A Shame About The Washington Post: Bad Education, Worse Reporting.

(8:30:55 AM)
We’ve spent the last two nights with friends, at their condo on the beach on the DelMarVa peninsula, southwest of DC. Dawn seems to have caught a cold, and is living on Sudafed and an occasional pinot grigio. But the weather’s been great, the water, too, and I’ve managed to avoid most of the noise going on in politics. The Post is the only generally available paper down here, and after skimming a couple of copies when we were in DC for the funeral, it seems pointless to read during our ‘vacation’ time.


I mean, how far can a paper fall from its heyday as the paper that broke Watergate, printed the Pentagon Papers, broke a president? Now, the two copies I’ve skimmed this week each had three of the ‘A’ section pages used for ads against the Dept of Ed’s proposed regulation of private training schools. The ads are because the Post Company makes most of its money from its Kaplan Educational company, which trains people to take tests, among other things.


Most of WaPo’s editorials were anti-Obama, both from the right wingers and from their supposed lefties. I guess they’re trying to out-right the rightwingers who left the company to found Politico, a site I avoid unless I want the views from what I describe as the rational, or Rockefelller, Right.

Politico is for the Republican left-behinds, who want a party somewhere between the Democratic Party and the TeaBags, but can’t seem to see that the Democratic Party is currently selling the mid-seventies Republican Party line. The Dem leadership certainly isn’t pushing much that can be called progressive or forward looking, at least not by seventies standards.

The success of the right wing , the Kochs and the Bradleys, Norquist and Limbaugh, in pushing the ‘legitimate political spectrum’ to the far end of the right wing, is not the amazing thing. It’s that they continue to whine that it’s not right-wing enough, that they are still victims of a terrible communistical socialist conspiracy, now headed by a Manchurian-candidate muslim from Kenya.


And Politico, and the Washington Post, are far too scared of them to report on this, to do a history of how this happened, naming names, listing organizations, and doing an accounting of it. Not as an indictment, or to reverse it, just to, ahem, ‘report’ it. (You guys do remember how to report, don’t you?)


An analogy, for those Redskins fans: Remember when the 50-yd-line was at the middle of the stadium, and the endzone goal posts were at either end of the field? Welll, politics in America now has the left end goal post at the center of the stadium, the 50-yd line at the wall in front of the first seats at the end of the stadium, and the right goal post most of the way up the stands. What used to be the middle of the field is now the far left end of play, and what used to be out of bounds, waaaayyyy out of bounds, is now the place where most of the plays occur.


This analogy probably will be lost on most Post readers. I mean, have you read their Sports page lately? Sheesh. Two-day old line scores for their own Nationals. I wonder if they’ll print the Redskins’ results before Tuesday.


A shadow of its former self. No wonder they’re trying to make up the margin by swindling folks who need vocational training into taking on college-size debt.


PS: Isn’t it a shame that I can write ‘college-size debt’ and you know, probably first-hand, what I mean? More on that another day.
(8:59:02 AM)(9:07:22 AM)