"Jayson Blair and the resurrected corpse of Spiro Agnew would be a great diavlog."

Former NYT reporter Judith Miller goes on BloggingheadsTV to talk about this article about female suicide bombers, and gets a tirade of abuse from the commenters:

Oh my god! Where do hack NYTimes reporters go to die, figuratively speaking of course! Why it's Blogging Heads TV!!!! Will we be seeing Rick Bragg and Howell Raines here next?

Oh God. Bloggingheads has stooped pretty low in the past, but really - Judith Miller? A dishonest hack and a proud purveyor of pre-war propaganda, one of the chief vehicles for the lies the Bush administration used to sell its phony war? Why is she being given a platform here? Could Bob not find anyone more intellectually dishonest - the festering corpse of Richard Nixon, perhaps?...

Why bother watching this? How would it be possible to guess when she's lying and when she isn't? There ought to be some minimal standards for who appears on bloggingheads.

Next up on Bloggingheads - Jayson Blair and Steven Glass...

Jayson Blair and the resurrected corpse of Spiro Agnew would be a great diavlog.

Etc. etc.

ADDED: Since I've been savaged by commenters at bhTV, I may have a distorted perspective, but I hate to see Miller treated this way. For one thing, she's talking about an interesting important subject, and it would be nice if people could pay attention to it. For another, I think her experience there will deter others from going on the show. You already have to face an interlocutor who will argue with you, perhaps intensely, in an hour-long session that will not be edited. But you also see that a strange horde of pseudonymous commenters is waiting to shred you.