Finger-in-the-Eye Politics

There sure are a lot of people getting beat up out there.

Judy Miller. Mary Mapes. Maureen Dowd. To name just a few.

Not to mention George Bush, Scooter Libby, Jerry Kilgore, Doug Forrester, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Freddy Ferrer and Jon Corzine's ex-wife, plus Jimmy Smits, who lost that debate to Alan Alda, and Terrell Owens, who got kicked off the Eagles for running his mouth instead of the football.

Sure, politics (and media) is a contact sport, if you can't take the heat, things have gotten meaner, and so on. But I can't help but notice how much blood is on the floor at the moment.

The cases are all different, and I want to avoid the columnist's trap of melding a few disparate examples into a pseudo-trend. Libby has been indicted for lying. Miller has been hammered for erroneous WMD stories, not cooperating with her NYT colleagues after her dealings with Libby landed her in jail and generally just ticking people off. Mapes is still insisting that her Bush/National Guard story on CBS was solid (details here .) Forrester thought it was cute to drag the former Mrs. Corzine into his race for Jersey governor. Maureen says high-powered men want to marry salesclerks and secretaries, not high-powered columnists (the skinny here .)

But it is rough out there, and that seems to reflect the smashmouth culture. Miller, who after all spent three months in jail, has been denounced with a passion that sometimes seems out of proportion to her offenses (though she's given it back to Bill Keller and other critics, just as Dowd used her column to stick it to Miss Run Amok). And now, of course, she's been forced out . Mapes rips bloggers as a menace to society and drags Les Moonves's marriage into her criticism of her former network. Forrester and Corzine both got accused of having affairs, with the complicity of the press, as the rumor mill spun out of control. And, of course, politicians who lose elections are routinely painted as pathetic losers.

Tina Brown , who knows something about prominent women getting built up and knocked down, throws Harriet Miers and Martha Stewart into the mix and asks: "Was it always so hazardous for women in the public eye?. . . . When a woman is the subject the vortex of venom reaches a spinning climax."

I don't think women have a monopoly on this sort of thing. But I do wonder whether the price of admission to the Great American Slugfest has gotten rather high.

Miller handled herself well on Larry King last night, but Steve Lovelady of CJR, is happy to bid Judy adieu:

"Miller, a reporter who gave new definition to the phrase 'gone native,' moved within the world of national security intrigue, a murky place, as we have recently learned, where creepy characters and self-serving careerists advance competing agendas, most of them only tenuously tied to reality.

"Inside that world -- and this is the scary part -- Miller fit right in, more at home, apparently, than she was in what she now calls 'the convent' of the New York Times.

"We commend the Times for lancing this boil, however reluctantly, after a long and frustrating summer and fall during which it sometimes seemed as if the newspaper itself was being run not by executive editor Bill Keller or publisher Arthur Sulzberger, but by Miller's legal strategy of the moment.