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:

[GOPJ]

Guess the only people good enough for Robert Kaiser are fellow liberal elites - and the criminal class that props them up.

[TLI]

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.”

That seems so old-fashioned now, when global-warming deniers hold forth on the floors of the House and the Senate, and numerous Republicans merrily denounce our moderate president as a “Socialistic dictator,” in the recent words of Rep. Randy Weber (R-Tex.). I haven’t met Weber, but I have met some of the other House Republicans whose intellectual output can be equally baffling. One of my frustrations in recent years has been the journalistic conventions that can make it difficult to speak or write in a straightforward way about people such as Weber who make preposterous statements — and act as though they believe them.

Robert? Please. Look. Outside.

That white stuff that is on everything from Spokane to Dallas to Albany is not "someone's opinion."

When President Obama states " I am not a socialist," well, yes Robert, that is a "politician lying."

And when people such as Weber make what you believe to be "preposterous statements — and act as though they believe them" you might not want to consider the sources so much as consider YOUR ability to separate the facts from the opinions.

Again, Robert, take a look outside. Heck, you might even try going for a walk out there...

.

[dhs12345]

He exactly what he is complaining about. Someone who makes broad generalizations based on some ignorant stereotype that are completely false. He is an ignorant fool.

[SecondAmendment]

> ...I bet many of them voted for Alan Keyes ...

I for one did in the 2000 primaries !

[clintonh8r]

He’s just a little out of sorts since an internet shopkeeper took over his precious “newspaper.”

[ozzymandus]

Seriously? Ever read The Hays Daily News? The editor is as commie as anybody at the Post. Most small-town editors consider aping the big-city leftie editors as the way to prove how smart and sophisticated they are (and maybe get promoted to a big city paper).

[andyk]

That’s the exact election to which I was referring. There was a certain FReeper at the time who was outspoken in her support of Ambassador Keyes.

[ozzymandus]

It’s always windy. I went to college there and still live in NW KS. Tonight it’s windy and about 0 degrees.

[Psalm 144]

It could be Kiev. The apparatchiks could be getting set on fire.

Some people don’t know when they have as good a deal as they are going to get.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

I delivered the Hays Daily News in the early 60’s.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

I went to grade school in Hays. It was America in the early 60's.

[Lisbon1940]

Sorry, I confused Keyes and Cain.

[Theophilus]

As a conservative, all I want to do is to turn D.C. from the National swamp it is back to the natural swamp it was. Let the birds of the air and the creeping things overrun it and defecate upon it.

[Talisker]

God exists, Robert.

And He doesn’t like you.

He loves you.

But He really, really doesn’t like you.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

Kaiser was a pretty good reporter from Vietnam but over the years he drifted to the “socialist” part of the spectrum, associating with various marxists/publications of the Left.

That’s a real shame but He is not the first Wash Post writer to go left and stay there. Karen De Young, their Foreign Affairs editor covered up for the Marxist Sandinistas in the late 1970’s, while Jack Anderson covered up for a lot of domestic communist operations (Tricontinental Films, The Chicago Meeting of the YWLL, the “anti-war movement” - no red leadership, and attacked Jim Angleton at the CIA).

This is what happens to a newspaper when the Left gets in and is given positions of influence.

[skinkinthegrass]

don't they always; like a 3 y.o. in a toy/candy store, when
they can't have what they want..slap 'em on the @$.

[kcvl]

Father of Robert G. Kaiser

WASHINGTON (AP) — Philip M. Kaiser, a former ambassador to Austria, Hungary and Senegal who during the Cuban Missile Crisis acted to deny the Soviet Union landing rights at airports where its planes might refuel.

Kaiser, a former assistant secretary of labor during the Truman administration, served as the U.S. ambassador to Senegal and Mauritania from 1961 to 1964. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he persuaded the Senegalese president to deny landing rights to Soviet airplanes.

Kaiser had earlier accompanied Senegal’s president, Leopold Sedar Senghor, on a visit to the White House, where he had a warm meeting with President John F. Kennedy. When Kaiser went to see the Senegalese president to ask him to deny the Soviets access to the airport at Dakar, the country’s capital, Senghor agreed.

“Anything President Kennedy wants,” Senghor said.

President Carter named Kaiser ambassador to Hungary in 1977, and he played a key role in persuading the Carter administration to return the Crown of St. Stephen to Hungary in 1978. It had been in U.S. hands since 1945.

[98ZJ USMC]

Their America would not have elected a black president.

Not this Marxist POS we wouldn't. We, who researched the empty suit, KNEW EXACTLY who and what he was and predicted all this crap. Throw Ben Carson up there and see what happens.

[driftless2]

Kaiser is upset because the “conservative” pols he knew pre-Reagan were happy to be in Washington taking their cues from the liberal establishment so as no to make waves. Those conservative pols just said they could manage the welfare state better than libs. They didn’t want to bring it down, life was too good without rocking the boat.

[Spartan302]

I was all enthusiastic about possibly retiring in Costa Rica.

until I found out its heavily infested with liberal retirees, thats right, there is supposed about a 75% ratio that most Americans retiring in Cr are from a liberal lifestyle.

Kills that idea of having nothing but ex teachers and social workers for neighbors.