When social psychologist Leon Festinger developed his landmark theory of "cognitive dissonance" in the 1950s, he had to hang out for months with a UFO cult awaiting the end of the world to find real-life examples. Festinger’s When Prophesy Fails recounts the mental contortions that these the-end-is-nigh true believers go through to square their faith in their imminent rescue by flying saucers with the inconvenient reality that nothing other-worldly was then happening in America -- unless, of course, you count Liberace's career.
Fifty years later, would-be Festingers do not need to hang out with wacky cultists on the fringes of society to find dramatic examples of cognitive dissonance. Instead, modern-day social scientists could simply watch the intense psychological discomfort of conservatives when one of their basic tenets (the New York Times is a bit to the left of Kim Il Jung) collides with an inconvertible fact (Times reporter Judy Miller is now completing her second week in the slammer for refusing to rat out her Bush administration sources in the Valerie Plame case).
The right-wing case against the “liberal media” has also been undermined by Time magazine’s Matt Cooper keeping mum for two years that Karl Rove was the first to tell him of Plame’s CIA connection. Cooper’s principled silence about Rove during the 2004 campaign also flies in the face of simple-minded conservative conspiracy theories that suggest that any reporter is suspect if he so much as attended a college where some of the professors opposed the Vietnam War. In Cooper’s case, he is married to Democratic media consultant Mandy Grunwald, which underscores the lengths that he went to keep his deep-background pledge of confidentiality to Rove.
(The obligatory full-disclosure paragraph: Miller, Cooper and Grunwald are all close friends of mine. Rove is not. And, yes, I remembered When Prophesy Fails from college).
In a rational world, Republican activists would be sporting First Amendment lapel pins to signal support for Miller and a free press. Tom DeLay would be ordering every high-priced lobbying firm in Washington to take out a full-page ad in the Times to give a financial boost to this brave newspaper for standing up to a jack-booted federal prosecutor. Right-wing senators would be racing to TV cameras to vow to support only Supreme Court nominees who agree that the original intent of the Founding Fathers was to protect reporters from being jailed in cases like Miller's.
Believe it or not, dear readers, this expected conservative outpouring just hasn't happened. Ann Coulter seems to have entered a Trappist monastery, since both a NEXIS search and a Google News scan came up dry when I linked her name with “Miller + Plame” and then “Miller + Rove.” I came up with similar cases of radio silence when I tried conservative columnists George Will and Michelle Malkin.
But no one dares silence Rush Limbaugh. A search of his website came up with numerous mentions of Miller, but since I balked at ponying up $49.95 for a year’s free access to “Rush 24/7" complete with a “Limbaugh on Liberty” screen-saver, I can only guess at their content. But a few recent headlines suggest that “Limbaugh on Liberty’ does not extend to freedom for Judy Miller. Take this telling example: “Rush is Right: Desperate Democrats Rally To Get Rove, Times Covers Up for Their Own Source.”
Unable to deal with their cognitive dissonance, some conservatives have floated the bizarre theory that Rove (who has a top-secret security clearance) only learned about Plame’s CIA ties from Miller (who only sometimes covers spooks). John Podhoretz writing on the National Review website was one of the first to advance this cockamamie notion. Even my centrist friend Mickey Kaus was tempted by it. In this topsy-turvy fantasy,Rove is the innocent White House staffer betrayed by a Times reporter who is only going to jail to protect her own involvement in outing Plame. You could almost imagine Rove or Scooter Libby shouting Marion-Barry style, “Bitch set me up.”
This Times-bashing theory seems to have died with the recent revelation that a top-secret State Department memo outlining Valerie Plame’s CIA connections was floating around Air Force One on a presidential visit to Africa. But I am surprised that no one on the right has jumped from Miller to the ideologically suspect Colin Powell as the next obvious villain.
Not all conservatives, it should be stressed, have abandoned Miller. Tucker Carlson last week on his MSNBC cable show rightly said, “Judith Miller went to jail rather than betray her source. I don’t know people in many other professions who go to jail before ratting someone out.” But like flying-saucer cultists, many right-wingers would much rather create an alternate universe in which the Times and its reporters are covert Democratic operatives than recognize the courage of both Judy Miller and the newspaper for which she works.