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:

[Joe Boucher]

Washington Post has been in steady decline since they helped takedown Nixon.
At this point it is garbage, losing money and isn’t worth wrapping your old coffee grounds in.

[JimRed]

How Republicans lost their minds, Democrats lost Sold their souls

[ozzymandus]

I cancelled my sub over a year ago and they’re still calling me to re-up. I suspect they’re having circulation problems, partly due to their constant leftist editorial stance. Even the “outdoor writer” scribbled an anti-gun screed on the sports page. His usual job is to lie about how plentiful the pheasants are to trick the out-of-state hunters into coming back.