Why I'm mad: An open letter to David Broder from a fellow journalist

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.attytood.com/

<snip>

But what we used to call "a healthy dose of cynicism" eventually became toxic, for you and for so many of your "gang of 500" inside the Beltway. Somehow, exposing the lies of the system during the Watergate era, when you won a deserved Pulitzer, grew into benign acceptance that politics is pretty much a sport – a sport where, well, everybody lies.

And while you and your new lunch pals at the Palm knew you still had to expose the occasional lie, or at least get worked up about it, to maintain your journalistic credibility, you only went for the low-hanging fruit, the “objective lie,“ the DNA test on a blue dress from the Gp, not the elusive but ultimately false premises that would kill tens of thousands on a bloody war far from most Americans’ sight. Monica Lewinsky allowed you and your friends to prove that journalism was still about exposing...well, exposing something or other.

You, and your colleague Bob Woodward, and so many others, grew to admire the callous art of spincraft you'd been trained to expose -- so much so that when Hurricane Katrina devastated an American city and betrayed a stunning indifference to the fate of the nation's poorest, you could only write that Katrina "opens new opportunities for to regain his standing with the public."

Your cynicism hardened as it grew -- to the point where your most famous quote is that "anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office." Ideas didn’t matter. Do you even remember what you wrote in 2000, when Al Gore gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. You said:

I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim's constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off.
And when “the dean of American journalism” writes that, no wonder that so many voters thought that Gore and George W. Bush were Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or that a protest vote for Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan in what proved to be the closest presidential election in modern American history wouldn’t matter.

[Uncle Joe]

1. Well, I guess Broder is lucky now,

he does not have to worry anymore about nodding off from any swell ideas coming from the Bush administration.

On the other hand, maybe he did not realize at the time, was that Al Gore made him so comfortable with his swell ideas, Broder could go to sleep without worry.

Maybe the Washington Post is just not paying David enough money to stay awake.

Of course David might try a sleep aid in the future, the night before a national candidate for the most powerful job on the planet makes his/her acceptance speech outlining their vision for the direction of the nation and to some extent Earth. Maybe then Broder can stay awake, do his job:which is to inform the American People as to making one of the most important decisions of their life: who to entrust with the lives of their children.

Edit for P.S. I don't think your link is working.