Jonathan Chait:
Sally Quinn Forced to Dine With Non-Fake Friends: After pretty much the entire journalistic world has made fun of Sally Quinn’s weekend Washington Post essay declaring the End of Power, further abuse may seem unnecessarily cruel. And yet even the fulsome stream of disparagement directed at Quinn has not adequately conveyed the full awfulness of her piece….
When assessing Quinn’s sense of the Lost Eden of Washington, we should also have a firmer sense of what the culture was actually like. Here is one scene from Quinn’s inculcation into the Washington elite:
Washington writer Sally Quinn told of a 1950s reception where: “My mother and I headed for the buffet table. As we were reaching for the shrimp, both of us jumped and let out a shriek. Senator Strom Thurmond, grinning from ear to ear, had one hand on my behind and the other on my mother’s. As I recall, we were both quite flattered, and thought it terribly funny and wicked of Ol’ Strom.”
Once Washington was a happy place where a girl and her mother could be groped simultaneously in good fun by a white supremacist. Sadly, it has all been ruined by Kim Kardashian and Ezra Klein.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
