Judy on Judy

If you look through the Judy Miller piece, it's hard NOT to find a statement that can't be plausibly denied in a court of law. In other words, she's never actually holding herself accountable. Almost every paragraph seems to contain an "as I recall" or an "according to my notes," and none of it is actually revealing of anything. And all of it -- if confronted later with contradictory evidence -- can be legally wiggled out of. It seems substantively ambiguous while trying to appear painstakingly accurate. It's a case of "facts" obfuscating "truth." It's disembodied. It's almost as if she's doing a sociological study of herself with herself as an object of observation whom she doesn't really know personally. It's as if she weren't actually living within herself at the time these things happened. As if there's this curious person -- "Judith Miller" -- whom she's been assigned to observe from a distance and is now writing up a summary of what she saw. It's weirdly detached and written, it seems to me, with a lot of advice and revision from a team of lawyers. I think it's total bullshit.