Maureen Dowd didn't like the reporter Judith Miller much. Or rather, she liked Miller a lot, but in a
special Dowdy sort of way:
I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp.
The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy -- her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur -- have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types.
Sometimes I wonder if Dowd isn't a fictional character invented by
Clare Booth Luce to preserve the worst early 20th-century stereotypes of the independent woman as uncontrollably catty misogynist. Anyhow, what she didn't seem to think at all was that
Miller's jailing for contempt of court in the summer of 2005 was a case of "strange and awful aggression against reporters and whistle-blowers". Au contraire!
