Disagreement Among the Titans

This morning’s Sun-Times featured a rare ideological split among liberal feminists over Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who went to jail for 85 days rather than reveal her source. Initially she was regarded as a secular saint, one willing to suffer for her independence. Then The Times decided otherwise. Promptly last week, Maureen Dowd (who is my all-time favorite slinger of ink even though I always disagree) and Frank Rich (not nearly as clever as Dowd but a blunt weapon of animosity) attacked Miller. Pinch Sulzberger (the son of Punch) holds firm but it looks like Dame Judith will be out on her own soon.

Get out the earmuffs in hell, for the local feminist liberals at the Sun-Times disagreed today. Lynn Sweet, the Washington bureau chief (who runs the bureau consisting of herself) wrote her usual unlabeled opinion piece this time in the straight news section which warned menacingly that Patrick Fitzgerald is “too clean” (the headline) for GOP criticism to stick so you dinosaur Republicans who want to protect Cheney better watch out because he is not like Ken Starr, quoting a malcontented GOP pollster Frank Luntz who’s been peeved because he didn’t get the attention that Matt Dowd the Bush pollster did in 2004 which he called on the button. Whereupon Sweet goes off on a seeming canonization kick for Fitzgerald: he doesn’t get paid more while doing twice the work and kicking Tom DeLay’s attack on his prosecutor while forgetting to mention that Ronnie Earl has been criticized as overly political (just an oversight, natch).

While Sweet was putting Fitzgerald on a pedestal, back in the editorial section, the paper’s at least unashamedly labeled political columnist Carol Marin goes the other way in a column “Fitzgerald’s on the Wrong Hunt.” Marin loves the martyrology of the press, taking the time to inform us if we hadn’t always known it that she, too, was probed by the feds to divulge a source she refused to do leading her to talk to her then 14-year-old son and say perhaps Mama’s going away for awhile. It didn’t happen but the yarn led us to recall how she stood up to the impending threat of Jerry Springer at Channel 5 which was a triumph of sorts for civility. The column concludes with a favored Marin theme: the hideousness of the Iraq war where the Bush administration led us to disaster “with no good reason at all.” I wonder if a political realignment could be worked out between Pat Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts and Marin. That would be exciting. No, maybe it wouldn’t.