Retiring WashPost Editor Throws a Fit About How Conservatives Ruined Washington

Newsbusters.org ^ | March 2, 2014 | Tim Graham

[Kaslin]

Former Washington Post managing editor Robert Kaiser is retiring at age 70, and he’s very cranky about how conservatives have destroyed government and Washington collegiality. This tells you a lot about what kind of liberal edits and massages the Post every day.

Kaiser is moving to New York, and on the front of the Sunday Outlook he described how “Republicans lost their minds” and “Democrats lost their souls.” In essence, both sides are now too conservative for Bob, starting with a debt-limit vote:

On Oct. 16, 162 members of Congress, 144 in the House and 18 in the Senate, voted “no,” votes meant explicitly to drive their government into bankruptcy, when there was a real chance that their view might prevail. Here was an entirely new style of public service, and it turned my stomach.

Those 162 votes reflected the deep hostility felt by the newest version of Republican lawmakers toward the government of their country. It is a cynical and often uninformed hostility, befitting the age we live in. And it has many adherents in a country with an elaborate regulatory and welfare state that many like to pretend we don’t really have, don’t really need and don’t really like — three blatant falsehoods.

Lies and intellectual inventions are now typical of our public life, which made Washington difficult for me. Of course, a politician lying is hardly a shock, but there is a difference between telling untruths (see Nixon, Richard M.) and making stuff up. I liked Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s dictum: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

To Kaiser, a gargantuan federal government is so positive that public love for it is a “fact.” Few conservatives deny we have an “elaborate regulatory and welfare state,” so who is inventing reality in this assessment? Notice that Kaiser was managing editor mostly in the Clinton years, and yet he still defies lying as Nixonian, not Clintonian.

The Clintons were not blamed for lying, corruption, and taking a rhetorical blowtorch to their enemies. The Clintons didn’t show a disregard for facts, as in “We’ll lie relentlessly until the Monica dress DNA sample comes in.” No, collegiality was destroyed unilaterally by GOP leaders like Newt Gingrich:

[Politicalkiddo]

I wasn’t aware you could “ruin” D.C.

[Olog-hai]

Yeah; that image does make this thread worthless with pics.

[bigbob]

heh, I WISH conservatives could take credit for it

[jsanders2001]

Kaiser - the same guy who’s been running the Post in the red for years now? I guess Stalin red is his favorite color.../s

[justa-hairyape]

So corruption had nothing to do with destroying DC ?

[onyx]

Stupid old b#stard has been living in the wrong country for all these years; Cuba being just 90 miles from FL, ya know.

[Chode]

[kabar]

Both parties, i.e., the political elites, have become disconnected from the American people. They are the real 1 percenters who despise the average person. Their arrogance is only exceeded by their ignorance. They are leading us off a cliff. We get the government we deserve.

[listenhillary]

No mention of “We have to pass the bill to see what is in it.”
No mention of the doubling of total government receipts as the result of Reagan’s tax cuts.
No mention of the results of welfare reform that reduced the unemployment rates.
No mention of “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.”
No mention that sequestration actually reduce the growth of government spending somewhat.
No mention that our current president has spent more money (foolishly) than any one person in the history of the world.

[andyk]

Hmm?

[kcvl]

Rich Algeni, Jr. (@richalgeni) tweeted at 9:30pm - 2 Mar 14:

@RobertGKaiser Wish we had truly known you were such a whack-job leftist! If there were true justice, you’d be a North Korean! (https://twitter.com/richalgeni/status/440328374829858817)

[kcvl]

Robert G. Kaiser
@RobertGKaiser
Born and bred in Washington, employed by The Washington Post for 50 years, author of SO DAMN MUCH MONEY, ACT OF CONGRESS and six other books.
Washington, D.C.

https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGKaiser

[kcvl]

Robert G. Kaiser (@RobertGKaiser) tweeted at 12:34pm - 27 Sep 13:

Idea: Start working now on the explanation you’ll give your grandchildren on how the GOP willingly crashed the economy in 2013 (https://twitter.com/RobertGKaiser/status/383645758508900353)

Robert G. Kaiser (@RobertGKaiser) tweeted at 4:18pm - 30 Jul 13:

NPR has a fine story on Republican disarray in Congress, a problem scary enough to cost you some zzzz’s. n.pr/1640Vkr (https://twitter.com/RobertGKaiser/status/362321419566202880)

[kcvl]

Robert G. Kaiser (@RobertGKaiser) tweeted at 8:44am - 24 Jul 13:

Here is a fine piece by Jonathan Weisman with a clear warning: Train Wreck Ahead. The GOP wants the wreck. nyti.ms/1bL8B0R (https://twitter.com/RobertGKaiser/status/360032734908923904)

Robert G. Kaiser (@RobertGKaiser) tweeted at 10:45am - 24 Jun 13:

EJ Dionne is justifiably angry. We seem headed for political disaster this fall because Boehner has lost control. goo.gl/tSJjF (https://twitter.com/RobertGKaiser/status/349191439156142080)

[Paladin2]

I've been to Hays a few times.

It's windy in the Spring.

[Paladin2]

We have gov't lock.

We need to be free of same.

[Cyman]

Ramblings of a syphilitic liberal mind

[kcvl]

Barney Frank, who chaired the House committee overseeing the financial services industry, and Christopher Dodd, his Senate counterpart. Both Frank and Dodd granted Kaiser frequent interviews while they worked on the bill and encouraged their staffs to do the same.

Or consider Frank’s staff director, Jeanne Roslanowick, who was skeptical of a new agency to crack down on predatory lending. Roslanowick told Kaiser, presumably with a straight face, that moderate House Democrats were cool to the idea because their constituents weren’t interested in it. “If what they were feeling back home . . . suggested the public was crying for an independent consumer protection agency, they would be responding to that,” she explained. A neutral observer might suggest that Roslanowick spend less time around bank-funded Democrats. (Polls consistently showed the consumer agency to be enormously popular.)

Like any good establishmentarian, Kaiser is skeptical of public opinion, and even more so of the politicians who pander to it. His diagnosis of what ails Congress can be summarized as “too much democracy.” He laments the huge drop in the amount of time congressmen have spent in Washington since the 1960s, when the government paid for only three annual trips home. (There is no longer a limit.) He echoes Dodd’s frustration that too much of what Congress does these days trickles into the press, unlike the back-room dealing of yesteryear, and Frank’s concern that the financial crisis ushered in the “greatest breach between elite and public opinion that I have ever seen.”

Let’s concede that the great unwashed can be ignorant, irrational and erratic. As Frank tells Kaiser, “The voters are no bargain.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/books/review/robert-g-kaisers-act-of-congress.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[Wuli]

He’s pissed because over the years its been harder to get majorities in the GOP to drink the Libs koolaid or admit they like it (though from OUR point of view, THAT has still not gone far enough yet). It was nicer when MORE in the GOP were really Dims wearing a GOP label, when the Dims had more in the GOP they could count on.

In other words, Washington was “nicer” (to Mr Kaiser) when it was more like one party (not that it still isn’t to many of us).

[Art in Idaho]

Hey Kaiser, We have Just Begun to Fight!