With its mxture of hearsay and wishful thinking Arianna Huffington's post last weekend, in which she implied that Judith Miller got what she deserved, was grotesque. Opponents of the Iraq War want to blame her for acting as the administration's mouthpiece. Now there's an even more sordid rumor floating around: Miller was so cozy with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzalez, who led the search for WMD, because she was cozy with Richard Gonzalez. In prose worthy of Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker, Huffington writes:

And no fewer than four sources have either e-mailed, called, or, in one case, run up to me on the street to tell me that what I termed Miller's "especially close relationship" with Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales, the leader of the WMD-hunting unit Miller was embedded with during the war, might have been, well, very close indeed. According to one insider, Miller had emailed a picture of Gonzales to a colleague at the Times with the message "Lucky Lady."

What's the use? When the redoutable James Wolcott writes goofily effusive encomiums ("she is riding this gift horse to cloud-trailing glory") to Huffington, you know the moral high ground on which Wolcott, Huffington, and others have stood to decry the administration's lies about Iraq is really a dung pile.
My point? Intelligent writers who demand accountability from their government, value accurate reporting, and denounce the administration's disdain for empirical data have no business drooling over unsubstantiated gossip.

In today's Washington Post, liberal columnist Richard Cohen reminds us that Miller is in jail because she refused to name a source. Never mind her political beliefs. Never mind who she was embedded with.