aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, August 29, 2005

Why’s the dog not barking?

The Times had another Judy editorial today. Arianna’s not persuaded:

Far from rallying support for Miller, today’s pitiable plea instead calls attention to how little support for Miller there actually is… even among the Times’ own op-ed columnists. Not one of them has written a single word about their incarcerated colleague during the entire month of August, a time when the questions about Miller’s actions have come to the fore. And even before then not one of them chose to devote an entire column to Judy’s plight. Indeed, Bob Herbert, Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, David Brooks and John Tierney haven’t written a word about it. Maureen Down and Nick Kristof barely mentioned it in passing. And Frank Rich wrote three July columns on Plamegate without once offering even a full sentence to her defense.

It’s the Times version of Sherlock Holmes’ curious incident of the dog that didn’t bark in the night.

Only Bill Safire, by then a former Times columnist, chose to devote a whole column to Judy (on July 29). And Safire is an unabashed Miller supporter. At a recent lunch thrown for him by Mort Zuckerman in his East Hampton home, Safire offered a toast to Miller “because she’s in jail and we’re not”. According to four of the guests, the toast left them and many others at the gathering scratching their heads. As one of them put it: “why the hell should I be in jail?”.