Ezra Klein on the Latest Atrocity Committed by Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post...

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein - Sarah Palin: One of Us:

Many in the national media would rather focus on the personality-driven political gossip of the day than on the gravity of these challenges...

writes Sarah Palin in The Washington Post, one of the country's few nationally oriented media outlets.

So, at risk of disappointing the chattering class, let me make clear what is foremost on my mind and where my focus will be: I am deeply concerned about President Obama's cap-and-trade energy plan, and I believe it is an enormous threat to our economy...

It's probably a bit kind to say that Sarah Palin "wrote" this. There are no words in all capital letters. There are no sports metaphors. There is nothing at all like "((Gotta put First Things First))." The stylistic and grammatical tics on display in last week's speech are totally absent. Sarah Palin signed her name to this. Or at least let someone else do so.

But that's not all that's missing. The term "global warming" is absent. So is "climate change." It's a bit like an op-ed that attacks firefighters for pointing pressurized water cannon at everything but never mentions fires, or a column that condemns surgeons for sticking sharp things into people but never mentions illness.

You could no more argue with this op-ed than you could drive a car made out of candy. Though it looks like one thing, it's actually another. And that other is a declaration of political intent: Palin is going to spend the next couple of years trying to act as leader of the opposition. She'll start with what she knows: Drill, baby, drill. And she'll start where she knows. In the media.

A week ago, Eugene Robinson ended a column by saying, "Sarah Palin is by nature more of a firebrand opinion-maker than anything else. I know one when I see one. She can deny it all she wants, but really she's -- gulp -- one of us." He had no idea how right he was. That column came out on July 7. Today is July 14, and he and Sarah Palin are across from each other on the op-ed page.

How long before the Washington Post editorial page tells Ezra what they told Dan Froomkin--that they didn't hire him to do media criticism, that that is Howard Kurtz's beat?