WaPo: Surveying the flaming wreckage

Also syndicated to the Guardian (“here”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/14/sarah-palin-energy-obama ).

There’s a simple explanation for why this piece is indistinguishable from standard WaPo product.
It was written for her (prime suspect: Kristol, W) and her name was put at the top.
Surely we know that if she’d tried to produce an oped unaided, we’d now be hooting with delight.
In this case, though, the natural response is weary contempt. Which tells us it comes straight from a tediously familiar source.

Well, she’s only trying to take the JFK route to the Presidency. The only difference is that she won’t get a Pulitzer prize for what she didn’t write.

But much more damaging is the observation that, if this piece had come out (with the obvious stylistic variations) under the byline of George Will, Robert Samuelson, David Broder or any of the other rightwing/Villager hacks on the Post op-ed page, it would have slipped by without any real notice.

With all due respect, it doesn’t sound like you’ve actually read Palin’s op-ed, which is several degrees worse than the Post’s usual mendacities and banalities. Palin is arguing against cap and trade, yet nowhere in her essay do the words “emissions”, “carbon”, “warming”, “climate” appear in it, nor any reference to those concepts. She instead refers incessantly to energy independence, as if that were the object of cap and trade. I have no doubt that she fundamentally misunderstands what is at issue, and this on a topic on which she purports to be an expert.

And for similar reasons, I’m quite confident that she wrote it, though copy editors no doubt polished her diction and syntax. It’s too obtuse, too beside the point, to have been written by anyone else in American political life or letters.

Oh, Timmeh. The Instituto Juan de Mariana is a right-wing think tank that shares its director and at least one fellow with the Heartland Institute’s anti-CC conferences. I think that puts them in the same category of reliability as AEI and Heritage.
And the study Will cites was, as Will admits in the article, backed by the Institute for Energy Research, which is oil-industry-backed and headed by the former director of PR for Enron – and which, as Will admits in the article, has also paid Will’s rent in the past.

And you think there’s nothing particularly hacktastic about it?

Well, I suppose you wouldn’t…

Picky, picky…

“…the proponents of “climate-friendly” policy stand to gain such political power that any amount of mere money looks like a sucker prize by comparison…”

And just how the fuckety-fuck fuck is that?? And what the crappety-crap crap does it even mean? Al Gore deciding who lives and who dies [by Powerpoint, of course]? Climatologists cackling maniacally as they eat the babies of helpless former oilmen?

Praise the Lord and pass the tin-foil hats…

Alex’s argument, especially the crappety-crap crap part, is so devastating I must admit defeat.

probably worth seeing her article in all its glory, just so you can see how she led the war on the clintons which led to the on gore that gave us bush.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/quinn110298.htm

You can be stupid enough to write the phrase “hungry markets” and still see that fire is hot, water is wet, and green policies are economic suicide.

Apparently.

I dunno about the Washington Post in its glory days. Considering that Broder was there at the time arguing that Woodward and Bernstein were destroying the presidency, I’m beginning to think that it was all a fluke.

My understanding (I’m happy to be corrected if this is wrong) is that Woodward (and I believe Bernstein, as well, were on the city beat for the Washington Post when they started getting the tips that lead them to break the Watergate story. That is, they were fairly low on the totem pole and explicitly not working primarily on political topics.

interesting, belle. i have not heard that before, but it’s plausible. the franklins vs. the orthogonians again. that would certainly cohere with one aspect of the coverage that i remember from that period, which was the extremely unkind treatment of martha mitchell, wife of atty gen john. i remember that the wapo went to lengths to portray her as a crass, déclassée, trailer-trash drunk.

i’m not saying that martha or john deserved any kindness, either, just that it is interesting that they were treated that way by a paper that was extremely willing to overlook the foibles of those it took to its bosom. if you are part of our town, then a wee drinking problem/mistress/wire-tapping is just a small secret among friends. if you are not part of our town, then the truth must be found!

katherine graham was extremely friendly with the reagans, for that matter–they were, for whatever reason, accepted as the right sort of people.

What does this mean? Excluding the costs relating to climate change, I suppose?

You suppose correctly. What I imply is a debate where someone says that creating green jobs will be a net plus for the economy, employment, what have you, without getting into the relative benefits of not having the planet explode.

Are we talking about some sort of “crowding out” argument whereby government money spent to subsidize green jobs pulls money out of the private sector and thus causes a rise in unemployment equal to the rise in the number of jobs due to the subsidy?

In practice it’s considerably worse than that, but basically yes.

Because that kind of argument just doesn’t fly in the middle of a depression.

What depression? And why not? What is it about being really sick that makes bleeding the patient a good idea?

In political rhetoric, it’s common to suggest that there will be a net benefit.

It’s not true but some people will say it anyway, so whatever, I guess.

If anyone commented before along these lines, it wasn’t me. No worries about the links; I was able easily enough to find the wikipedia articles on Stern and Garnaut. Of course, I tend to find the skeptics such as George Reisman more credible than the authors; it’s that tinfoil hat of mine. As for the papers themselves, I wouldn’t know how to read them (and neither would just about anyone commenting here, so you all may as well save your snark for another day).

Thanks for your civil and informative reply.

I think the Post was never quite as great in its glory days, nor is it as bad now, as the OP and several of the comments suggest. There have always been some good reporters at WaPo and there still are some, especially reporting from the foreign bureaus (Pamela Constable in Pakistan, to cite just one current example). I haven’t read David Broder much in recent years, but if he’s become a right-wing partisan like George Will that’s a fairly recent development. He was not that way in the years I read him, but rather someone concerned (perhaps obsessed would be a better word) with the decline of political parties and similar issues that I thought of as being more “process” issues than left-wing or right-wing. To the extent he had a discernible bent I would have said he was a Rockefeller Republican (or now you would say perhaps a Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe Republican), which is not where I ever was ideologically but is not, to be fair, a George Will/Charles Krauthammer position. Also, before he was an op-ed columnist Broder, unlike Will, spent years as a straight political reporter, and he was unquestionably one of the best in the business. If you don’t believe me, go back and read his coverage of, say, the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries. I was too young to vote in that election but I was old enough to follow it avidly, and Broder and his colleagues on the Post political staff produced first-rate reportage. Whatever Broder’s become in recent years, no one can ever take that away from him.

ezra’s case is a bit of a puzzle, since you don’t normally see rats jumping *onto* a sinking ship, esp. rats who are extremely intelligent.

i have to assume that ezra took a gamble that this will not impede his trajectory upwards to wonkish stardom. and i think it was a wise gamble–if he stays there for a few years, he will probably be able to move on to something higher profile, whether big media or political.

i think he’s an odd case in that his credibility among the progressive bloggy world is so secure that this will not hurt him much with that group. what he needed was visibility *outside* the world of people who readed tapped, delong, ct, yglesias, etc., and this he is getting.

what i do *not* think it means is that smart young progressives are putting their money and careers on the future of the washington post as a brand. ezra won’t be there in five years, and he knows it.

ezra’s case is a bit of a puzzle, since you don’t normally see rats jumping onto a sinking ship, esp. rats who are extremely intelligent.

My guess is, someone at the Post made a damn good decision in offering Ezra a salary he couldn’t refuse. I’m probably not the only one in the vaguely-left population who is now returning regularly to the Post’s website for Ezra’s blog, and only for that reason. Maybe their net loss in traffic from firing Froomkin has been minimal for this reason. (And admittedly I still end up clicking around to see if there’s anything else interesting on the site, which presumably is part of what they were hoping for…)

as you wish, barry.

i think it’s pretty clear that we’re both just psychologically projecting on a stranger neither of us knows, so we’re at liberty to make up our own fantasies.

i fantasize about his nimbly climbing the pathway to stardom, you fantasize about his moral corruption thereby–and the more we go on, the less it has to do with young ezra at all. but fantasy is free.

So the Post’s pimping itself as a go-between for lobbyists looking for access to the Obama administration is less outrageous than a poorly-written op-ed by a former vice-presidential nominee?

Probably because WaPo retracted the former and ran the latter.

“Priorities” must be based in realities.

Adding injury to insult, the cost of the dead tree paper has jumped to 75 cents from 35 cents. Not only will I not read it, I won’t buy it either!

Graham was the insider’s union-busting the people sometimes don’t need to know insider, and George Will’s been plaguing the Post for far longer than the war on Clinton, Gore, and Iraq. I’m glad people have wised up to the fact that the Post sucks, but it’s been sucking for a long long time — when I started reading daily in 1987, Richard Cohen was just as bad as he is today, and Juan Williams worked there too, and was as irritating as he is at NPR and on Fox. Washington has forever been the land where Cokie Roberts is relevant. What’s interesting is the way that generally mushy NPR liberals have come around to hating on the Post like us left-wing cranks. It may be because they are more Republican than they have been, but really, when it came to blaming poor black people, women, gays, who have you, for screwing up normal people’s lives, the 2000s didn’t have all that much on the 1980s in that paper. And when it came to blowing up darker people in other countries, same as it ever was. I figure it’s a combination of Bush v. Gore, Iraq, and Katrina. But why the hell didn’t the slobbering over Grenada get this done a long time ago?

No doubt, but the one was a pretty clear sign that the next would be encouraged. Not to mention Guatemala.