What's Going On at the Washington Post?

The Washington Post is long removed from it's Woodward and Bernstein/Watergate days.  In the last couple of days alone, its editorial staff is shocked to discover that perhaps the new Republican majority in the House isn't as serious about debt reduction as they claim, despite their own journalists reporting on the hypocrisy, post an online poll asking the reader to prioritize issues that Congress should tackle while completely omitting "job creation" or "economy" as one of the choices until long after the poll was made available thereby skewing the numbers, and now publishes an article about Estonia's growing economy and their success story while they are in the middle of recovering from a depression.

Maybe Judith Miller should apply for a job there.

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Miller

Remember Judith Miller? She was the New York Times reporter who drummed up the case for the Iraq War with front page news on weapons of mass destruction; stories that were cited by the Bush administration as evidence for the need to invade and remove Saddam Hussein from power. Where did she get those stories that wound up to be completely unfounded? "Official secrets" and "secret government reports." See how that works?

Anyway, it seems that Miller is now criticizing Julian Assange for his failure to verify the stories in the Wikileaks cable releases.

Miller said that Assange "didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."

Uh-huh. But stories about WMD that didn't exist didn't hurt anyone either, so that's cool, right?

The funny thing is that when she came under fire for her hack journalism, she responded, "'[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal.'"

So just to sum up, Miller, a journalist who worked for the NY Times for 28 years, who dropped the ball on WMD whether intentional or not, and was involved in protecting Scooter Libby during the Valerie Plame outing, criticized a wanted fugitive for not verifying stories in illegally obtained government cables for his data dump. ... Got it.