The strange case of the NYTimes

John Podhoretz demonstrates how bizarre the behavior of the Gray Lady has been of late. And the outright hypocrisy of Bill Keller and the nasally whining Maureen Dowd in denouncing Judy Miller and smearing her with innuendo about her relationship with Mr. Libby.

And why? Well, she embarrassed all journalists by being wrong about WMD in Iraq:

The not-so-hidden truth is that Miller's critics believe that she bears some responsibility — maybe even all the responsibility — for the fact that America went to war with Iraq. Why? Because she published some articles that offered evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction — articles whose evidence turned out to be untrue. She didn't know it to be untrue, and neither did those who passed it to her. Nonetheless, she has become part of the lunatic case against the war — dragged into the never-ending BUSH LIED meme.

THERE'S something comic about this, as if Miller's coverage changed the course of history because it appeared in ... gasp . . . omigod ... the Times.

The outraged prose on this matter from writers outside the Times — like Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher and the just-out-of-the-nuthouse cases populating the Huffington Post on the Web — suggests that if only the Times had published nothing articles more skeptical of the WMD claims, it could have kept the war from happening.

Because, you know, the world revolves around the Times. The world spins and spins on its axis around a liberal newspaper of declining influence . . . whose most famous and powerful staffers now think there's great merit in devouring their own.

The irony that those who are always lecturing us on their journalistic integrity have so bought into the myth that Saddam really never had those WMD that they will denounce someone who reported the conventional wisdom at the time that he did.