Judy In Jail: It’s Hard To Top Curtis Sliwa

This evening on “Showbiz Tonight,” I was pitted against radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa on the subject of Judith-Miller-in-jail. Here’s the transcript. It was so frustrating when Sliwa completely misconstrued the issue and asserted that Miller had broken the law!

SLIWA: Lock her up, throw away the key. There she is, ‘Oh, do the Martha Stewart to me. Give me a bracelet, home detention. I won’t play with my computer.’ Hey, it’s a law. You broke the law, pay the price, because then she’s going to go on tour. Every college she’ll be getting $50,000 a throw at every journalist school, because she’ll be their new Joan of Arc. Four months, that’s soft time. She’ll do that in a breeze.

So I responded:

STELTER: Four months in the D.C. jail. They wouldn’t even let her go in home detention or to a women’s prison. Here’s the thing about Miller. She hasn’t been convicted of a crime. She hasn’t even been accused of a crime. She’s being held in civil contempt, because they want to coerce her into talking. It’s a damn shame.

Yes, I accidently said “damn.” But damnit, Sliwa was wrong. Later in the conversation, he referred to Dan Rather’s “bogus stories” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil disobedience, then he tried to downplay the story: “This is no Watergate. This is not Pentagon papers. This is just buzz, nattering that took place.” An e-mailer comforted me: “Curtis Sliva is a raving lunatic…you provided a great counterpoint and shot down his idiotic rants.”

> Correction: Miller is across the Potomac in an Alexandria, VA jail, not a D.C. jail.