Short and sweet: Judith Miller is either appallingly cynical or utterly self-unaware. Either way, she wins the Hypocrite for the Ages trophy.

The former New York Times reporter, you remember, deservedly caught unholy hell for her role in pushing the Bush administration’s lies about WMDs in Iraq. She wrote a series of stories for the Times — based on B.S. spoonfed to her by Cheney & Co.’s favorite puppet, Ahmad Chalabi — claiming that there was clear evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam was working to acquire nuclear weapons. The stories were all written and published without verifying the evidence. The Bushies then turned around and used Miller’s “reporting” as grounds for the invasion. When her shoddy work exploded in her face — about the same time IED’s were exploding, much more literally, in American soldiers’ faces — Miller defended her reporting thusly: “[M]y job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

No, Ms. Miller, your job, particularly in such a highly charged, dangerous situation, was to be sure you were telling the truth. In any case, Miller is now a paid analyst on Fox News (there's a shock), where last weekend she  accused WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange of being “a bad journalist.” The reason? Now get this: “Because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone.”

In my fantasy world, when an irresponsible journalist who helped pave the way to a genuine catastrophe calls someone else irresponsible, a bucketload of bullshit drops on his/her head. But that’s just in my fantasy.  In real life, no one on the Fox News show batted an eye, and Miller goes to work this week for the ultra-conservative site Newsmax.com.