Judith Miller's "Story": Setting the Record Straight

“In the spring of 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, I was at the peak of my profession,” Judith Miller writes in the prologue to “The Story: A Reporter's Journey,” her compelling account of her life in journalism. Miller had been a versatile reporter at The New York Times for 25 years, but her special beat was the Arab world, Islamic extremism, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and war.  She was part of the Times staff that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting for its investigation of al-Qaeda's pre-9/11 global network; she received an Emmy that year for a documentary based on her co-authored book “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.” She was nine years into a happy marriage to New York publishing eminence Jason Epstein.  Three years later, with her reporting “mired in controversy,” the Times drove her out. A swarm of bloggers and more than a few fellow print journalists accused her of “hyping” the threat of WMD posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, thus helping President George W. Bush and his team sell a misbegotten war to the American public. At best, Miller was blamed for lacking the requisite skepticism any serious reporter must have, for ignoring facts, and distorting information. At worst, she was charged with having morphed into one of the dreaded neoconservatives who, according to this media caricature, sought to export democracy to the Arab world by sword and fire.

Read more at Real Clear Politics Read More......

Unexpectedly: The New York Times discovers that many don’t have to work in the age of Obama

You already knew that Mitt Romney was right about just about everything.

He was right when he called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” With Moscow occupying sovereign foreign territory in Europe for the first time since 1989, and as American tanks and possibly even nuclear weapons are headed back to the European front, the 1980s called and they clearly got their foreign policy back.

He was right to warn about the expansion of Islamic extremists into formerly obscure places like Northern Mali. Despite being mocked by the unduly self-assured for his insistence that Islamic radicalism in North Africa was a threat to global security, France introduced troops into that country in 2013 at the behest of Mali’s president in order to quell the raging conflict between Islamist insurgents and government forces.  He was right about Detroit.

Read more at Hot Air Read More......