Judith Miller may not have a book deal just yet (much less the $1.2 million Simon & Schuster advance alleged by gadfly blogger Arianna Huffington). But when she does get to it, we can be sure that—along with Norman Pearlstine’s planned tome on the hilarious topic of anonymous sourcing—it’ll be an earnestly self-justifying take on a Very Serious Matter. Not for jolly Time reporter Matt Cooper, who testified without doing any hard time, keeping his sense of humor intact. He’s been telling friends he intends to write a comedy about the Valerie Plame Wilson affair. And Cooper, who does stand-up part time (sample joke: “ [John] Kerry’s idea of rebellion is having red wine with fish”), sees himself as just the man for the job. Cooper wouldn’t comment, even for a punch line. “The question,” says a friend of Cooper’s, “is whether publishers are going to have the intelligence to want a funny book about this, instead of one that huffs and puffs about ‘a crucial turn in American history’ and all that.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Boris Kachka
• Table of Contents: Oct 31, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!