Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post Edition)

Outsourced to Matthew Yglesias, who examines Ruth Marcus's special pleading for Alberto Gonzales:

Matthew Yglesias: Ruth Marcus, driving hard for the wanker of the day prize, decides that though Al Gonzalez "dissembled and misled" and he didn't commit perjury and so rather than "trying to incite criminal a prosecution that won't happen of an attorney general who should have been gone long ago," Democrats "need to concentrate on determining what the administration did -- and under what claimed legal authority -- that produced the hospital room showdown. They need to satisfy themselves that the administration has since been operating within the law; to see what changes might guard against a repetition of the early, apparently unlawful activities; and to determine where the foreign intelligence wiretapping statute might need fixes."

The possibility that if the administration continues to dissemble and mislead congress, and is told in advance that it can get off the hook for doing so, it might be difficult to get to the bottom of this matter doesn't seem to have occurred to her. Oh, well.

She can't really be that stupid, can she?

Anybody think that Ruth Marcus and company "should[n't] have been gone long ago"? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

The scary thing is, by the low standards of the WaPo op-ed page, Marcus is above average in her accuracy and judgment.

Samuelson, Applebaum, and Richard Cohen are just plain dumb. Krauthammer's barking mad. Hoagland's nothing more than a CW shill. Broder's practically senile. Will's mostly pointless. Robert Kagan (yes, he now has a regular monthly op-ed column, according to their website) is a neocon True Believer. Novakula's inside-baseball (wingnut version) insights belong in a subscription newsletter for those interested in such things, not on a major op-ed page. Michael Gerson wrote Dear Leader's speeches for most of his presidency. Marcus is better than all of them.

She's not as good as E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Harold Meyerson, or Colbert King. She's battling it out for fifth place with David Ignatius, and they're only slightly ahead of Mallaby.

That's how bad the WaPo op-ed page is.

Not only is that scary, it's really kind of pathetic. As the blogosphere has demonstrated, there's an overabundance of people who can write excellent, topnotch commentary on national politics. The Washington Post could hire a bunch of them for a fraction of what they're paying people like Marcus, Mallaby, and Samuelson. But they don't, despite the fact that it would revitalize their op-ed page tremendously.

From this, I can only conclude that the WaPo has what it regards as a more important purpose than turning a profit, and that would be dispensing their own special line of Conventional Wisdom.

[Reader]

One wonders at the business sense of a company which retains columnists who repeatedly receive page-after-page of harshly negative commentary from its readers on the Post's own web site. A detail, I guess, in support of Brad's repeated prognosis for the Post.

[JMOHR]

Yes, this is the usual standard that we have all come to expect from the once mighty Washington Post. Not unlike Bernstein, it has been co-opted by the conservative, corporate have's and have more's that constituted the base for George Bush and his Republican party.

Note that there is never a reason to challenge, punish or change the actions of this administration. Accountability is a foreign concept. At best, we may have permission from this columnist to gin up a thousand more arcane laws and rules to cover what should be easily recognized as a crime, mala per se.

[Bloix]

No, she is not that stupid. She is doing her job, which is to confuse and placate the moderate-to-liberal portion of readership into passivity, while Krauthammer et al throw red meat to the conservative-to-wingnut portion of the readership. Proposing impossible courses of action in lieu of practical courses of action is a time-honored technique of her trade.

Marcus is not stupid. The people who are stupid are those who continue to act as if the columnists on the Post write in good faith. For these people, I recommend a daily dose of Bob Somerby.

[Ritchie]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair

[robert the red]

Anne Applebaum is actually interesting when she writes about the subject she knows firsthand: modern Poland. She lives there, speaks Polish, and is married to an important Polish politician. The further she drifts from her area of knowledge, the more she founders.

[NYT]

The business of the Washington Post company is primarily selling educational materials through its Kaplan subsidiary.

Its bad business to attack your best customer especially if your best customer is a bunch of loyal Bushies.

[Barry]

"Samuelson, Applebaum, and Richard Cohen are just plain dumb."

No, because they are almost always 'dumb' in a direction preferred by the powers-that-be. They do have those occasional adorable personal lapses, but not on the big stuff.

"Anne Applebaum is actually interesting when she writes about the subject she knows firsthand: modern Poland. She lives there, speaks Polish, and is married to an important Polish politician. The further she drifts from her area of knowledge, the more she founders."

Well, her 'area of knowledge' concerning the US doesn't seem to include her native country, high-school civics, or anything else that one would expect a moderately intelligent person to understand.

I think that, after having been proven so wrong so often writing about the USA, we can't fairly assume that any of her writing about Poland is trustworthy.

[low-tech cyclist]

Well yeah, they're dumb establishmentarians, but their stupidity is still the more notable quality: you'd think establishment-fluffers with at least the mediocre brains of, say, a Sebastian Mallaby, would be a dime a dozen. That Cohen, Applebaum, and Samuelson are a distinct step or two down from Mallaby, yet still have op-ed columns in what is supposedly one of America's great papers, is just plain pathetic.

And, like I said, it leads us to conclude that dispensing its own particular line of Conventional Wisdom is a more central mission to the WaPo than turning a profit is.