvement in the Valerie Plame leak case.

She casually revealed that she had agreed to identify her source, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, as a "former Hill staffer" because he had once worked on Capitol Hill. The implication was that this bit of deception was a common practice for reporters. It isn't.

She said that she had wanted to write about the Wilson-Plame matter, but that her editor would not allow it. But Managing Editor Jill Abramson, then the Washington bureau chief, denied this, saying that Judy had never broached the subject with her.

It also doesn't seem credible that Judy wouldn't remember a Marvel comics name like "Valerie Flame." Nor does it seem credible that she doesn't know how the name got into her notebook and that, as she wrote, she "did not believe the name came from Mr. Libby."

An Associated Press story yesterday reported that Judy had coughed up the details of an earlier meeting with Mr. Libby only after prosecutors confronted her with a visitor log showing that she had met with him on June 23, 2003. This cagey confusion is what makes people wonder whether her stint in the Alexandria jail was in part a career rehabilitation project.

Judy refused to answer a lot of questions put to her by Times reporters, or show the notes that she shared with the grand jury. I admire Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller for aggressively backing reporters in the cross hairs of a prosecutor. But before turning Judy's case into a First Amendment battle, they should have nailed her to a chair and extracted the entire story of her escapade.

Judy told The Times that she plans to write a book and intends to return to the newsroom, hoping to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country." If that were to happen, the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.

Copyright © 2005 The New York Times Company

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I Thought That I Was Alone!

Andrew Heinze teaches history at the University of San Francisco. USF was best know for its basketball teams in the mid-1950s that won national championships with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones. USF is middling-good Roman Catholic liberal arts institution, so I was surprised by Heinze's admission that his selectively-admitted students didn't know the meaning of "pessimistic" or "fatalistic" or "opportunistic." These words appeared on one of Heinze's history exams and he was confronted with the reality of stunted vocabularies among his students. At least Heinze's word-challenged student raised her hand and asked a question. At the Collegium Excellens where I labored for more than three decades (groan), most of my students would skip a word they didn't understand and plow ahead. Dictionary, what's that? Just think about Malcolm Little (before his conversion to a variant of Islam: Malcolm X), spent his time in prison memorizing the dictionary, one page at a time. If words are powerful (and I think they are), my students — like Heinze's — were 90-pound weaklings. If this is (fair & balanced) philology, so be it.

What Does 'Vocabulary' Mean?
By Andrew R. Heinze

My student's question caught me off guard: "What's 'pessimistic'?" She smiled meekly and added, "I'm sorry, but I don't know what it means."

She was puzzling over a multiple-choice question about Abraham Lincoln's philosophy of life, and "pessimistic" was one of the choices. I said: "Well, you know the expression about the glass of water being half-full or half-empty? A pessimistic person sees it as half-empty. An optimist sees it as half-full."

She nodded, thanked me, and returned to the test.

My student was born and raised in the United States. I would guess that she comes from a middle-class or upper-middle-class background, like many of her peers at the small, expensive, private university where I teach. Like the vast majority of American colleges, mine does not attract many academically inclined students — the ones who enjoy school and love learning. They usually end up at more prestigious institutions.

Most of the students at colleges like mine are there only because they have to be: Without a bachelor's degree they cannot qualify for jobs that offer reasonably high status or pay. Most of our graduates become technicians, managers, sales representatives, civil servants, or public-school teachers.

I like my students. They are nice, respectful, and willing to work, especially on assignments that will be graded. But I sometimes forget how little they know.

As a history professor, I realize that they are unsure of centuries ("Is the 19th century the 1900s or the 1800s?"), geography ("Is Vermont in the South?"), chronology ("Was the Great Depression before the Civil War?"), and people ("Wasn't Frederick Douglass one of the presidents?"). And as a teacher with quite a few foreign-born students, I know that some will be unfamiliar with idiomatic expressions ("nuts and bolts," "bread and butter," "jumped the gun," "paid the piper").

I am also mindful that even my American-born students have fairly limited vocabularies. So when I use a word that I think they will not know (anomalous, fortuitous, chicanery), I usually follow it up immediately with a definition: "The leaders were guilty of all kinds of chicanery — chicanery means lying and cheating — but they often went unpunished."

But it is only when I get a question like "What's 'pessimistic'?" that I realize how much of what I say in a lecture goes over my students' heads. During the next class meeting, with that question in mind, I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence about Teddy Roosevelt and the ideal of virility. I had used the word "virility" a few times already and hadn't noticed any puzzled looks, but now I paused to ask the 40 young people looking intently at me, "Do you understand the word 'virility'? Do you know what it means?"

At first no hands rose in the air, but after I waited a while, one did. That student said, "I'm not sure, but does it have to do with power — with sexual power, or something?"

I told him, yes, it did have to do with sexual power, and then I asked if anyone knew whether the word applied to men and women, or only to men. Nobody knew.

I asked, "Has anyone studied Latin?" A young woman's hand went up. "Do you remember the word for man?" Tentatively, but correctly, she said it. I then explained to the class why the "vir" in "virility" made it a term for masculine power, and returned to talking about TR, whose cult of power wouldn't have been the same if it had been gender neutral.

But a few minutes later I had another question for my students. In the biography of Roosevelt they were reading, the author noted that young Teddy's schoolmates had chided him for his priggishness. "Prig" appeared several times in the chapter assigned for class that day. So I asked, "Do you know what the word 'prig' means?" No one did.

Obviously the problem is not about "prig," or "virility," or even "pessimistic." It is about the assumption most of us make when we lecture, that college students will be familiar with most of the words we use, as long as we avoid rarefied or academic terminology. Behind that assumption lies a pedagogical problem for which we have no good solution: inadvertently speaking over our students' heads.

What should we do about it? Dumbing down our speech to a sixth- or eighth-grade level is not an option. If we don't stimulate our students to learn important words, who will? On the other hand, even though we might take a few extra seconds after saying "chicanery" or "anomalous" to give a definition, we cannot do that with every "prig" and "pessimistic" that passes our lips.

One possible approach is to switch from essay-question to multiple-choice exams. The only reason I discovered the severity of my students' semantic problems is that, a few years ago, I made that switch in my lecture courses. The move was a painful one. It challenged my whole way of thinking about education. Multiple-choice tests in college? In a humanities course? When I was in college, I never had an "objective" test in history, English, or philosophy. That was how you tested students in junior high school or maybe high school, but certainly not in college.

Without going into all the reasons why I decided to use that kind of test, except in seminars, I can say that it gives me much more specific information about what my students understand and don't understand. Some of that information involves verbal ability. In 30 or 40 multiple-choice questions, there are easily a thousand words, some probably obscure to many students. Even the most straightforward questions may present challenges:

Lincoln's philosophy of life is best described as:

a. pessimistic

b. fatalistic

c. opportunistic

Most of my students probably don't know what "fatalistic" and "opportunistic" mean, even though they hear me use those words in class. Thanks to the few who are brave enough to ask me for definitions when the words come up in a multiple-choice test, I get more insight into the language gap between us.

If we aim to educate, we cannot simply ignore that gap. But neither can we devote all our time to it if we are hired to teach history, sociology, philosophy, or anything else that doesn't revolve around a distinct terminology that students must memorize.

Beyond the obvious practical suggestion — that we do what we can to expand our students' vocabularies — there is a deeper question: What do we take for granted when we teach? We should probably reassess, from time to time, that boundary line between the explicit and the implicit. Whether we are patient or impatient about the language gap, it can't hurt us to think about how our students interpret our basic words and gestures, the ones we assume to be self-evident.

What we should not do is fall back on the cherished clichés of the educator: indignation ("What an appalling decline in standards!") or resignation ("That's par for the course these days."). That would be pessimistic.

Andrew R. Heinze is a professor of history at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book is Jews and the American Soul (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Guess Who Has A Blog?

In lieu of a final report, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has launched a blog! The pundits and bloggers are convinced that Fitzgerald is going to post the juicy stuff on the Web. That remains to be seen. This blog contains a few pdf-files (requiring an Adobe Reader plugin) of mundane stuff, e.g., the memorandum of appointment from the Deputy Attorney General. The Creepster (Attorney General John Ashcroft, remember him?) recused himself and Fitzgerald was brought in from Chicago in a reversal of the Elliott Ness pattern. If this is (fair & balanced) geekiness, so be it.

Nail The Suckers!

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Perjury Is A Misdemeanor?

Ol' Kay Bailey is a former Longhorn cheerleader turned U. S. Senator. Legal scholar she ain't. T.(urd) B.(lossom)'s and Scooter's Amazing Adventure is about to come to a screeching halt. If this is (fair & balanced) hypocrisy, so be it.


[x The Plank: A Blog by TNR staffers]

TOMORROW'S PLAME TALKING POINTS TODAY: On "Meet the Press" yesterday, Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison cautioned America not to get too worked up over possible indictments in the Valerie Plame case:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment ... that it is an indictment on a crime, and not some perjury technicality where they can't indict on the crime, and so they go to something just to show their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars....

Hmm... That's not the tune Hutchison was singing back when Bill Clinton was caught with his hands in the intern jar. Here's the February 13, 1999 Dallas Morning News:

"The principle of the rule of law—equality under the law and a clear standard for perjury and obstruction of justice—was the overriding issue in this impeachment," said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who also voted "guilty" on both counts.

Now, this is almost too easy. Nevertheless, in the event of PlameGate indictments, The Plank looks forward to reuniting apologist Republicans who persecuted Bill Clinton with their earlier views about perjury and obstruction of justice. Just because the fish are in a barrel doesn't mean you shouldn't shoot them!

—Michael Crowley

Copyright © 2005 The New Republic

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