Finally, my Epiphany moment or what really is behind the curtain at The Washington Post

January 23, 2010



Increasing my carbon footprint is my main avocation. I cruise the internet, a device for which I never properly thanked former Vice President Alpha Gump, in search of intelligent life. Finding none I move on to raising hackles, trapping manatees, buckling swashes, training pythons, and trying to find a perfect sentence.

[Full disclosure requires me to reveal that I too drive a pick up truck. Red, 5 speed, hole in the driver’s seat, 6 foot plumber’s snake, fading radio, 122,000 miles, and sometimes internal combustion eructations. I mention it because not “everybody can buy a truck” as the best President we have told us. Further, and like Trollope stating the obvious, if everybody did buy a truck wouldn’t most of our economic problems be solved? Just asking.]

I was watching Chris Cizzilla of the Washington Post on C-Span3 discoursing on the Brown Senate campaign. Two things were obvious:

#1 – “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” is terra incognita for him. In the real world, results, not effort, count. I can play football as hard as Peyton Manning. I can’t play it as well. That’s why I’ll watch him play on TV tomorrow. Senator-elect Brown is going to Washington. Marcia Coakley, as the really dumb Kennedy called her, will be the Assistant Vice Deputy Grand Marshalette of the fan appreciation parade for Curt Schilling. She’ll be the one behind the elephant. [There is now one more reason to call in artillery and air strikes on Fenway Park. I just completed a 2976 mile round trip in my gas guzzling SUV. By the Boston Marathon the only CITGO sign left in America will be the one behind the Green Monster. Viva Chavez. Go Hugo.] That David Gergen asked Marcia what her favorite color was just before he asked Senator-elect Brown why did he stop beating his wife didn’t hurt either. Has anyone looked the possibility that Gergen is on the Tea Party payroll?
#2 – I am glad to see that some people still drink whisky at lunch. I thought I was the last one keeping that tradition alive. Go Chris!

I read Post’s E.J. Dionne premature eulogy to civil discourse in politics.

As I recall the President reached out to WOG terrorists at his inauguration. “We will extend our hand if you will unclench your fist.” Lame brained when confronted by History but at least he can say that he took a shot.
The first Republican he spoke to, Senator Kyl of Arizona, got a different greeting. “We won.” That‘s a polite way of saying, “Play ball with me or I’ll shove the bat up your ass”. His flunkies soon added that he should “shit in his hat and pull it down over his ears because he looks good in brown”.

I am surprised he hasn’t sent Predator drones to Glenn Beck’s house.

The fact that he had unassailable majorities in both houses seems not to have caught Mr. Dionne’s attention. The American people dealt the President a pat hand. He blew it.

My only regret about the Health Care plan going walkabout is that I was looking forward to being on the Death Panels. I’ve been keeping a list for years. Lately, it has been growing exponentially. It is at a secure, undisclosed location just in case.

Howie Kurtz, a Post chattering head for whom the term “amiable dunce” could have been coined, is rambling forth in his usual combination of “What, me worry” and “I desperately want to be a smarmy bastard” about the National Enquirer, John Edwards, and Pulitzer Prizes.

It is indeed fitting and proper to mention Janet Cook whenever the words Washington Post and Pulitzer Prizes appear in the same sentence, the same paragraph, or the same page.

It is to the Post’s credit that they immediately defenestrated Ms. Cook when her Pulitzer fraud was discovered. They took her name off the Hall of Fame wall and drew a line through it before consigning it to the Hell fires of media Gehenna.

No mention of Pulitzer Prizes can be made without citing the New York Times. They cling to the memory of Walter Duranty, their employee, who was the winner for Foreign Correspondence in 1932. That he was bought and paid for by the KGB is of no import. That he lied about the extermination of the Kulaks made the New York Times acquiescent in the horrors that the 1930s produced. If you recall it was Auden who called it a “low dishonest decade. One more argument against inherited wealth.

Your actions merit you an indulgence and entry into the newspaper hagiography.

John Edwards and Sarah Palin have one thing in common.

They both lost elections to become Vice President.

John Edwards then lost his race to become the Democrat nominee in 2008.

What if he had been elected?

Save for the Enquirer no other media outlet investigated him and his dalliance.
Modern American Liberal journalists were aghast at the thought of Sarah Palin one step from the Oval Office. John Edwards in the Oval Office didn’t seem to bother them one whit. There’s a disconnect there.

Then I thought of Tom Shales, Eugene Robinson, Sally what’s her name, Bradlee’s goomah, Dana Milbank, Wilhelm Boysenberry, David Broder, Ellen Goodman inter alia. Post toadies all.
POW!

I got knocked off my horse without ever getting to see Damascus.

The truth is simple.

The Washington Post is like the “Boy in the Bubble”. It is enveloped in a large penumbra of “non-malodorous fecal matter”. Beyond being permeated by it, beyond wallowing in it, they generate it. To be fair, they try to do it in an environmentally sensitive manner. Febreeze at the Post is like holy water to a vampire.

I have tried to arrange my affairs in such a manner so that I run out of money and breath at the same time. I had set early Fall as the time when the lines would most likely converge. I knew I was going to fall 3 short of my goal set foot in each of the 50 states.

Now that President Yokahama Messiah Osama Bahama, to quote the late Senator Kennedy, has found either 7 or 8 more states my Stygian crossing will have to be delayed. This is the first time I have ever gone mano a mano against deus ex machina.

Just as I was almost back in the saddle I get knocked of again. It was all made clear to me.

Do you remember the famous line from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

“Morons! I am surrounded by morons.”

Bad enough that the dunces are in the ascendancy but their shoes never wear out because their feet never touch the ground.

How, you ask, can they defy gravity?

Dr. Johnson explained it all.

“The triumph of hope over experience.”




Kevin Smith